Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

71
SPreAD OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
One english piper of Scottish origins, the noted travelling newcastleupon-Tyne
comedian and self-declared player of the ‘union pipes’
Billy Purvis, kept the instrument before audiences in the north of
england from about 1815 until his death in 1853. 243 Willy or Billy
Bolton of yorkshire was playing ‘union-pipes’ about 1845 244 and
continued until 1870. 245 In the mid-nineteenth century there is said
to have been an Irish piper in Britain for every day of the year, 246 but
by 1896 Thomas garoghan, born in Coventry in 1845 of Mayo
parents, was able to advertise himself in Sheffield as ‘the only
Professor and last of the old bards on the Irish Union bagpipes’. 247
remarkably, the term was found in oral tradition in Britain as late as
1960, used by an elderly lancashire woman whose father had played
the bagpipes. When asked by a folklore collector if he was Scottish,
she replied, ‘no, certainly not, he played the Union Pipes’. 248
In the later nineteenth century visiting Irish professional pipers
continued to use the term in Britain. The Cahir, Co Tipperary, piper
Thomas O’hannigan, for instance, later ‘royal Minstrel’ to Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert, was advertised in Ireland in 1838 and
1839 as playing on the ‘Irish Pipes’ as well as the ‘Irish union
pipes’. 249 But in liverpool in 1842 250 and in london in 1843 the
newspapers universally describe him as an ‘Irish Piper’ simply
playing on the ‘union pipes’. 251 The famous Kerry piper James
243
Proud & Butler 1983: 29; Moylan 2006: 28–9.
244
J.h. Dixon 1846: 226, quoted in Cannon 1971: 142.
245
Schofield 1975: 90.
246
O’neill 1913: 286.
247
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Sheffield, 22 Aug. 1896.
248
Schofield 1975: 90.
249
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Dublin, 9, 13, 15 Jan.
1838; Belfast News-Letter, Belfast, 30 Mar. 1838; Carolan 1994: 46–52.
250
Liverpool Mercury, liverpool, 4 Mar. 1842.
251
Carolan 1994: 46–52.