Union Pipes

Denis Courtney on stage in Oscar and Malvina, Theatre Royal, Covent
Garden, London. Engraving by Barlow after Isaac Cruikshank. From The

Whim of the Day of 1793, London, 1793 (courtesy Na Píobairí Uilleann)
COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY
OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
Nicholas Carolan, Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin
Version 1.0 as at 14 May 20121
Irish uilleann pipers and followers of the uilleann pipes generally

know nowadays that their instrument was once often known as the
‘union pipes’.2 The term was one of those commonly used before
1900 to refer to variant forms of the bellows-blown bagpipe found
in Britain and Ireland, the United States of America, Australia, and
elsewhere. After 1900 it continued in use but gradually gave way in
Ireland to ‘uilleann pipes’,3 which term eventually spread to be used
universally, or almost so, for the Irish form of the instrument.
There is nevertheless uncertainty about the term ‘union pipes’ – its

origin, forerunners, meanings, spread and demise – and it is proposed
1
Much of the information on which this essay on Irish music terminology is based
has been newly discovered through ongoing international print and image
digitisation programmes. Since other relevant information will doubtless emerge
from these sources in the future, the essay will be updated here to include such
information as it is found. For expansion of bibliographic etc. citations see
Information Sources below. Corrections and earlier instances of terms cited can
be sent to union.pipes@itma.ie, but because of other commitments it will not be
possible for the writer to enter into correspondence. The essay should be cited
by author, title, version and date on www.itma.ie as above.
2
This form of the term is used throughout here for convenience, except in
quotations, but the term also occurs in historical sources as ‘union pipe(s)’, ‘union
bag(-)pipe(s)’, ‘Irish union pipes’, etc., and its elements are often given initial
capitals. Original spellings and initial capitalisation (only) have been retained
here in quotations. Primary sources quoted have been checked unless otherwise
stated.
3
This term also appears in variant spellings in older sources and often with initial
capitals: ‘ullann’, ‘uileann’, ‘uillinn’, ‘ullian (bag-)pipe(s)’, etc. Introduced only
in the twentieth century, it is the term now in standard use in Ireland to refer
(ahistorically) to Irish bellows pipes of any period and in any place.
COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS 2
here to examine these aspects, and to establish an outline history of

the term. Other terms for the uilleann pipes are also traced. As well
as core questions of terminology, consideration of ‘union pipes’ also
necessarily touches on the whole history and historiography of Irish
bagpiping, and involves other dimensions of Irish musical culture:
artistic processes and allegiances; national identity and self-
representation, especially in relation to the Irish language; and the
ongoing globalisation of Irish traditional music.
It must be emphasised that only the history of the term is being

centrally addressed, not the history of the instrument itself. Although
the two are of course related, they have led somewhat independent
lives. Changes in terminology did not necessarily reflect develop-
ments in the physical nature of the instrument; such developments
did not necessarily lead to the introduction of new terminology.
But to provide a context for the discussion of piping terminology,

some brief consideration of the history of the instrument itself is un-
avoidable. Bagpipes are musical wind instruments consisting of a
reeded melody-pipe or chanter with finger-holes by which the player
produces melody, an attached skin bag acting as an air-reservoir, a
blow-pipe attached to the bag by which the player inflates it, and,
normally, reeded fixed-pitch melody-pipes attached to the bag which
provide a droning accompaniment to the chanter. Known in classical
times, they are immemorially old and of uncertain origins. By the
Middle Ages they were a common instrument, existing in many
different forms across europe, and in Asia and north Africa. Played
mainly out of doors, and usually by professional players of low status,
they are thought to have reached the limits of their popularity in west-
ern europe from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth.4
4
Baines 1995: 100.
3 COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS
The late european innovation of using a bellows worked by the

elbow to inflate the bag, instead of using a blow-pipe, probably
derived from the medieval use of bellows in portative and other
organs, although the principle was known in classical times. Adapted
first, presumably, to various kinds of bagpipes which were originally
mouth-blown, the use of bellows was crucial in the eventual develop-
ment of indoor and socially genteel bagpipes. even more important
was the replacing of older chanters (which were loud and of a re-
stricted melodic range) with newer chanters (which were quieter and
of an extended range), and the concurrent refinement of reeds and
drones compatible with these chanters. Bellows bagpipes are attested
to in europe from the sixteenth century, although it was the early
seventeenth before they came into widespread use. They existed in a
great variety of folk and aristocratic forms, large and small, in
different countries, and their development was influenced and to
some extent driven by the contemporary spread of new popular forms
of instruments of extended musical range, such as the recorder, violin,
transverse flute and oboe. The first publication on the bellows bag-
pipes – a treatise, instruction book and tune book for an instrument
with a range just above an octave – was Traité de la Musette by Pierre
Borjon de Scellery, published in lyon in 1672, at a time when
musical-instrument makers of the French court had produced a form
of bellows bagpipe called a musette du cour (court bagpipe) to cater
for a then current aristocratic taste for ‘pastoral’ music.5
In the course of the seventeenth century an awareness of bellows pipes

clearly must have arisen in Britain and Ireland through the numerous
channels of communication, travel and trade which various parts of
both islands always had with the Continent. On each island the earliest
5
For bellows pipes generally see Baines 1995: 12–23, 100–28; Kopp 2005: 9–19;
Kopp 2011: 243–47.
forms of bellows pipes appear to have been in existence by the late

seventeenth century,6 and to have been subject to processes of develop-
ment that continued through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth
centuries. Distinct traditions of bellows-pipes manufacture and playing
would survive in Scotland, northern england, and Ireland after bag-
pipes had fallen out of favour in most of Britain. no early insular
makers are known, but the attachment of bellows to existing types of
bagpipes, or the importation of a small number of Continental bellows
pipes, probably of different kinds, would have been sufficient to set
chain reactions in motion among innovative makers. Bellows pipes
would always be peripheral instruments in these islands, and would
never be played in any great numbers. They would never begin to rival
the recorder, violin, german flute or keyboard instruments in popular-
ity, and the major music publishers of Britain and Ireland would not
publish music or tutors for them as they would for those instruments.
But bellows pipes have often been accorded an elite status, specialist
publishers have long produced tutors and tune books for them, and
they have exerted a persistent, powerful and unique fascination on
6
For Britain there is the evidence of the english playwright Thomas Shadwell who
in his 1671 play The Humorists refers to ‘a Scotch-Bag-Pipe that has got a flaw
in the Bellows’ (quoted in Stewart 2009: 53; from Keith Sanger) and that of the
english organologist James Talbot who c. 1685–1700 listed ‘Scotch’ bellows
bagpipes which he had seen (Cocks 1952: 44–5). In both instances ‘Scotch’ may
mean ‘north British’. By the 1720s there is further evidence of various kinds of
Scottish and northern english bellows pipes (Sanger 1989: 11–13). The Irish
evidence is less explicit, not mentioning bellows until the 1750s, but there are
references from the 1680s to bagpipes being played in domestic settings with
harp and fiddle and these must have been pipes of the new kind (Carolan 2010:
6–7). larry neal M’elvanna, an ‘Irish piper of note’ who died in Co Down in
1746 in his 78th year, was reported as having learned to play the pipes from Piper
Malone of lurgan, ‘who died in 1700 at the advanced age of 100’ (Walker’s
Courant, Sept. 1746, quoted in An Píobaire vol. 3, no 35, Apr. 1998: 23). By
1746 a noted Irish piper was doubtless a bellows piper.
5 COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS
players and listeners here for over three centuries now. They currently
enjoy an unprecedented worldwide level of popularity.
There is no reason to think that the different insular bellows-pipes traditions

did not arise independently of one other, nor is there any evidence that they
had an early influence on one other. But in 1743 the first english-language
publication on the bellows pipe – The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or
New Bagpipe – alludes to the existence of several contemporary makers of
a developing bellows bagpipe.7 The instrument was sold in his music shop
by John Simpson, the london publisher of the Tutor, and is described in the
Tutor by its Irish author John geoghegan; but it is not known whether the
makers referred to were British or Irish. geoghegan’s tutor is for a two-
octave-plus chromatic bellows pipe with a lowest chanter note of middle C,
the second octave achieved by over-blowing (exerting increased air-pressure
on the chanter reed by squeezing the bag harder). It is not at all certain that
the instrument described by geoghegan is a brand new one, in spite of his
title; possibly he had only coined a new marketing term for an established
bellows bagpipe.8 his book would be obscurely republished and sold into
the early nineteenth century in england and Scotland, and possibly sold in
Ireland9 and the United States10 – an indication of the continuing if low-level
popularity of the instrument itself, which is now well represented in museum
collections. The instrument must have had a general influence on the course
of bellows-pipe development in both Britain and Ireland.
7
‘This day is publish’d The Complete Tutor for the Pastoral or new Bagpipe... by
Mr. John geoghegan...’, Daily Advertiser, london, 29 Sept. 1743 ff. See also
Donnelly 2008a: 26–7 for the assignment of this publication to 1743.
8
The instrument illustrated in the Tutor closely resembles one illustrated in a
london publication of 1728 (see note 14 below).
9
Dennis Connor, a musical-instrument maker and seller of little Christ-Church
yard, Dublin, is advertising either ‘bagpipes’ or a tutor for the bagpipes (the
wording is ambiguous) in 1759 (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, Dublin, 17–21 July
1759, see Carolan 2006: 23).
10
An anonymous tutor for bagpipes is advertised in Philadelphia in Stephen’s
Catalogue of Books etc. for 1795.
Introduction of ‘Union Pipes’
long processes of invention and experimentation normally leave no

surviving trace before a musical instrument and its terminology
emerge onto the public record. This is true of ‘union pipes’. It is not
now known for certain who invented the term.
But it is known when ‘union pipes’ first emerged onto the public
record, and the piper with whom the term was first associated (and
who may very well have coined it) is also known. The term is first
found on 5 May 1788, in a front-page advertisement in the london
newspaper The World for a general concert to be held in the Free
Masons’ hall in the city on 14 May: ‘For the Benefit of Mr.
Courtenay, Performer on the Union Pipes’.11
Although the venue and the occasion are english, as will be seen
below the piper is Irish and his pipes are Irish pipes, and, insofar as
it was introduced by him, the term is also Irish.
11
earlier instances of the term may yet be discovered.
7 InTrODUCTIOn OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
‘Mr. Courtenay’ was the stage name of the professional bellows piper
Denis Courtney, an ‘itinerant Irish musician of great fame in the
British provinces’.12 he was about twenty-eight when he made his
first london concert appearance on 14 May 1788, in the company of
other very different but well known performers and in what was a
leading london music venue. Courtney’s piping quickly became
famous in london and he had a somewhat meteoric career before he
died there in 1794, in his mid-thirties, of an illness brought on by
heavy drinking. long after his death, he was remembered as an out-
standing musician.
Before Courtney’s debut, no bagpiper of any kind is known to have

given a stage recital in london, as distinct from performances in the
street and in taverns and ballrooms, from the accompanying of dancers
on stage, and from private recitals. Bagpipes had long been generally
spoken of in print in Britain, usually in unflattering terms, and in their
Scottish forms used to make oblique criticisms of Scottish politicians
at Westminster. They were bywords for riot,13 drunkenness, low living
and noise. nor were Irish pipes exempt from this latter criticism. The
Scottish novelist Tobias Smollet compared the piercing singing of a
character in his 1751 london novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
to ‘the joint issue of an Irish bag-pipe and a sow gelder’s horn’; this
quip was reproduced over and over in contemporary newspapers and
magazines. nevertheless there is occasional print evidence of a positive
bagpipe subculture in the capital: the publication of the first image of a
bellows bagpipe there in 172814 and of lancashire bagpipe music in
12
highfill et al.: 4, 8.
13
Scottish bagpipes had recently been used in london to lead mobs participating
in the highly destructive anti-Catholic gordon riots of the summer of 1780
(Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 5 Jan. 1781).
14
This important image is part of a burlesque depiction of an ensemble of musicians
playing for John gay’s famous 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera. First
1730;15 the sale (and probably the manufacture) of bellows bagpipes in

1743, as cited, and in the same year the publication of geoghegan’s
tutor-tunebook for them, which includes english, Scottish and Irish
tunes; the setting of stage jigs to Irish bagpipe tunes in 1751;16 the
advertising for ship’s bagpipers in 1768;17 the patronage of Scottish
highland and Irish bagpipers in the 1770s and 1780s,18 and so forth.
As the performer who first brought the new term ‘union pipes’ to the
public, it is significant that Denis Courtney, in the advertisements for
his first london performance, also used an altered stage form of his
own surname: ‘Mr Courtenay’. It is not in doubt that his real name, in
english, was Courtney.19 Of the different forms of surname used for
him in print, however, ‘Courtenay’ is not a form of the name found
commonly in Ireland, although it was common in the Britain of his time
and is of norman-French origin. It was the family name of well known
contemporary english aristocrats, earls of Devon, and also the name of
a prominent contemporary Westminster politician of Irish birth to whom
advertised as a commercial print in The Daily Journal, london, 4 May 1728 (Barlow
2005: 90), the scene was long tentatively believed to have been drawn by William
hogarth, and the image has been regarded as evidence of the existence of a bellows
pipes in london by the 1720s. But expert opinion now holds the depiction to be the
work of a French rather than a British artist; it may in fact therefore reflect a form of
the instrument current in contemporary France rather than in Britain (for a discussion
see Barlow 2005: 88–91). nevertheless it is inconceivable that bellows-blown bag-
pipes were unknown in contemporary london after they had been in existence on
the Continent for well over a hundred years.
15
‘new Musick. This day publish’d, The Third Book of the Most Celebrated Jigs...
with hornpipes the Bagpipe Manner...’, Daily Journal, london, 12 Aug. 1730.
16
London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette, london, 12 Sept. 1751.
17
Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, london, 29 June 1768.
18
See below.
19
Courtney’s first name, age, and the correct form of his surname in english are found
in the burial register of Old St Pancras Church, london, where he was interred on 5
Sept. 1794. The register is now in the london Metropolitan Archives. The entry is
in accord with other evidence cited below, including notices of Courtney’s death and
his date and place of burial in contemporary print sources.
the piper was once compared.20 ‘Courtney’ on the other hand is a

surname common in Ireland, even to the present day, and, as well as
also being a form of the norman-French Courtenay there, is an
anglicised version of more than one gaelic surname.21 Courtney the
piper – or his media handler – may have made the change to an almost
identical surname that was known and accepted in Britain, one with
flatteringly topical and aristocratic overtones. his experiences in the
British provinces may have suggested that a slight change in surname
for his london launch would be advisable. he may likewise have felt
that a name-change would render his Irish pipes more acceptable to the
musical public of the metropolis.
To understand why Courtney or his promoters may have felt this, it is

necessary to know something of the relative positions in 1788 london of
Scottish and Irish music; it is mainly within the context of these ethnic
musics that the union pipes would have their British future. It was Scottish
music that had long been popular in london, in print and on the stage and
in general musical culture, not Irish. There had been a certain fashion for
Scottish culture in london since the accession of James VI and I to the
english throne in 1603, and an increasing number of Scottish melodies
were to be found in english publications from the mid-1600s. But in the
last fifteen years of the seventeenth century there ‘a liking for Scotch-
style music became a positive craze’.22 It was a craze that would last for
over a hundred years. Chiefly this came about because of the innate
attractiveness of Scottish (and faux-Scottish) melodies and songs to the
20
John Courtenay, born ‘Courtney’ in Co louth, see Thorne 2004. For the comparison
see below.
21
The surname Courtney is found in various parts of Ireland but principally clusters in
Kerry and adjoining counties and in southern Ulster. In gaelic it is Ó Curnáin, Mac
Cuarta, etc. (Maclysaght 1996: 65).
22
Fiske 1983: 5. See Fiske for a detailed discussion of Scottish music in eighteenth-
century england.
english ear, and their exotic yet familiar character. But their acceptability
must have been increased by the legislative union of england and
Scotland which was brought into effect in 1707, and by the patronage of
Scottish members of Parliament in london. Certainly there was a buying
public in london for Scottish music throughout the century, and Scottish
pieces featured prominently there in ballad operas and entr’acte perform-
ances. Many were published in london from the 1720s by the migrant
Scottish music publishers William Thompson, James Oswald and robert
Bremner. Their popularity increased as Scottishness became less and less
threatening in england after the defeat of the Stuart cause at Culloden in
1746, the subsequent absorption of highland soldiers (and their military
bagpipes) into the regular British army, and their emergence as British
heroes in such engagements as the battle of Quebec in 1759. After the
publication, beginning in 1760, of the poeticised ‘translations’ into english
by James MacPherson from the supposedly original gaelic poems of
Ossian, a Scottish bard of the third century, and their extraordinary
europe-wide success, positive ideas of Scottishness were further
established in contemporary london consciousness. This was aided by
the founding there in 1778 of the highland Society of london and by its
high-profile aristocratic support for indigenous Scottish culture, including
the publishing of ‘ancient Scotch music’ in the capital in 1784.23
Ireland on the other hand, from a london perspective, was a separate and
somewhat distant landmass, culturally more alien and less understood
than Scotland. The majority of its inhabitants were Catholics, adherents
23
A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs, Never Hitherto Published by Patrick
MacDonald: advertised in The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser,
london, 11 nov. 1784. The Society also encouraged the playing of the mouth-
blown highland bagpipes by offering prizes at annual competitions, but these
competitions were held in Scotland only. Apart from one instance of a highland
piper playing in a ballroom, no Scottish pipers seem to have engaged in public
performance in london before the May 1788 appearance of Courtney. As will
of a threatening Continental religion, and they spoke a barbarous tongue,

Irish. The country had long been colonised and ruled by Britain but never
completely subdued. Agrarian disturbances were widespread there in the
1780s, and even the Protestant ascendancy of its Dublin-based colonial
parliament was showing disquieting signs of legislative independence
during the decade. Those of its aristocrats who lived in london were
largely absentee landlords of British origins, unsympathetic to Irish in-
digenous culture, and while they formed dining clubs in the city there is
no evidence that they offered patronage to Irish musicians. Most of the
city’s Irish population belonged to its often troublesome underclass.
For these and other reasons, Irish music is poorly represented in london
publications and in public performance before Courtney’s time. no
separate collection of Irish music had been published there, and when
Irish melodies are published in london from the mid-seventeenth century
they appear as stray items in anthologies or as afterthoughts in collections
of ‘english, Scottish and Irish’ tunes. The few ‘Irish’ songs known are
mainly comic stage pieces put into the mouths of Irish servants; few of
the many Irish actors in london specialised in Irish song. As the British
music historian Sir John hawkins said in about 1785: ‘I know of no Irish
airs so much celebrated in england as the Scotch have been’.24
This situation began to change in london in the 1780s: the Dublin

dramatist John O’Keefe introduced harp tunes by the famous Irish
be seen below, some of the Society’s prizewinners were briefly introduced to
the london stage in later 1788 and in 1791. The Society itself sometimes
engaged Irish bellows pipers, including Murphy, Courtney, McDonnell and
O’Farrell mentioned below, to play at their social occasions in london, and also
(along with Murphy) a ‘piper – Allan’ who may have been the famous
northumbrian piper James Allan (see Sanger 2011: 21 and nlS MS highland
Society of london Dep. 268/34 from which a facsimile of extracts was supplied
to the writer courtesy of Keith Sanger).
24
letter to Joseph Cooper Walker quoted in Walker 1786: 66. hawkins excepted only ‘The
Black Joke’, correctly regarding this as being an Irish tune of modern composition.
harper-composer Turlough Carolan (1670–1738) and other Irish

melodies in his musical plays there from 1783;25 Dubliner Joseph
Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards, the first book
on Irish music, was published and seriously reviewed in london in
1786,26 and The Hibernian Muse, the first British-published
collection of Irish music, appeared there in 1790.27 The performances
of Courtney, who was widely recognised as an Irish piper, doubtless
helped contribute to this change of climate. But in reference to the
Irish bagpipe specifically, James Dungan, an Irish patron of
traditional music, said in the 1780s: ‘I consider my native country
half a century behind Scotland in encouraging and rewarding their
best performers on the bagpipe’.28 Although Denis Courtney was part
of a modernising trend in contemporary Irish life – entrepreneurial,
outward-looking, technologically and musically innovative, function-
ing in urban settings, and english-speaking – he was prudent there-
fore not to draw attention to his Irishness or to his Irish pipes in
making his london debut.
25
Fiske 1986: 459–61.
26
In European Magazine and London Review vol. 19 (1786): 369–72 and Monthly
Review; or, Literary Journal vol. lXXVII (July–Dec. 1787): 425–39, for instance.
27
‘Music lately published, and sold by Messrs. Thompson... The Caledonian Muse;
a Collection of scarce and favourite Scots Tunes... The hibernian Muse; a
Collection of Irish Airs...’, The World, london, 23 Oct. 1790. The volume carries
no publication date and has been assigned to c. 1786 in some library catalogues.
28
Quoted by Arthur O’neill in O’Sullivan 1958: II, 163. James Dungan, an Irish
merchant in Denmark inspired by the highland Society of london, funded three
competitive harp festivals in granard, Co longford, in the 1780s (see Donnelly
1993: 27–9).
13 FOrerUnnerS OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
Forerunners of ‘Union Pipes’
As an Irish player of bellows-blown bagpipes, Denis Courtney would

most likely have been described in Britain before May 1788 as an
‘Irish piper’ playing the ‘Irish pipes’. This latter was the commonest
of the terms used there before that date for bellows pipes played by
Irish pipers.
In Ireland however the bagpipe in all its forms was earliest simply
referred to in Irish as píb, píob, píopaí, píb mhála (from the medieval
latin loan-word pipa) or in english by the equivalent ‘pipe’, ‘pipes’
or ‘bagpipe(s)’; there was normally no need there to characterise
them as ‘Irish’.29 Confusingly, these shorthand terms in Irish and
english were also used in Ireland into the eighteenth century to refer
to mouth-blown bagpipes as well as to bellows-blown bagpipes.
early Irish terminology does not therefore help in distinguishing one
kind of bagpipe from another. Instead, notice must be taken of the
social context of playing: whether it takes place indoors or outdoors,
for listening or dancing or marching to, with other domestic musical
instruments, and so on. notice must also be taken of the range of
music played on it: whether it falls within the range of the Irish
mouth-blown bagpipe – which is believed to have had the same nine-
note (or smaller) compass typical of mouth-blown bagpipes inter-
nationally30 – or is music of a two-octave-plus range such as was
employed in contemporary Ireland in traditional and popular music
by the harp, recorder, violin, german flute and oboe. The wider range
29
‘Pipes’ continues to be the everyday casual and conversational term used by
uilleann pipers for their instrument in Ireland today; ‘uilleann pipes’ is used when
speaking formally, or when distinguishing the instrument from Irish mouth-
blown pipes (also still referred to casually by their players as ‘pipes’).
30
Baines 1995: 20.
of the new bagpipe enabled it to play in ensemble with these

instruments. On this basis, as already mentioned, bellows pipes are
referred to in print in Ireland from the late 1600s. From then to 1788,
references are found to Irish pipes that are or seem bellows-blown,
some of them in British and north American sources. Visual
illustrations of bellows-blown pipes begin to appear in Ireland from
about 1750, and some instruments of the 1760s and 1770s survive in
Irish museum collections and in private hands. They continued in
these years before Courtney’s debut to be called ‘pipes’ in Ireland,
or, when referred to more formally in newspapers and especially in
the travel accounts of tourists, ‘Irish pipes’.
In Britain, the otherness of Irish pipes and pipers, when they began to
be noticed in print from the 1730s,31 leads to them being normally
denoted as ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘Irish pipers’. Again the terminology is
confusing. Are they players of a familiar kind of mouth-blown or
bellows-blown pipes who just happen to be Irish, or are they players of
a distinct form of the instrument called ‘Irish pipes’? In 1743, as already
mentioned, an Irish piper in london, John geoghegan, introduced to
the public the terms ‘Pastoral or new Bagpipe’ for bellows pipes, and
defined a particular form of these pipes in some detail. But his new
terms failed to be adopted generally,32 and later in the same decade
reference is again found in london to an ‘Irish bagpipes player’.33
31
‘… a noted Irish Bagpiper, and Midnight Bully.’ Daily Post, london, 19 June
1732, for example (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
32
however, after being noticed again by organologists in the 1950s and 1960s,
geoghegan’s ‘pastoral pipes’ term has come into currency within the last thirty
years among an international subculture of makers and musicians interested in
surviving instruments which resemble his, and in music which survives for them.
33
‘Committed... to the gatehouse... Thomas Martin the famous Irish bagpipes
player, for playing many tunes commonly used among the rebels..., Whitehall
Evening Post or London Intelligencer, london, 27–29 Dec. 1748.
In an english letter of 10 July 1751 the ‘Irish Bag-pipes’ are

unambiguously defined as a distinct bellows-blown instrument by
henrietta Knight, lady luxborough (c. 1700–56), writing from Barrells
hall, Warwickshire, to the poet William Shenstone in london; the
musician referred to was a trooper guarding horses on her estate:
I sat last night agreeably... hearing one of the grass-guard Dragoons play
on his german flute; which he does very well: he has also a pair of Irish
Bag-pipes, with which he can play in concert; they having sixteen notes,
and the Scotch but nine. he has no pipe to put to his mouth, and but very
little motion with his arm; his fingers do the chief...34
In 1758 a ‘pair of fine Irish bagpipes’ was being raffled in Traquair on

the Scottish borders;35 they had belonged to a deceased piper James
Smith: evidence possibly that local pipers were taking up Irish
instruments. Certainly an ‘Irish pipe’ inflated by bellows was known in
lowland Scotland at the period, and was recognised by a highland bag-
pipes player and knowledgeable critic Joseph MacDonald, writing in
1760, as an instrument distinct from the common run of lowland
bellows pipes. he speaks of the
most variegated kind of Pipe, which is the Irish Pipe. This they have neither
a regular Sett of Musick or Cuttings for, but they have diversified it into
Surprising Imitations of other Musick.36
34
[luxborough] 1775: 277. This 1751 reference is the first known occurrence of a
frequently published eighteenth-century distinction made between the Irish and
Scottish pipes, by which the Irish are characterised as being powered by the
bellows and having a range of two octaves while the Scottish are mouth-blown
and have a range of nine notes. In fact bellows-blown pipes with a range of eight
or nine notes were common in Scotland in the eighteenth century: see also note
155 below.
35
eytan 1999: 26.
36
Cannon 1994: 76. lowland bellows-pipes chanters typically had a range of nine
notes, which could be increased according to MacDonald by ‘adding Pinching
In 1766 a blind professional musician Mr James Mullin had come

from london to Derby to perform ‘Several extraordinary Pieces of
Music on the Irish Bagpipes, german flute and Violin’.37 The Scot
James Tytler, editor in edinburgh of the second edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, played on the ‘Irish pipes’ according to
his friend the poet robert Burns,38 and Tytler would have been speak-
ing from personal experience when he also applies this term to the
instrument in 1778, and describes it in the encyclopaedia as the ‘soft-
est, and in some respects the most melodious of any’ bagpipes.39
From about 1765 to the end of the century london and other musical
instrument sellers are regularly advertising two kinds of bagpipes –
‘Bagpipes, Scotch or Irish’ – for sale,40 and some claim to be making
them.41 By 1779, less than a decade before Courtney appears in london,
notes… By this, their Chanter has the most of the Flute Compass’. If the
contemporary Irish pipes he refers to were more ‘variegated’ or varied than these,
they would have had a range comparable to that of geoghegan’s ‘new or pastoral’
instrument, and probably, like it, have had a capability for producing various semi-
tones by crossfingering. They may even have been geoghegan’s instrument; he
was Irish, and it is an open question whether his pipes were seen as Irish in
Scotland in 1760. By ‘other Musick’ MacDonald doubtless meant the kind of pop-
ular classical music he had just been writing about, by such composers as Corelli,
Festing and handel.
37
Derby Mercury, Derby, 19 Sept. 1766.
38
r.h. Cromeck, Reliques of Robert Burns, quoted in Stewart 2009: 79.
39
[Tytler] 1778: 954.
40
See halfpenny 1964: 100–101 for a 1765 robert Bremner advertisement; Bath
Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, Bath, 17 Aug. 1769, for a Thomas Underwood
advertisement; Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, london, 13 June 1770, for a
henry Thorowgood advertisement; and A Catalogue of Vocal and Instrumental
Music... for a John Welcker advertisement [c. 1775]; etc.
41
John Welcker [c. 1775] for example: ‘John Welcker... Manufactures and Sells the
following Instruments... Bagpipes Scotch or Irish... Bagpipe [reeds]...’ (in catalogue
of note 40). Welcker lists so many instruments of his manufacture that it might be
suspected that he is factoring them for other manufacturers, but he also gives a separate
list of instruments that he only imports (including ‘Welch harps’ and ‘Irish harps’).
at least one Irish-made bellows bagpipe by a recognised Irish maker is

also being played there:
Wants a Place, a young man, who is thoroughly acquainted with all the
branches of servitude... The same person has a very handsome pair of Irish
Bag-pipes, by the real old egan in Dublin, made for a nobleman deceased.
Any single gentleman wanting a servant, or a pair of Bag-pipes, or both...
shall be immediately waited upon...42
This young man is doubtless the ‘Murphy, Player of the Irish Pipes’
who would advertise in edinburgh for a place in service as a musical
dresser or butler in 1787, the year before Courtney’s london debut.43
his full name was John Murphy,44 and he also would become a well
known professional recitalist from 1788.45 An Irish ‘bagpipes’ player,
unnamed but from Mullingar, Co Westmeath, was playing on stage
for dancers in 1781 in a revival london production of Allan
ramsay’s Scottish pastoral the Gentle Shepherd.46 At this general
period also the ‘bagpipe’ is the favoured instrument among the poor
Irish of london celebrating St Patrick’s Day in the ghetto of St giles.47
42
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 20 Sept. 1779. For the 1760s Dublin
pipe-maker egan see Donnelly 1983: 7–11.
43
Caledonian Mercury, edinburgh, 26 July 1787.
44
Murphy c. 1810: title page, quoted in Cannon 1980: 90–1.
45
Murphy played for the highland Society of london on seven documented occ-
asions in 1788, beginning on 20 January, and twice during the year with Denis
Courtney (nlS MS highland Society of london Dep. 268/34). Although playing
Irish bellows pipes in london earlier than Courtney, he was eclipsed by him.
46
Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, london, 14 Dec. 1781: ‘When his Majesty
was to see the gentle Shepherd, one of his officers, a Scotchman, being behind
the scenes, and conceiving that no person but of his own country could play the
bagpipes, went up to the man who performs on that instrument in the highland
reel, and said, “What part of the kirk, laddie?”. The other answered, with a very
broad provincial accent — “From Mullingar, by J—s honey!”’. Mullingar is in
Co Westmeath. The John geoghegan mentioned above was also of Co Westmeath
connection, but was doubtless of a different social class from this piper.
47
General Advertiser, london, 21 Mar. 1786.
Some other minor terms were used in the eighteenth century for Irish
bellows pipes, or what seem to be such. Among the earliest of these
was ‘the Irish organ’ (and variant forms) which first appears in 1733
in a Dublin reference to ‘an Organ Piper’,48 and later and more
explicitly in Cork in the 1770s and 1780s,49 and in Scotland in the
1780s.50 Also in the 1770s ‘small pipes’, which may or may not be
bellows pipes, are referred to in a Co Kildare context.51 A reported
Cork printed advertisement, seemingly of the 1780s but possibly
earlier or later, refers to ‘common large pipes Small pipes & and
Dunn the pipers way of playing ye large Soft pipes whether the
Scholer can read or write’;52 presumably some if not all of these are
bellows pipes. ‘Parlour pipes’ was also used of the instrument.53
Irish antiquarians of the 1780s used a variety of terms. About 1784
the unreliable antiquarian speculator general Charles Vallancey
observed to the twenty-four-year-old Joseph Cooper Walker, who
was then researching in Dublin the first book on Irish music, that the
Irish had pipes of two kinds, ‘one filled by the mouth, the other
48
lawler 1733, quoted in Donnelly 1994a: 42–5.
49
Hibernian Chronicle, Cork, 26 July 1773, 12 Sept. 1774, and 4 Apr. 1784. For
details see Carolan 1984: 59–61.
50
Cheape 2008b: 117.
51
‘On the 25th ult. departed his life at Athy in the County of Kildare in the 80th
year of his age... James Purcell, commonly known by the name of Baron Purcell
of loakman... his will... ‘... my body shall be preceded to the grave by twelve of
the best performers on the small pipes which can be had, to whom I will one
crown each for playing my favourite tune of granuail... The pipers attended...’
(Hibernian Magazine, Dublin, Dec. 1774).
52
Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society vol. XlI (1936): 52
(reference courtesy Seán Donnelly). Dunn’s instructions were presumably the
pipes gamut in tablature.
53
nlI Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8118(2). no date is given for this usage, but the term
was a common one, often used in Britain as well as Ireland and over a wide
period of time.
modern by the bellows at the elbow or Uilean’,54 the latter word a

form of the Irish word for elbow. In referring to the old Irish word
‘Cuislanagh, Pipers’, Vallancey says
‘I think Bagpipers; because they at this day call a piper by that name,
and he names the bellows, bollog na Cuisli, the bellows of the Cuisli, or
Veins of the Arm, at the first joint, and on the outside is Ullan or the
elbow – so that I take Ullan Pipes and Cuisli pipes to be the same...’.55
Vallancey’s coinage of ‘Ullan Pipes’ was motivated by a wish to

make a connection with the ‘woollen pipes’ of Shakespeare in The
Merchant of Venice. When Walker came to print in 1786 he repeated
Vallancey’s observations and passed on his supposition:
‘Vallency [sic] concludes that Ullan Pipes and Cuisle Pipes are one and
the same’.56
In time, as will be seen, this first term, which has no ancestry before
Vallancey but was coined by him, would give rise to the term
‘uilleann pipes’.
54
Charles Vallancey to Joseph Cooper Walker in undated questionnaire, TCD MS
1461 (I) T51, fols 182–6.
55
Charles Vallancey, undated letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, in TCD MS 1461–7
T.66 fol. 242. ‘Cuisli Pipes’ were not bagpipes but mouth-blown Irish pipes of
antiquity.
56
Walker 1786: 76. This is the first appearance of these terms in print. For further
details see Carolan 1981: 4–9. Another unreliable contemporary Irish
antiquarian, William Beauford, incorrectly used the term adharcaidh ciuil for
bagpipes (Beauford 1781: 244) but he meant mouth-blown bagpipes. Walker
1786: 76 followed Beauford in this.
Establishment of ‘Union Pipes’
It is necessary to detail what is known of Denis Courtney’s career in

order to understand not only how he introduced the term ‘union
pipes’, but how he established it so firmly in contemporary musical
consciousness that it would outlive him as a standard term for more
than a century. The explanation for this feat lies in the considerable
public successes he enjoyed in the course of his brief musical career.
had he not been successful, the term would hardly be known today.
Courtney in London 1788–1792

even before his first public appearance in london on 14 May 1788,
Denis Courtney is seen as receiving an unusual measure of recog-
nition there. On 10 April, as ‘Courtney’, he was brought by Sir hector
Munro to play privately for the highland Society of london, along
with his fellow Irish piper John Murphy. They shared a fee of two
guineas.57 Both played for the Society again for the same fee on 8
May, ‘Courtney having come without being ordered’.58 In the several
advertisements taken for his stage debut a particular emphasis can
be discerned in the promotion. The concert itself is introduced as a
benefit for him, something which implies that the performer already
has a following. The tickets are expensive – 7s. 6d. each. They are
being sold by the leading music sellers, publishers and musical
instrument makers longman and Broderip of Cheapside who, as
contemporary makers and sellers of ‘Bagpipes, Scotch or Irish’,59
were possibly involved in the promotion of the concert. Courtney
himself is to be found at the fashionable address of 1 york Street, St
57
nlS MS highland Society of london Dep. 268/34. general Sir hector Munro,
Bart., became president of the highland Society of london in 1800 (Highland
Society of London 1873: 23).
58
nlS MS highland Society of london Dep. 268/34.
59
Longman and Broderip catalogue [c. 1780].
21 eSTABlIShMenT OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
James’s Square, where he would remain until the year of his death.
his supporting artists, especially the musical director and violinist
Dieudonné Pascal Pieltain,60 are well established london favourites.
On the eve of the concert a further burst of publicity is employed:
the full programme for the night is given in an extended
advertisement. It will be a performance for listeners, free of the
vulgar associations of bagpipes, and presented in terms of
contemporary classical music, but at the same time novel. It will be
supported by members of the nobility, who are probably the members
of the highland Society of london for whom he had lately played.
The first half will feature ‘Concerto Union Pipes, Mr. Courtenay
(being the first ever attempted on that instrument)’; the second
‘Maggy lawther, with new variations, by particular desire of some
noble personages, on Mr. Courtenay’s Union Pipes’. It is not ex-
plained what ‘Union Pipes’ are,61 but Courtney had received a
considerable build-up for his debut.
The promotion was highly successful. According to an anonymous

reviewer in The Times of london on the morning after the concert:
last night Mr. Courtney introduced a new species of music to the public,
called the Union Pipes, being the Scotch and Irish Bag-pipes united; and he
performed Maggae lawther, with its variations, on it with great success.’62
not quite everyone in the audience however was impressed with the
music of the pipes. John Marsh, an english composer, recorded that
60
For Pieltain see highfill et al.: 11, 306.
61
I had formerly thought (Carolan 2004: 21–3) that the instrument was already
familiar to British audiences since no mention was made of the novelty of the
term (or of the instrument), and that earlier examples of it would be found in
print. Although earlier examples of the term may yet be found, I now think that
the absence of explanation was an advertising ploy.
62
Issue of 15 May 1788 (reference courtesy Terry Moylan). The form of Courtney’s
name used here is interesting: the writer clearly knew that it was really
‘Courtney’ in spite of his newspaper’s advertising.
having seen an advertisement ‘for the benefit of one Courtney, performer

on the union pipes, I went to it & sat in the gallery, but came away (find-
ing myself rather tired) as soon as he had played his concerto, with w’ch
I was not very well pleased, some parts of it being as I thought like a
person singing & crying at the same time’.63
Courtney’s success was quickly followed up on the same day as The

Times review appeared, on 15 May, with a surprise appearance during
a concert on the pre-opening night of the 1788 season at the
fashionable london pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. Two thousand were
in attendance at the gardens, and the musicians played in a newly en-
larged and brilliantly lit promenade room.
The concert was unexpectedly enriched by the introduction of Courtney,
the bagpipe player, who performed the tune of Maggy lauder with un-
common beauty. It is astonishing what tenderness of tone and variety he
gives to the instrument.64
The gardens were open again two nights later, and Courtney was
again on hand:
After the concert was finished in the garden orchestra, Mr. Courtenay per-
formed a concerto on the Union Pipes in the grand Saloon, which was re-
ceived with much applause, for the execution and skill he displayed on an
instrument as single and novel for the audience, as for a regular concerto.65
Another newspaper review was in agreement with this assessment.

The singers had disappointed – they were ‘much agitated by their first
appearance at this place’ – but
Mr. Courtnay afforded much pleasure to the general entertainment of the
evening. his excellence on the Union Bag-pipes is universally admired,
63
robins 1998: 432.
64
London Chronicle, london, 15–17 May 1788.
65
Ibid.
and he played Maggee Lawther with much effect. The instrument was
particularly well adapted to the room.66
For a period Courtney now disappears from the prints, but he doubtless
went on to capitalise on his successes, performing unreported at
Vauxhall and elsewhere, and privately for the ‘noble personages’ who
had patronised his first stage appearance. Within a few years it was
said of him that ‘The principal nobility of the three kingdoms are well
acquainted with his excellence’.67 A muck-raking publication, attacking
the prominent nobleman Charles howard, 11th Duke of norfolk
(1746–1815, also known as ‘the dirty Duke’ and ‘the drunk Duke’),
says of howard:
Although no person can be more tenacious of the dignity due to high birth,
or more jealous of the privileges of Aristocracy, yet his appearance,
manner, and habits, are strikingly plebian, and his companions are selected
from the very dregs of democracy. The principal friends and attendants
on his grace, are a Mr. Se—ge—ck, a subaltern actor belonging to the
haymarket Theatre, Mr. C— n—y, the celebrated performer on that har-
monious instrument the bagpipe, and the noted Captain M—r—s, whose
excellent songs have acquired him such unbounded popularity.68
The reference to the ‘dregs of democracy’ is a reminder that the

American War of Independence, which concluded in 1783, would have
been fresh in the minds of Courtney’s audiences, and that the events
of the French revolution formed a prominent part of the political back-
ground to almost all of his six years in the limelight in Britain, from
66
The Times, london, 17 May 1788. This third spelling of Courtney’s surname in
as many notices, two of them in the same paper, is typical of the lack of
uniformity found in print for his name.
67
Hibernian Journal, Dublin, 4 Jan. 1793.
68
[Pigott] 1792: pt 2, 10–11. Thomas Sedgwick (d. 1803) was a bass singer much
in demand as well as an actor. Thomas Morris (1732–1818), a retired soldier who
may have been Irish, was a well known bon viveur and a writer of both
respectable and obscene songs. For both see highfill et al. howard famously
the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the year after his london debut, to the
guillotining of robespierre and the closure of the Jacobin Club about
the time of his own death in 1794. All of his aristocratic patrons would
have been greatly exercised by the revolution, and those of a Whig
outlook in politics, such as Charles howard was, would generally have
at first sympathised with the revolutionaries.
Illustration on following pages:

‘Maggie Lawder with Variations’ as published in Dublin, seemingly during
Denis Courtney’s visit there, January–July 1793
would only allow his servants to wash him when he was dead drunk. By coincid-
ence another contemporary Irish piper named Denis was also taken up by a
drunken english nobleman: ‘les lords lieutenants d'Irlande... ont le droit de
créer chevalier qui il leur plait, ils en ont quelques fois fait une plaisanterie assez
mal placée, à ce que je pense. le duc de rutland, après avoir un peu bù, fut si
charmé d’un certain aveugle, joueur de cornemuse, qu’il lui ordonna dè se mettre
à genoux et le créa Chevalier avec l’epée et l’accollade. Cet homme depuis ce
temps se nomme Sir Denis * * *, il continue cependant son premier métier et va
jouer dans les maisons pendant le diner, c’est un homme vraiment habile sur son
instrument, dont j’avoue à ma honte que je ne fuis pas grand amateur’. [The lords
lieutenant of Ireland... have the right to make whomsoever they please a knight,
and as a result they have sometimes made, in my opinion, the odd pretty unfunny
jest. The Duke of rutland, after having had a drink or two, was so charmed with
a certain blind bagpiper that he ordered him to go down on his knees and created
him a knight by sword and by embracing him. This man since that time is called
Sir Denis * * *. he continues however with his first way of life and goes to play
in people’s houses during dinner. he is a man really skilled on the instrument, of
which I must admit to my shame that I am not very fond. – present writer’s trans-
lation] (De latocnaye 1797: 110–1; 1801: 120. A published english translation
Rambles through Ireland 1798: 1, 165–6 identifies the piper as a ‘Denis O’grady’,
which seems confirmed by a later poetic reference to ‘O’grady, that fam’d piping
Knight’ (The Overseer, Cork, 5 July 1817). he was doubtless a bellows piper.
Charles Manners, 4th Duke of rutland, was lord lieutenant of Ireland from 1784
until his death in 1787. he was popular in Dublin for his conviviality and
hospitality, and drank himself to death in office.
howard was for a time a close companion of ‘Prinny’, the dissolute

Prince of Wales and Prince regent who would become King george
IV. Courtney also was a favourite of the prince, and of his father
george III. In 1792 at a meeting and dinner of some five hundred of
the Free and Accepted Masons in their hall at lincoln’s Inn Fields
the Prince of Wales, the grand Master, was in the chair, and after-
wards ‘Courtney, on the Union Pipes, and Wiepert, on the harp,
added to the entertainment of the day...’.69 In 1793 it was claimed
that ‘his royal highness the Prince of Wales has often commanded
him to attend his parties’.70 In a 1794 royal Command performance
of a show in which he played, it was reported that ‘Courtenay, with
the charming music of the Union Pipes, seemed to afford uncommon
satisfaction to the royal Box’.71
Courtney did not however spend all his time in aristocratic service:
‘Courtenay, the celebrated Union Piper... was a choice spirit, and would
sooner play on his pipes to amuse his poor countrymen, than gratify
the wishes of noblemen, although handsomely paid for it’.72
Courtney’s establishing of the bagpipes as an instrument acceptable to

fashionable london audiences may have contributed to the first stage
appearance of a Scottish highland piper there later in 1788. The
highland Society of london, as well as having the Scottish mouth-blown
highland bagpipes played privately at its own london functions, had
69
The Diary or Woodfall’s Register, london, 4 May 1792.
70
71
The World, london, 11 Feb. 1794.
72
egan 1820: 142–3. The implication that Courtney would have had a familiar Irish
traditional repertory for this audience is borne out by his later introduction of
such music into his stage performances as below. It is likely that Courtney also
played for dancers on these occasions, that being then a primary function of an
Irish piper. This and other references give the impression that Courtney was him-
self of humble birth.
been supporting the highland pipes since 1781 by organising annual

piping competitions and offering prizes. These had been held to date in
Falkirk and edinburgh,73 but now Mr. neal M’lean, piper to the Society
in london and a prizewinner in their 1783 competitions,74 was advertised
to appear for one night only at Sadler’s Wells theatre on 10 September
1788. he would take part in an Ossian-inspired pantomime entertainment
entitled The Witch of the Lakes; or, Harlequin in the Hebrides. There
would be introduced ‘A new Scotch reel; accompanied on the Bag-
pipes, in character’, and M’lean would ‘entertain the Audience with a
Pibroch on the Prize Pipes, descriptive of a highland Battle’.75 In time
Denis Courtney would have an outstanding success in a similar london-
Scottish Ossianic pantomime entertainment.
Courtney next appears in print – ‘Concerto Union Pipes, Mr. Courtney’

– at a benefit in March 1789 in the Free Masons’ hall for the singer Miss
leary, who had featured in his own initial benefit almost a year earlier.76
Thereafter he again disappears from view until he has three engagements
as ‘Courtney piper’ with the highland Society of london in March, April
and May 1790.77 his relationship with the Society continued: he played
for them again in January 1791 as ‘D. Courtney Irish Piper’, and in
February of the same year as ‘Dennis Courtney’ in company with a ‘Jms
Macdonald’,78 who was doubtless James McDonnell, an Irish
professional bellows piper famous in Cork since the 1770s, and also later
active in Scotland and london.79 In April 1791 Courtney publishes a
preliminary notice of a concert and ball to be given for his benefit:
73
Manson 1901: 389.
74
Manson 1901: 388.
75
Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, london, 8 Sept. 1788.
76
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 25 Mar. 1789.
77
78
Ibid.
79
See below.
Mr. Courtenay, Performer on the Union Pipes, begs leave to inform his
Friends and the Public, that his Benefit is fixed for Thursday, the 12th
of May, at the great room, the Crown and Anchor, in the Strand; where
will be a grand concert of Vocal and Instrumental Music. After the
concert will be a Ball.80
The Crown and Anchor was a popular london meeting and dining
venue with one of the largest rooms in the city, capable of seating
2,000.81 It was not as prestigious as the Free Mason’s hall of his
debut, and the tickets were cheaper, but longman and Broderip are
still in support and he is still living at 1 york Street.82 A report of a
masquerade held the following month in the london pleasure gardens
at ranelagh suggests something of Courtney’s current lifestyle. One
of the masqueraders appears in the character of ‘Courtnay and his
bag-pipes, as tipsey as any piper need be’.83 Another report of the
same occasion however simply lists the character as ‘Mr. Courtenay,
the performer on the Union Pipes’.84 Both reports furnish evidence
that he had become a noted figure on the fashionable london scene.85
By this time Courtney had begun to make guest appearances in the

intervals of theatrical presentations at leading london venues: at, for
instance, a performance of Love in a Village starring the well known
actor and singer Mr. Incledon at the Theatre royal, Covent garden:
80
The World, london, 27 Apr. 1791.
81
See Parolin 2010: 112–3.
82
The World, london, 27 Apr. 1791.
83
The World, london, 4 May 1791.
84
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 4 May 1791.
85
It would seem that the character of Courtney became a standard feature of
masquerades: ‘Courtenay, with his bag-pipes, attracted as usual much notice.’
(London Chronicle, 14–16 Feb. 1792). From another report of this occasion, it
seems that he was represented in his stage persona as a ‘highland piper’
(Morning Herald, london, 16 Feb. 1792).
‘With a variety of entertainments. In which will be introduced the

favourite air of “Moggy lauder” on the Union Pipes, by the celebrated
Mr. Courtney’.86 This venue could also hold 2,000; it was owned and
managed by the Irish playwright richard Brinsley Sheridan. In the
same theatre two nights before Courtney’s appearance on 20 May, a
group of Scottish highland pipers appeared in a
... new Divertisement, consisting of Dialogue, Singing and Dancing, The
Union: Or, St. Andrew’s Day. In the Divertisement will be introduced, The
highland Competition Prize, exactly as represented annually in the City of
edinburgh, by M’lane, M’gregor, M’Tavish, and several other celebrated
Pipers, who will perform several Strathspeys, laments and Pebruchs.87
Ironically, given his opening up of the london stage for Scottish pipers,
Courtney’s own biggest stage success would be playing the union pipes
in a Scottish role. James Byrn or Byrne, a dancing master, had choreo-
graphed a ballet pantomime ‘taken from Ossian’ entitled Oscar and
Malvina, with ‘the new Music composed, and the ancient Scots Music
selected and adapted, by Mr. Shield. The Overture by Mr. reeve’.88
Courtney played in the new piece accompanied at first by a german
harper Charles Meyer,89 but thereafter and regularly by another german
harper John erhardt Weippert (1766–1823).90 In this presentation he
would reach the pinnacle of his career.
The spectacular production opened in Covent garden on 20 October

1791. It had a resounding success, and had been performed over forty
86
87
The Diary or Woodfall’s Register, london, 18 May 1791.
88
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 20 Oct. 1791.
89
hogan 1968: 1399. Byrn danced the role of Oscar.
90
For Weippert see highfill et al.: 15, 335–7.
times before the season ended on 31 May 1792.91 The published libretto
and score went into a third edition in 1791.92 The piece would be revived
at intervals over the next thirty years, in Ireland and germany and in the
United States as well as in london. Courtney was frequently singled out
as one of the main attractions of the first and other early productions. he
would play music from it in his general stage recitals until his death, and
over the years several professional bellows pipers, following his lead,
would feature music from it in their concert performances.
Music from William reeve’s score of Oscar and Malvina would

frequently be published in sheet-music form and in anthologies of
melodies: in london from 1791 and into the nineteenth century; in
Dublin in 1793; and in the United States from the second half of the
1790s. These publications were aimed at the general body of
musicians and arranged generally for instruments other than the
union pipes, but among them a rondo marked for the ‘Union Pipes’
and harp in duet shows that a range of two octaves was required of
the pipes.93 The pipes stave also calls for several three-note chords,
but these must have been supplied by the harp as they are not chords
that could be played on the then-new keyed closed chanters or
‘regulators’ of the pipes, which only sound when their keys are
depressed to add harmony notes to the chanter and drones. While a
single regulator was in use on Irish bellows pipes by 178994 and
three regulators have been standard on the instrument since the nine-
teenth century, there is no evidence that Courtney employed any. If
however he did, it would explain further the success of his playing.
91
hogan 1968: 1384.
92
Airs, Duets, Choruses, and Argument, of… Oscar and Malvina…
93
[reeve] n.d.: 4–5.
94
‘A regulator’ is mentioned by William Beauford in a description of the uilleann pipes
written in August 1789 but not published until 1790. he made no mention of this
feature in a similar description which he wrote in 1785 (see Carolan 1984: 61).
One newspaper correspondent, styling himself ‘The ghost of Carolan’

and complaining about Courtney’s stage costume in Oscar and Malvina,
incidentally confirms his nationality and that of his pipes:
As an Irishman, give me leave to observe, that in the representation of
Oscar and Malvina the Irish pipes are introduced; but why the piper should
be habited in a highland dress, I cannot reconcile to my feelings... now,
by my shoul, I tink an Irishman playing so well upon the pipes as little
C——y, should not be ashamed of his brogues, and let the music give his
Scotch bonnet the lie.95
now known for their duets in Oscar and Malvina, Courtney and
Weippert had begun to perform together as entr’acte entertainment in
variety productions, such as Collin’s Evening Brush at the lyceum in
the Strand during March 1792.96 In May 1792 Courtney is having an-
other benefit in the Crown and Anchor and playing ‘an entire new
Concerto on the Union Pipes by Mr. reeve, who Composed the
95
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 8 nov. 1791. There must be a sus-
picion that the writer was the Irish actor and humorous dramatist John O’Keefe,
who, as said, had been introducing Carolan tunes to london audiences since the
early 1780s, sometimes in collaboration with Shield, the part-composer of Oscar
and Malvina (see O’Keefe 1826: II, 49,70–1, 77; Fiske 1986: 274, 459, 600–12
and passim). O’Keefe was interested in the Irish pipes: he had introduced the
piper James MacDonnell to Cork stage audiences in 1774 (Carolan 1984: 59–61)
and had pipers as characters in his 1783 stage production The Shamrock
(O’Keefe: II, 49; Fiske 1986: 459). The dilemma faced by the musical directors
of Oscar and Malvina – of wanting to represent Scottish pipes on stage, but
being unable to use highland pipes because their confined melodic range and
their unique temperament (those features which are the very basis of their charac-
ter and attraction) prevented them playing melodies of extended range and
playing in concert with other theatre instruments – is a familiar one. It is usually
solved nowadays, from the television series Kidnapped to the film Braveheart,
by using Irish uilleann pipes off-screen.
96
Morning Chronicle, london, 29 Mar. 1792 etc. See also Morning Herald,
london, 19 May 1792 (in The Irishman in London); and Morning Herald,
london, 26 May 1792 (in Kean’s Evening Lounge).
From William Reeve etc., The Overture, Favorite Songs, Duets and Choruses
in the grand Pantomime Ballet of Oscar & Malvina, Longman & Broderip,
London, n.d. [1791]
Favourite Overture in Oscar and Malvina’. he is supported by

Weippert, Mr Incledon, Mrs Mountain, Miss leary, and other leading
london entertainers.97 later in the month Courtney and Weippert are
accompanying the singing of a Scottish duet by Incledon and
Mountain in a theatrical evening in Covent garden which featured as
the afterpiece the popular comedy The Irishman in London.98 For the
first time in his london career, Courtney is billed as playing the ‘Irish
Pipes’; this was doubtless thought appropriate for the theme of the
comedy, which also featured ‘A Planxty’ sung by the Irish specialist
singer Mr Johnstone.99 But ominously Courtney fails to appear for the
last night of a run of Oscar and Malvina in the same venue: ‘Mr.
Weippart with his harp, undertook the whole piece by himself, with
wonderful execution and taste; the sweet tone which he brought from
the harp astonished the Company’.100 By the beginning of november
97
Morning Herald, london, 7 May 1792. The ticket price had increased from the
5s of his earlier benefit in the same venue to 7s 6d: his stock had obviously risen
because of Oscar and Malvina.
98
Public Advertiser, london, 28 May 1792.
99
Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, london, 22 May 1792.
100
Morning Herald, london, 2 June 1792.
1792 Courtney and Weippert are together again in Oscar and Malvina
during the new theatrical season in Covent garden.101
At this time Courtney was beginning to be noticed in books as well as in

newspapers:
... in many passages she [a stage singer Miss Broadhurst] reminds us of
Courtenay, on the Union Pipes, who certainly commands the greatest power,
and produces the most bewitching and various sounds on that Instrument
which possibly can be conceived. his ingenuity seems to have made a new
discovery in Instrumental Music...102
Courtney in Ireland 1793

By early January 1793, a month in which France would declare war
on Britain and Ireland, Courtney’s successes in Oscar and Malvina
had brought him across the Irish Sea to Dublin and he is noticed there
as an arriving celebrity: ‘yesterday morning, Mr Courtney, so famous
for playing on the pipes at the Theatre royal, Covent garden, arrived
from holyhead.’103 he had been brought over by richard Daly,
manager of the Theatre royal, Crow Street, ‘at a very considerable
sum’104 to appear there in a roadshow version of the piece, one of
two productions that had been running in Dublin from late 1792:
hitherto its success has been unprecedented, and the Manager... has, to
encrease its attraction, brought over at a considerable expence, Courtney,
whose performance on the bagpipes, at Covent garden, has established
101
The Diary or Woodfall’s Register, london, 1 nov. 1792.
102
[Pigott] 1792: 261. The reference is also found in the 3rd ed. of 1793 and the
4th ed. of 1794.
103
Public Register, or, Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 1–3 Jan. 1793. he arrived on 2
January. holyhead is a Welsh port of embarkation for Ireland.
104
his pre-eminence on that favourite instrument. —his first appearance will

be tomorrow evening... when a very crowded audience is expected’.105
The country in which Courtney had arrived was in a state of
increasing political and sectarian tension which would result before
the end of the decade in armed rebellion and parliamentary union
with Britain. Its Protestant ascendancy parliament was continuing its
efforts to become a sovereign assembly free from Westminster
control, at the same time as a Catholic Committee was in london
suing for relief from legislative disabilities suffered by Catholics.
Animated by the example of the French revolution, radicals were
secretly contemplating violent separation from Britain; Courtney’s
six months in Ireland would see a government crackdown on the
United Irishmen movement in Dublin and Belfast. But native
instrumental music and song had been providing one of several
temporary cultural bridges between Protestants and Catholics since
the 1780s; just six months earlier, in July 1792 (to coincide with the
anniversary of the storming of the Bastille) the Belfast harp Festival
had been held in an effort to preserve the threatened harp tradition.
As one classical instrument of Irish traditional music was slowly dis-
appearing after being in use for the best part of a thousand years, an-
other was finally coming into its own in the capital city with
maximum publicity after a hundred years of obscure development.
A fanfare notice for Courtney’s Dublin debut on 4 January, headed

‘national Music’, seems to imply that Irish rather than Scottish music
will be heard, but without actually saying so:
105
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 1 Jan. 1793. Courtney seems to have been the only
one of the original london cast to have transferred to Dublin – a testament
doubtless to his unique talent and to the attraction his art would have for Irish
audiences. A well known Irish actor who was already part of the Dublin cast, as
one of the ‘Principal Bards and vocal Performers’, was robert MacOwen or
Owenson, an Irish-speaking singer from Mayo and father of the future novelist
and harpist Sidney Owenson, lady Morgan.
national Music. The celebrated Courtney, whose superior character,

unrivalled abilities, and uncommon execution on the Union Pipes are
so well known to every person of taste in the three kingdoms, makes
his first appearance this evening in the dramatic Pantomime of Oscar
and Malvina...106
Another notice of the same date was even more effusive and emphas-
ised the national angle more strongly, while touching on the
contemporary antiquarian interest in older music:
The musical amateur, the man of refined taste, and the admirer of ancient
music, will this evening gratify their feelings beyond their most sanguine
expectations by the unrivalled performance of the celebrated Courtney
on our favourite national instrument, the Union Pipes...107
A management advertisement speaks of ‘The Bagpipes by Mr.

Courtney from the Theatre royal, Covent garden, his first
Appointment’.108 It is noticeable that his Irish management, unlike his
london promoters, frequently advertise him as playing ‘bagpipes’.
Since it was, as said, ‘our favourite national instrument’, there was no
need to camouflage it in Dublin as there had been in london, but rather
it was a good business move to draw attention to its national familiarity.
On the other hand the new and fashionable london term for the pipes
is also employed, although not the piper’s london stage name.
Courtney was once again an undoubted hit: a review speaks of ‘the

engaging novel[t]y of C’s superior performance on the union pipes,
a novelty sufficient of itself to fill a house, for he has to boast the
admiration of all the best judges in london for his masterly
execution, his delicacy yet power of tone, and for his affecting
106
Saunder’s News-Letter, Dublin, 4 Jan. 1793.
107
108
manner on that instrument.’109 Another states that ‘Courtney, the cel-

ebrate[d] performer on the Bagpipes... has brought full houses... noth-
ing can exceed the fineness of his tones, and the extent and variety
of them could not be surpassed... on any instrument’.110 yet another
says
Much as we had heard of him, the reality exceeds all expectations,
indeed nothing but hearing him, and to that all listen with avidity, can
convey any adequate idea of his extraordinary merit. his brilliancy of
execution, the elegance of his shake, and his delicacy, yet truth, of tone,
are the universal themes of applause; but his pathetic impression which
melts every heart with sympathising feelings is not to be told...111
even allowing for the hyperbole of these puff-pieces, which was

probably management-inspired, it is clear that something out of the
ordinary was being heard on stage in Dublin, and that Courtney had
helped Daly fill his 2,000-seater venue. london was kept informed
of the latest success: ‘Courtney, the Irish Piper, is performing... in
Ireland... and is as much followed as haydn’.112
As early as 11 January 1793, while Oscar and Malvina continues its

Dublin run, Courtney is also continuing his london practice of
entr’acte theatrical performance, and is playing for dancers in an in-
termezzo: ‘A favourite Pas de Deux and reel by Mr. lassells, Master
lassells and Mrs. Parker accompanied on the Bagpipes by Mr.
Courtney’.113 In February, after Oscar and Malvina had finished its
109
110
Dublin Evening Post, Dublin, 8 Jan. 1793.
111
112
Morning Post, london, 18 Jan. 1793. Joseph haydn and his ‘london’
symphonies had caused a sensation there in 1791–2.
113
run on 31 January,114 ‘a grand Concerto on the Union Pipes, by Mr.

Courtney’ is advertised for after the second act of The Conscious
Lovers,115 and in May ‘a celebrated rondeau on the Union Pipes, by
Mr. Courtney’ during the play Wild Oats.116 he is also open to private
engagements:
Courtenay. Performer on the Union Pipes, most respectfully informs the
nobility and the gentry, that his engagement with Mr. Daly is expired;
and, for the short time he has to stay in this kingdom, will thankfully
receive commands at no. 15, Trinity-street.117
he was probably successful in receiving private engagements: it is

the end of April 1793 before he is back on the Dublin stage, and no
evidence has been found that he performed publicly in Cork, limerick
or Kilkenny in the interim. In May the Dublin music publisher hime
is advertising among the ‘new Music... Just published... The
fashionable Songs and Airs as played by Mr. Courtney on the Union
Pipes in Oscar and Malvina’.118 Music from the show was also
published in Dublin by John lee.119
114
Saunder’s News-Letter, Dublin, 31 Jan. 1793.
115
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 28 Feb. 1793.
116
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 30 Apr. 1793.
117
Saunder’s News-Letter, Dublin, 9 Mar. 1793. Trinity Street is in south central
Dublin, close to the then Irish parliament buildings and to the Theatre royal in
Crow St, and would have been a fashionable address. It is noticeable that
Courtney’s stage name and the new term for his instrument is being used here
in an advertisement presumably inserted by himself rather than by Daly.
118
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 4 May 1793. Undated copies of the hime sheet
music are in the nlI: Rondo and Favorite Airs as Performed by Mr Courtney
(JM 2832, JM 2833, Add. Mus. 7027 with a song from Oscar and Malvina on
the reverse of the single sheet). hime similarly published Three Favorite
Marches in Oscar and Malvina (JM 2832) and various songs from the show,
and included tunes from it in Hime’s Pocket Book for the German Flute or Violin
(JM 5474)
119
An undated single sheet was published by John lee: The Favourite Airs in Oscar
& Malvina Performed by Mr. Courtney (nlI Additional Music 12,401).
As published in Dublin, during Denis Courtney’s visit there,

January–July 1793 (courtesy National Library of Ireland)
later in the same month, at a Dublin benefit for him, Courtney is

extending his performance repertory in a more Irish direction: ‘Mr
Courtney will introduce several Airs on the Union Pipes, particularly
The Munster lilt, And Papa! Papa! Mama! Mama!120 By this time
he is being billed as ‘Performer on the Union Pipes to the Prince of
Wales’, and is also now performing ‘ellenaroon’121 and ‘the favourite
Air of Coolun’.122 These are among the ‘Irish lilts’ and ‘Irish airs’ he
now regularly performs. By June 1793 Courtney’s Irish visit only
had a few weeks to run, and the publicity stops were being pulled out
for another benefit for him:
The performance of... Mr. Courtney... on the Union Pipes is justly
admired here as well as in england, and this evening he is to give such
further instances of his abilities, as never were known before. This... is
a desirable treat; and as Mr. Courtney, who has had the honour of being
countenanced for his singular merit on the Union Pipes, by his Majesty,
and his royal highness the Prince of Wales, is shortly to return to
england, it is probable those who delight in that music, will never have
such another opportunity of enjoyment.123
In the event Courtney stayed on in Dublin for another six weeks, and
finished up the theatrical season in the Theatre royal at the end of
July in his by now usual style: ‘Mr. Courtney will perform the
celebrated Overture and rondeau of Oscar and Malvina, with several
favourite Irish Airs, on the Union Pipes’.124
120
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 14 May 1793.
121
Irish ‘eibhlín a rún’ (eileen my love). Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 18 May
1793.
122
Irish ‘An Chúilfhionn’ (The fair-haired girl). Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 18
May 1793.
123
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 11 June 1793.
124
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 30 July 1793. he appeared on the same bill as
robert Owenson, who was performing a ‘Planxty in character’.
Courtney’s Last Years 1793–1794

Courtney had not been forgotten in london during his Irish sojourn. In
March 1793 an engraving of a portrait of him by the leading
contemporary illustrator Isaac Cruikshank appeared as the frontispiece
of a new publication, a confirmation of his five years of public celebrity:
This day were published... The Whim of the Day of 1793: containing a
selection of the choicest and most approved Songs; embellished with a
beautiful representation of Mr. Courtenay playing on the union-pipes, in
the favourite pantomime of Oscar and Malvina...125
But also in March 1793, during his absence in Ireland, Courtney’s pos-
ition as an Irish piper on the london stage would be briefly challenged
in public, as would his by-now established new term for the pipes.
James McDonnell, the Irish professional bellows piper from Cork
already noticed as appearing with Courtney in london in 1791, was
again in london. he had an unadvertised success there on 25 February
1793 in Mr. Willis’s music rooms on King Street, St James’s. On 14
March he took a newspaper advertisement for another performance by
him at the same venue, describing himself as ‘Mr. M’Donnell, (The
Celebrated Performer on the Irish Pipes)’. he would perform ‘a new
Variety of the most-admired Scots and Irish Airs on the said
Instrument... Together with a Selection of the Ancient Irish and Scots
Music... Between the Acts, Mr. M’Donnell will play any favourite Tune
that may be desired by the Company’.126 McDonnell would not be
heard of performing again in london.127
125
The Star, london, 7 Mar. 1793. This is the portrait of Courtney reproduced as
the frontispiece of this essay (for which click here) and discussed below.
126
True Briton, london, 14 Mar. 1793. Antiquarianism was in the air. As cited,
three harp festivals had been held in granard, Co longford, in the 1780s, and
one in Belfast in 1792 (for which see Moloney 2000). Bunting would publish
one dance tune taken down from McDonnell in 1797 (Bunting 1840: xi). It is of
interest that McDonnell also gives primacy here to Scottish music and uses a
Scottish M’ in the spelling of his surname in london.
127
This was probably not for musical reasons. McDonnell was a proud and irascible
character, prepared to offend patrons and other employers, and in 1789 involved
in legal difficulties in Scotland (see Sanger 2006).
In October 1793 Courtney, back in Britain, is appearing on stage in

Bath128 and in Bristol, but for once not meeting with a success,
although the fault seems to be that of the Bristol audiences:
The Theatre is but thinly attended... Courtenay, with his sweet and simple
melodies upon the Union Pipes, is here; but he plays his ditties in vain, for
there is scarce attendance enough to pay the piper... Trade had ever a dull
ear for music!129
In February 1794 Courtney is in london, playing in Covent garden on
the opening night of a new season of Oscar and Malvina, but this time
advertised as performing on the ‘Irish Pipes’130 – the first time he uses
the term in connection with this Scottish creation.131 he continues with
the new form for the remainder of this run. his name also appears in a
new london publication A Musical Directory for the Year 1794 as
‘Courtney, Bag and Union Pipes, Cov ga Th.—no. 1, york-Street, St.
James’s’.132 From this, he may also have played a mouth-blown bagpipe
or, more likely, he was giving a generally understood alternative name
for his ‘union pipes’.
For the run of a new variety entertainment Mirth’s Museum, which

begins at the lyceum in the Strand in March 1794 with ‘The Music
entirely new, by Mr. reeve’, Courtney is back between the acts – as
‘the celebrated Mr. Courtnay’ – with ‘several new Airs on the Union
Pipes, Accompanied on the harp, by Mr. Wieppart’.133 Again reeve
had a hit on his hands and Courtney is uniquely singled out for notice:
128
The World, london, 15 Oct. 1793.
129
The World, london, 22 Oct. 1793.
130
The World, london, 6 Feb. 1794.
131
no explanation is given for the change from his usual terminology. It may have
been influenced by compatriots like ‘The ghost of Carolan’, by his Dublin trip,
or by McDonnell’s example.
132
The only other piper in the Directory is the highland Society of london’s
‘Macgregor, John, Bag-Pipes’ (43).
133
The World, london, 1 Mar. 1794. In later appearances of the advertisement he
is ‘Mr. Courtenay’.
‘Courtnay, on the Union Pipes, as usual, was universally encored, in the

favourite Overture to Oscar and Malvina...’;134 ‘Courtnay, on the Union
Pipes, received the most liberal applause last night in the Overture to
Oscar and Malvina...’.135 By the beginning of April, Courtney and
Wieppert are billed there as also playing ‘edmund O’hanlen’s gavot
with the much-admired Air of “eman eknough,136 or the little house
under the hill”’, and ‘an entire new Overture, for the Union Pipes and
harp, composed by Mr. reeve’.137
But while Mirth’s Museum continues, Courtney himself seems to be in

financial or other difficulties. In the same advertisement he announces
Mr. Courtenay respectfully begs leave to inform his Friends, and the Public,
that Mr. lingham [the manager] has kindly given him a Benefit on the
above-mentioned evening, to extricate him from the difficulties he now
labours under; and humbly flatters himself his endeavours will secure him
the honour of their Patronage.
his domestic circumstances have altered: he has by now moved from

1 york Street, St James’s Square, to 12 Danmark Street, exeter Street.
By the end of May 1794 Courtney is again playing ‘a Solo on the Union
Pipes’ and he and Weippert are playing ‘a Duetto on the Union Pipes
and harp’ in the newly rebuilt Covent garden,138 which can now hold
audiences of 3,600. On 2 June they are performing ‘several much
admired Pieces on the Union Pipes and Pedal harp’ between theatrical
134
Morning Post, london, 15 Mar. 1794.
135
Morning Post, london, 18 Mar. 1794.
136
Irish ‘Éamonn an Chnoic’ (edward of the hill).
137
The Oracle and Public Advertiser, london, 1 Apr. 1794. By this date also ‘The
Music of the most favourite Airs are published, and may be had at Messrs.
longman and Broderip’s...’.
138
Morning Post, london, 26 May 1794.
performances at the Theatre royal, haymarket.139 This is Courtney’s

last advertised stage appearance, although he may have finished out a
run of Oscar and Malvina in Covent garden on 11 June.140
It would seem that by this date Courtney was in the final chaotic stages
of alcohol-induced illness. An associate in his last months was another
notable character, Captain Patrick leeson (1754–c.1810s), a somewhat
older Irishman born in nenagh, Co Tipperary. From a modest back-
ground and after military training in France, leeson had become a
British army officer and a famous gambler with a stable of horses at
newmarket. enlisting Courtney and the ‘sweet strains of his pipes,
added to copious draughts of whiskey’, he raised an independent
regiment in such a short time that he won a great bet on it.141 Some of
the work of recruitment was carried out in April 1794 at a disorderly
annual outdoor festival at greenwich hill. The place abounded in
... recruiting Parties... Of these the most conspicuous were Captain
leeson and his party, with Courtnay the Piper in a highland dress, as
drunk as any of his fraternity, and viewed with professional envy. They
were attended by some gentlemen of the fist... Their efforts were so
skilfully directed... that many a bold Pat—rician was induced to
exchange his bludgeon for a bayonet; and decorate that shoulder with
a musket, hitherto degraded by a hod.142
139
140
hogan 1968: 1575.
141
egan 1820: 142–3.
142
The Oracle and Public Advertiser, london, 24 Apr. 1794. leeson’s luck event-
ually deserted him. Turning to brandy, he shunned fashionable society and
‘sought the most obscure places in the purlieus of St. giles’s, where he used
pass whole nights in the company of his countrymen of the lowest, but industri-
ous class, charmed with their songs and native humour... once the soul of whim
and gaiety, [he] sunk into a state of stupor and insensibility... having contracted
a number of debts, he was constantly pursued by the terriers of the law...’ (egan
1820: 143). Courtney’s end may not have been dissimilar.
The next notices of Courtney are of his death at the age of thirty-four
on 2 September 1794 – ‘lately, in the Middlesex hospital, Mr.
Courtenay, the celebrated player on the bag-pipes’143 – and of his
spectacular funeral three days later.
The funeral was ‘in the true Irish style... preceded by two pipers’ accord-
ing to one Scottish report.144 The fullest account of it suggests that he
was at least as well known in the Irish slum area of St giles as in the
fashionable West end and confirms that, while he was unique as a piper
on the london stage in his time, he was only one of a fraternity of Irish
bellows pipers in london:
Courtenay’s Funeral. This celebrated performer died of a dropsy, which he
was supposed to have contracted by hard drinking. The body was yesterday
interred in the church-yard of St. Pancras.
The procession that attended the body was exceedingly numerous, and
extended from the Hampshire Hog, in Broad-street, St. giles’s, a consider-
able way into Tottenham-court-road. The number of those in mourning
could not be less than eighty or ninety couples, who were preceded by two
Irish Pipers, one of whom played on the Union Pipes used formerly with
such wonderful effect by the deceased.
The body was waked at the hampshire hog, and all the expences of the
funeral and it, were defrayed by Captain leeson. The motive that induced
Capt. leeson to order the wake to be held there, was his great success in
recruiting by means of the deceased, who had some time since enlisted in
his corps, and had, by that gentleman, been appointed a Serjeant.
Courtenay was a wet soul, and every thing about the body, to its interment,
was entirely correspondent. During the continuance of the wake, the great-
est profusion of liquors was distributed.
143
St James’s Chronicle or The British Evening Post, london, 4–6 Sept. 1794. As
said, the date of his death and his age are recorded in the burial register of Old
St Pancras Church, london, which is now in the london Metropolitan Archives.
144
Scots Magazine, edinburgh, Sept. 1794: 588.
At the church-yard the same liberality in the distribution to every one

who chose to drink, was observed; and the company happily parted
without any fighting.145
Through his musicianship and general celebrity therefore Denis

Courtney had won over the public, from the lowest to the highest social
levels, to his ‘union pipes’ – a term unique to him during his lifetime –
and had firmly established their name in contemporary musical
consciousness by the time of his early death.
he was not immediately forgotten. In london in 1795

Oscar and Malvina renewed its attraction on Thursday evening... with
encreased effect. A new Performer, much resembling poor Courtney,
both in figure and execution, enlivened the opening of the Piece with
his Union Pipes, accompanied by the original harper Weippart. Their
performance was universally encored...146
and in 1796 a reference there to a newly published satirical print

showing John Courtenay or Courtney, a famously witty Irish-born
Westminster parliamentarian, emphasises that it shows ‘Mr. Courtney
the Irish Jester, not the Irish Piper’.147 A london novel of 1804 has
an Irish character say
heaven is most like the lake of Killarney. There will be no want of music
in heaven... For myself, I think the choicest instrument is the Irish bag-
pipe; and should Courtenay be gone there, we cannot have a better hand;
I shall find him out, he is a sweet countryman of my own.148
145
The Sun, london, 6 Sept. 1794. This obituary notice is unusually long by
contemporary standards; it was much copied by other publications.
146
Morning Post and Fashionable World, london, 7 Mar. 1795. For the identity of
this performer see below.
147
The Oracle, london, 15 Oct. 1796.
148
Bisset 1804: 33. This raises the possibility (but no more) that Courtney had his
origins in Co Kerry, a county where his surname (and first name, as an anglicis-
ation of the Irish Donncha) was common.
In 1811 he was being remembered in a Dublin article on the ‘Irish

Bagpipe’: ‘the... celebrated Courtney has fully established the
captivating sweetness of those [notes] in alt... [of] our national
pipe’.149 In 1817, in a Cork poem in praise of another famous Irish
bellows piper, Denis Courtney’s name was still being linked with the
term he had introduced: ‘And Courtney, with his union reed,/ To
enraptur’d Princes gave delight’.150 And as late as 1838 his name is
still being invoked, by a union piper in leamington Spa boosting his
instrument: ‘his late Majesty, george IV, was a lover of the Union
Pipes, and appointed the celebrated Courtney as his Pipist’.151
From P. O’Farrell ed., O Farrells Pocket Companion for the Irish or Union Pipes
vol. 3, London, n.d. [c. 1811]. Presumably taken from the oral tradition of
union pipers in London
149
Freeman’s Journal, 21 Mar. 1811, reprinted in Evening Telegraph, 1 Apr. 1911.
150
‘On Mr. O’Connor, The celebrated Performer on the Union Pipes’, The
Overseer, Cork, 5 July 1817.
151
Sic. Leamington Spa Courier, leamington, 31 Mar. 1838.
49 MeAnIngS OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
Meanings of ‘Union Pipes’
What then did Courtney’s new term signify? Different meanings have
been assigned to it by its users since 1788, and it is by now necessary
to speak about the different, shifting and sometimes coexisting mean-
ings of the term. It has had several, each with a certain validity in its
own time.
Scotch and Irish Bagpipes United

The earliest explanation given for the term is Courtney’s own. It
appeared on the morning after his debut, published by an anonymous
writer in The Times of london, as already seen:
last night Mr. Courtney introduced a new species of music to the public,
called the Union Pipes, being the Scotch and Irish Bagpipes united...’152
This contemporary explanation for ‘union pipes’ is unique to this

source at this time of writing,153 and it is obscure in meaning. The
explanation may have been a journalist’s rationalisation, but given
Courtney’s continuing and conscious use of the term it is much more
152
See note 62 above. ‘Courtenay’ has become ‘Courtney’ overnight; this flipping
occurs over and over during Courtney’s career, as can be seen from the
quotations reproduced here.
153
A version of the explanation is found in a very uninformed publication of 1809:
‘The Bagpipe is of two sorts; viz. the Scots and the Irish: the former is filled by
means of a wind-bag, carried under the arm, and worked like a pair of bellows;
the other plays with a reed, like a hautboy. These two species have, within these
few years, been blended, under the designation of the union-pipes; both are
fingered much the same as a flute, and have a drone, or open tube, through which
the wind passes, causing a deep humming tone. The bagpipe, however ancient
many assert it to be, nevertheless appears to be derived from the old gallic
musette (which it in every instance resembles); as the musette is from the ancient
hebrew sampunia. happily all this genus are rapidly declining’. (nicholson
1809: iv, article ‘Musical Instruments).
likely to have been part of his own promotion.154 The Scottish bag-
pipes in question are undoubtedly to be understood as the mouth-
blown highland bagpipes, and the Irish bagpipes as the
bellows-blown instrument, both, as seen, recently known in
contemporary london. Although Scottish and Irish bagpipes had long
existed in both mouth- and bellows-blown forms, this fact was un-
known or ignored by writers (as distinct from artists) in contemporary
england. A plethora of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century statements
in print there conveys this over-simple dichotomy of Scottish bag-
pipes being mouth-blown and Irish bellows-blown.155 What elements
of each bagpipe are being united? In organological terms, this explan-
ation does not make sense. The Scottish pipes and Irish pipes, as we
know them from documentary evidence and surviving sets, are each
separate linear descendants of earlier Scottish and Irish pipes respect-
ively, and each exhibit only separately localised forms of the ele-
ments of their continental ancestors. each type of bagpipe had
154
As has been seen, Courtney’s 1793 Dublin management often advertised his
instrument as ‘bagpipes’ but he himself, personally seeking engagements, refers
to them as ‘union pipes’.
155
See for example Pennant 1772: 178: ‘Bag-pipes... The oldest are played with
the mouth, the loudest and most ear-piercing of any wind musick; the other,
played with the fingers only, are of Irish origin...’; and Jones 1794: 116: ‘we
have reason to believe that the Britons blew it [the Bagpipes] with the mouth,
instead of the bellows, like the Irish pipes’. This perceived distinction between
the two kinds of bagpipes is also reflected in the advertisements of those english
musical-instrument sellers of the second half of the eighteenth century who
advertise ‘Bagpipes, Scotch and Irish’ (see note 40 above), and must have been
supported by the contemporary exploits of highland pipers in the British army.
Queen Victoria much later made the same distinction, and preferred the Scottish:
‘Friday August 10 [1849]... The Irish pipe is very different from the Scotch; it
is very weak and they don’t blow into it, but merely have a small bellows which
they move with the arm. – Queen Victoria, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life,
london, 1868: 184, quoted in An Píobaire vol. 3, no 7 (July 1991, contributed
by Seán Donnelly). The more significant difference at any rate is the extended
musical range of the Irish chanter rather than its air source.
already reached a distinct stage of development prior to 1788, and

no element of either was adopted from the other, then or
subsequently.
But this meaning of 1788 is nevertheless a correct one, correct not in

organological but in socio-political cultural terms. The union in
question is the notional union of an Irish form of bellows pipe, played
by an Irish performer, with the Scottish musical ethos prevailing in
contemporary london, the english capital. An instrument associated
with rebellion and war in Scotland and Ireland is now being used on
stage in the capital to perform ethnically tinged but politically neutral
and unthreatening music which is acceptable to the three kingdoms.
It unites the kingdoms in musical taste; it is a new instrument for a
new era of peaceful coexistence, one desired by Courtney’s patrons.
This common show-business tactic of accommodation to a local
audience provides one convincing explanation for Courtney’s intro-
duction there of a new quasi-political term for his musical instrument.
There is support for this view in the little that we know of Courtney’s
repertory as performed publicly in london: it is not at first Irish but
largely Scottish (‘Maggie lawther with variations’ was his show-
stopper throughout his career)156 or newly composed in a Scottish
156
‘Maggae lawther’, Courtney’s main cited musical piece, had however long been
associated with both Scotland and Ireland, and the idea of ‘union’ may also be
in play here. The song ‘Maggie/Maggy/Magie lauder/lawder/lawther’ (‘Wha
wadna be in love wi’ bonnie Maggie lauder’) is of course Scottish, but the ori-
gins of its melody have been disputed between the two countries (for an early
discussion see O’neill 1910: 168–71). Its tune was printed many times in the
eighteenth century, and sometimes with variations, but Courtney’s set is not
identified as such in any source. Since John lee published music from Oscar
and Malvina about the time Courtney was in Dublin, lee’s publication of
‘Maggie lawder with Variations’ is reproduced above. It is undated but
published from 70 Dame St, Dublin, where lee was from c. 1778–1803 (hogan
idiom for the Ossianic hit show Oscar and Malvina (for which he
dresses in Scottish costume). On the other hand, when he goes to per-
form in Dublin in 1793 he certainly plays the expected music from
his Covent garden hit but (billed as ‘Mr. Courtney’ and often as
playing ‘bagpipes’ rather than ‘union pipes’) he also for the first time,
as has been seen, advertises specific Irish melodies. Only towards
the end of his london career does he begin to call his instrument
‘Irish pipes’ and begin to introduce Irish melodies on stage there.
The only known illustration of Courtney and his pipes (for which
click here) gives little help in understanding the explanation of The
Times for ‘union pipes’. Shown in an engraving of a 1790s sketch by
Isaac Cruikshank, he is playing pipes on stage in Oscar and Malvina.
Sitting, with one leg crossed over the other, he is certainly playing
bellows pipes (an elbow-strap is visible and there is no blow-pipe in
evidence). But it seems an oddly undeveloped and toy-like form of
the instrument when compared with, say, the surviving contemporary
two-octave Irish instruments made by egan of Dublin and Kenna of
Westmeath.157 These were instruments of a type which already
existed in the second half of the 1770s when Courtney, born in 1760,
must have been learning the pipes. But the central elements of the
pipes shown in the Courtney illustration stand in contrast with them.
The chanter is short, with a noticeably conical exterior, and ends in
a bell rather than being externally cylindrical and ending in a
stoppable end-tenon. It is being played off the knee and could only
therefore have produced music legato; it could not have varied
1966: 102). Among others, Courtney’s successor O’Farrell published a set with
variations (O Farrell’s National Collection 1804: 42–3).
157
Both are known to have been making Irish pipes in the 1760s, see Donnelly
1983: 7–11, Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 1–44.
melodies with staccato passages or staccato effects as the

contemporary Irish instruments already could. Only two drones are
apparent, in about a 3:2 length ratio, whereas Irish instruments
already had three as early as about 1750.158 resting against the
player’s shoulder, they imply a small common stock, but it is doubtful
whether the common stock shown is realistic. no regulator can be
seen, and it is probable that he did not have one – given that there is
no mention in the many surviving references to Courtney of what
would have been such a noticeable and musically interesting feature.
Whereas sitting was and is the normal posture for players of Irish
bellows pipes,159 the instrument shown here could as easily and more
dramatically have been played standing, like a Scottish bagpipe. The
second octave needed for playing the music that we know Courtney
played would have been obtained on the contemporary Irish pipes by
placing the end of the chanter on a knee-pad (not possible in a pipe
of the type shown) while overblowing through exerting pressure on
the bag, and probably uncovering a back hole on the chanter. In all,
it is hard to understand how the instrument shown could have the
emotional effect that Courtney’s playing undoubtedly did on
audiences, whereas it would be understandable had he played pipes
with the rich sonic potential of a good instrument of the egan or
Kenna type.160
158
Illustrated in a Joseph Tudor painting ‘View of Dublin from the Phoenix Park
(see Crookshank 2002: 73); and a hugh Douglas hamilton drawing ‘Blind
Daniel the Piper’ (see laffan 2003: 135).
159
Street players did sometimes play standing, but they used a leg-crutch under
one knee to enable the characteristic occasional silencing of the chanter on a
knee-pad.
160
Whatever about the exact form of the instrument used by Courtney, it is puzzling
how he achieved sufficient volume to be heard by the large theatre audiences
he played for, such as the 2,000 who filled his regular venue of the Theatre royal
on Drury lane, or the 3,600 who filled the rebuilt theatre from 1794. The bore
of his chanter may have been specially adapted for volume. At any rate singers
The instrument shown also seems undeveloped in the light of the earliest
known physical description of the ‘Irish pipes’. This was of a set that in
1774 belonged to the Cork piper James McDonnell, the same who, as
already noticed, played with Courtney before the highland Society of
london in 1791 and played the ‘Irish pipes’ in recital in london in 1793
during Courtney’s absence in Ireland. McDonnell also played seated.
his pipes in 1774 were ‘small and of ivory... tipped with silver and
gold... [as well as ‘the chanter or treble’] there are three other pipes
which hang over the wrist. The longest of them is called the drone or
bass.’161 Again as seen, since Courtney played with John Murphy before
the highland Society of london in early 1788, and since Murphy played
a set of ‘Irish Bag-pipes, by the real old egan in Dublin, made for a no-
bleman deceased’, it is inconceivable that Courtney played on an
instrument inferior to Murphy’s, given that he would have a resounding
london stage success within a week of their second performance. It
also seems inconceivable that Courtney’s Dublin successes of 1793
could have been achieved on an instrument as undeveloped as the one
shown in Cruikshank’s illustration, when played for Irish audiences who
were used to more sophisticated instruments. Courtney had been absent
from london from the beginning of the year in which the illustration
was published: it is likely therefore that Cruikshank had been forced to
draw from memory and had fallen back on a stock bagpipe image. The
probability must be therefore that the drawing is not an accurate
representation of the reality – in spite of the high reputation of the artist
Cruikshank – as is so often the case with drawings of musical
instruments, and especially the bagpipes,162 by even the best artists.
and instrumentalists such as violinists, flute players, oboeists and harpers also
played successfully in the same spaces; the venue acoustics must have been
finely balanced.
161
O’Keeffe 1826: I, 246–8, see Carolan 1984: 59–61.
162
See Cannon 1989: 10–31. The accuracy of a c. 1828 drawing by one of the
Cruikshank family of the northumberland piper James Allan has been called
What seems from The Times of 15 May 1788 to be Courtney’s under-

standing of his imprecise new term may not have been understood
even by those pipers who used it immediately after his death.
Certainly none of them, not even those who edited or published music
books in the next ten or so years, give any explanation for it. But they
continued to use it because for them also it was a usefully neutral
term, and a prestigious term, one that had received approval at the
highest social levels. It was a label associated with a hitherto un-
achieved level of public professional success for a bagpiper, and it
would be strange if they were to discard it, especially since ‘union’
did not at first have the negative political connotations that it would
later take on in Ireland. even when it had, it was by then a well
established term that had created its own tradition. As will be seen,
pipers associated its use with their predecessors, and developed a
loyalty to it that lasted well into the twentieth century. nevertheless,
it would appear that while it soon became an established term, it was
one with no firm established meaning, and one that was ripe therefore
for having further meanings assigned to it.
Act of Union 1800

It has occasionally been said that the union pipes derived their name
from the Irish Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the Irish
parliament in Dublin and provided Ireland instead with reduced
political representation from Westminster.163 The Act was brought
into effect by bribery and corruption rather than by consent, and it
led to more than a hundred years of economic, social and political
decline in Ireland. The word ‘union’ shrank in meaning there to
into question (Proud & Butler 1983: 3). William hogarth has also been criticised
for the inaccuracy and carelessness of his eighteenth-century bagpipe depictions
(Barlow 2005: 225).
163
For example, ‘The name of Union pipes probably originated from the instrument
having appeared about the time of union of the Irish and english parliaments...’
become only a shorthand reference to the hated ‘Union’, and for

many years in the mid-nineteenth century the leading Catholic polit-
ician Daniel O’Connell led a national movement for the repeal of the
Union. It has never been explained what the connection of the Act to
the musical instrument could have been, but at any rate, as has been
seen, the term was in existence some dozen years before the Act was
passed, and it was introduced in another country. The idea of political
union was of course in public debate for some years before the
passing of the Act, but it was not very actively promoted as early as
1788.164 This proposed derivation of the term can therefore be
dismissed as spurious. however, after the passing of the Act, this
meaning was implied for political purposes at least once, in Scotland
in 1806, and in connection with an Irish piper richard Fitzmaurice:
(Day 1891: 55); and more influentially but also more tentatively: ‘These [Irish
Pipes] were called Union Pipes, either as immortalising the legislative Union of
great Britain and Ireland in 1801, or more probably from a mistaken rendering
of the native name Uilleann or “elbow” pipes’ (galpin 1911: 179).
164
In fact the term ‘union pipes’ was so well established by the time of the Act of
Union debate that it was used for political purposes in some satirical sheets
published by the anti-Union side in Dublin in 1799: ‘Sir Pertinax Platter...
though an hon. gentleman had talked of Union Pipes in allusion to him, he was
not sufficiently skilled in concert music to be able to understand...’ (Proceedings
and Debate of the Parliament of Pimlico, in the Last Session of the Eighteenth
Century. no. 1); ‘At the royal Circus, near College-green [the Irish parliament
building]... January 15... After the Pantomime, a favourite Concerto on the Union
Pipes, By Mr. Corelli...’ (poster). Similarly an American newspaper of the period
used the term to make a political point about Ireland: ‘In the new pantomime at
Covent garden Theatre, the Irish Harp and the Union Pipes played in concert.
We should be glad to find our Hibernian brethren inclined to such National
Harmony.’ (Daily Advertiser, new york, 25 June 1799). The term had an even
wider political application: ‘A transparency in a street in St. Ann’s Parish
[london], represented Mr. Pitt, the First Consul of France, Mr. Windham, and
Joseph Bonaparte, dancing a Fandango, to a tune played on Union Bagpipes.
John Bull appeared in a corner, with a purse in his hand, ready to pay the piper.’
(Morning Chronicle, london, 16 Oct. 1801).
The Scots Society, in honour of St Andrew, held... their anniversary

meeting, in the london Tavern, Bishopsgate-street [edinburgh]...
Captain Skeene sung a song alluding to the union of the three kingdoms.
Mr Fitzmaurice played several tunes on the Union pipes...165
The term must certainly have been used in this way by Unionists and
other interested parties at other times, giving support and circulation
to the spurious explanation, and leading with the passage of time to
a belief in its validity. ‘Union’ was a bad brand-name in Ireland, and
this undoubtedly had an influence on the eventual demise of the term
in the twentieth century, and the vehemence with which it was
rejected by some.
United Chanter, Drones, Regulators, or Concords of Sound

A plausible and therefore very widely accepted explanation for
‘union pipes’ has been that these pipes – unlike medieval bagpipes
and the contemporary Scottish highland mouth-blown bagpipes –
unite their drones in a single cylindrical unit or ‘common stock’ in
which the heads of the drone-pipes lie side by side and are fed with
air by the bag through the stock. An expansion of this idea is that the
union in question may have been that of the existing chanter and
drones with a new keyed closed chanter or ‘regulator’.166 As said, a
single regulator is first mentioned in the late 1780s, in Ireland; over
the following decades more would be added.
related to this explanation of the physical union of hardware is the

idea that the unusually many pipes of the instrument provide a close
sonic union – a balanced chorus. Some support for this explanation
is found in a 1772 Dublin verse translation from the latin of horace
165
Caledonian Mercury, edinburgh, 8 Dec. 1806.
166
This addition of the regulator is considered by hall 1842: 412–3 to distinguish
the Irish bagpipes in their ‘primitive form’ from the ‘improved or union pipes’.
which says that ‘the Bagpipe’s Drone,/ May hum in drowsy

Unison’,167 and in a Scots gaelic dictionary of 1825 which translates
‘the union-pipes’ as píob na comh-sheinm (pipes sounding to-
gether).168 When the Dublin Museum catalogued sets of Irish bellows
pipes in the late nineteenth century, it called them ‘Irish Bagpipes’
but explained their other name ‘union pipes’ as being derived from
the chanter playing in unison with the drones.169
These related explanations, based on ideas of physical or sonic bag-

pipe union, fit in neatly with the date of the introduction of
Courtney’s new term, when seen in retrospect. And they had a
robustly rational basis to them, much more so than had Courtney’s
long-forgotten original explanation. They are the explanations that
have been most commonly accepted in recent times.
The Workhouse
One further meaning for the term has been proffered, but only with
tongue in cheek. A bitter joke circulated among the members of the
Dublin Pipers’ Club, founded in 1900 when uilleann piping seemed
in great danger of disappearing with the few last elderly and
poverty-stricken professional pipers who had survived the post-
Famine years: that they were called union pipers because most of
them were reduced to the ‘Union’ workhouse or poorhouse.170
167
Public Advertiser, london, 24 Apr. 1772.
168
Armstrong 1825: 443.
169
nlI Séamus Ó Casaide MS 5452.
170
Plain Piper 1912. From 1838 in Ireland parishes were amalgamated into Poor
law Unions, each of which had to have a workhouse.
59 SPreAD OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
Spread of ‘Union Pipes’
Before Denis Courtney’s death in September 1794, no other piper is

known to have used his new term, but after his death it is seen to
begin an independent existence: in January 1795 an Irish linen draper
Mr O’neil died at Whitehaven in Cumbria; he had been ‘well known
for his performances on the union bag-pipes’.171
The gap left by Courtney’s death in Oscar and Malvina was soon
filled – had to be filled – as it resumed its triumphant progress in
March 1795 and as the ‘new performer’ noted above ‘enlivened the
opening of the Piece with his Union Pipes’.172 Tantalisingly billed as
‘The Union Pipes by an eminent Performer (his first appearance in
public)’,173 this player was an otherwise obscure piper named
Shannon, known in Belfast and performing a heavily Irish repertory
there in 1796, and therefore undoubtedly Irish.174
And the new term began to be used in Ireland; presumably some

pipers there had been suitably impressed by their compatriot’s
successes and wished to be associated with them. In 1796, a Daniel
Fitzpatrick, proprietor of a music shop in Cork, was praised in verse:
‘There is a man in fair Cork town/ Fitzpatrick at the harp/ For he can
play the Union pipes,/ And nobly squeeze his bags...’175; and in
171
Gentleman’s Magazine, london, Dec. 1794 (but published after the year-end).
172
Morning Post and Fashionable World, london, 7 Mar. 1795.
173
Morning Post and Fashionable World, london, 9 Mar. 1795. he performed at
least five times that month.
174
Belfast Newsletter, 2–6 May 1796: ‘At the Theatre Belfast on Mon. 9... Mr.
Shannon who is engaged at Covent garden Theatre to succeed the late Mr.
Courtney will play the following airs on the Union pipes. The rondeau in Oscar
and Malvina. Carolin’s receipt. lango lee. So Vorreen Deelish. Moggy lawder
with variations. how oft louisa. The lake of Killarney’.
175
The Rover no 25, Cork, 5 Mar. 1796, quoted in nlI Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8117 (3)
Dublin in the same year a ‘Mr. Martin Carty, professor of the union
pipes’ died in St Mary’s lane.176
Back in london, in April 1796, a Mr Topham, otherwise unknown,

was briefly playing ‘Union Pipes’ with Weippert on harp in a london
production of John O’Keefe’s The Lad of the Hills, or The Wicklow
Gold Mine,177 and in April 1797 a writer in The True Briton of
london was complaining that the ‘Union Pipes’ had been left out of
the overture to Oscar and Malvina in Covent garden.178
But by May 1798 ‘Mr. Murphy’, the piper-servant with Dublin

connections noted earlier in edinburgh and london, Courtney’s
fellow-piper before the highland Society of london in 1788 but long
since eclipsed by him, was filling the gap left by Courtney on a more
permanent basis and finally coming into his own. he was performing
in Covent garden ‘Solo on the Union Pipes’, accompanied on the
harp by Weippert in a musical interlude The Starboard Watch.179 As
seen, John Murphy had earlier described himself as a player of the
‘Irish Pipes’ but he was now always using Courtney’s term, even
when applying as before for a position in service or for playing for
‘ladies and gentlemen at their houses, and Parties at taverns,180 or
advertising that he intends publishing his own compositions.181 he
seems also to have filled Courtney’s place for a time as the regular
176
Hibernian Journal, Dublin, 12 Dec. 1796.
177
The Times, london, 9 Apr. 1796. Topham may have belonged to a london family
of dancers and actors of the name who had been prominent in the early
eighteenth century (see highfill et al.: 15, 27–9). he is not heard of again. An
edward Topham wrote four plays that were produced at Covent garden in the
1780s (Stephens 2004), but he is not known to have been a musician.
178
15 Apr. 1797.
179
The Oracle and Public Advertiser, london, 23 May 1798.
180
The Times, london, 9 June 1798.
181
Morning Chronicle, london, 2 Jan. 1799.
musical partner with Weippert and they appear together (and some-
times with C. Jones, harp) at various periods in 1798 and early 1799
(including yet another performance of Oscar and Malvina in March
1799).182 By May 1799 Murphy had moved to the new royal Circus
and was playing regularly there with another harper, g. Adams.183 In
1801 he was ingeniously canvassing engagements by word-playing
on the new term for his Irish pipes:
Murphy, who performs on the Union Pipes at the Theatre royal, Covent
garden... would, if agreeable to the noblemen and gentlemen of the
Union Club, be glad... to wait on them, when they dine at the Union
Club house, and play on his Pipes...184
The northumberland outlaw gypsy and performer on several kinds

of bagpipe James Allan (c. 1734–1810), referred to in 1828, is
recorded as having played the ‘Union pipes’.185 As said, he may be
the ‘Allan – Piper’ who is recorded playing with John Murphy for
the highland Society of london in the early months of 1788, just be-
fore Murphy appears there with Courtney.186 If so, he would first
have known the instrument as ‘Irish pipes’.
nineteenth-century printed references to Irish bagpipes – which are

found in Ireland, Britain, the United States of America, Canada and
Australia – run into the high hundreds if not the low thousands of
instances. But throughout the century the same assortment of terms
is found as has been seen in use during the eighteenth-century. A
difference is that ‘union pipes’ now features prominently among
182
The Times, london, 14 Mar. 1799.
183
The Times, london, 16 May 1799.
184
Morning Chronicle, london, 20 nov. 1801.
185
Thompson 1828, quoted in Stewart 2009: 85.
186
them. If a trend is to be seen, it is that this new term is particularly

favoured by professional pipers, especially Irish pipers (and some-
times Scottish pipers) playing outside Ireland who may have regarded
themselves as being in Courtney’s modern public tradition of concert
and stage performance.
This has already been seen in the cases of Shannon, Topham, and
Murphy. By 1800 yet another prominent Irish piper has appeared to
take Courtney’s place on the British scene: a ‘Mr. Farrell, Performer
on the Union Pipes’ is advertising a ‘la Braugh Pleasurah’187 at
Cheltenham races in July 1800 and playing familiar Courtney fare at
a public breakfast: ‘favorite Scotch and Irish Airs, and Pieces of
Music, with that favorite rondow, in Oscar and Malvina, and Magie
Lawder, with new Variations. After the Performance there will be an
Irish Jig, Danced by Two natives’.188 Always using Courtney’s term,
O’Farrell (whose first-name initial was ‘P.’)189 later appears in
london, in 1803, in partnership with Weippert on the harp,190 and
with another harper ‘Mr. Dizi’.191
187
Irish Lá Breá Pléisiúrtha, a fine pleasurable day.
188
O’Farrell also advertised as a ‘Teacher and Maker of the Union Pipes’ (Morning
Post, london, 1 Apr. 1806), and later that ‘All kinds of Pipes, Scotch, Irish, and
northumberland, are made and repaired, and may be had of him’ (Morning Post,
london, 30 June 1825). According to highfill et al.: 11, 95, about 1795 a sonata
was published by the english composer Thomas Costellow to which was added
an air in a ballet The True Lover’s Knot as it had been performed at Drury lane
theatre by Mr ‘O’Farrol’ and the harper Weippert. But in fact the sonata was
published about 1802 (watermark date 1802: British library online catalogue,
29 Aug. 2011) and 1800 is still the earliest definite known date for O’Farrell.
For other details see Donnelly 2008: 23.
189
Sanger 2011: 21.
190
E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, london, 19 June 1803.
191
Morning Chronicle, london, 13 Aug. 1803. In 1806 O’Farrell was playing ‘a
favourite Irish Air and rondo’ in the german Theatre, leicester Square, london,
with another harper ‘Mr. Duchatz’ (Morning Post, london, 19 May 1806). In
By the following year P. O’Farrell had embarked on the seminal

music-publishing work for which he is remembered today. From
1804 to about 1811 he edited collections of Irish and Scottish
instrumental music in london, and in them gave precedence to the
pipes and further authority to Courtney’s term: O Farrell’s Collection
of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes... Adapted Likewise for
the German Flute, Violin, Flagelet [sic], Piano and Harp...
Gentlemen may Likewise be Accommodated with Real Toned Irish
Pipes; and later O Farrells Pocket Companion for the Irish or Union
Pipes... Adapted for the Pipes, Flute, Flageolet and Violin vols
1–4.192 In these titles O’Farrell seems to be going out of his way to
emphasise that the union pipes are Irish pipes, and throughout the
publications he conscientiously attributes tunes to an Irish or Scottish
origin when possible. In 1808 he is advertising a ‘Union Pipe Concert
and Ball’ in london.193
The Courtney term was likewise used in print by the Irish

professional piper richard Fitzmaurice, who in April 1803 was
advertised as playing the ‘union pipes’ in london.194 he played
frequently in Scotland, and published in edinburgh about 1805
Fitzmaurice’s New Collection of Irish Tunes. Adapted for the Piano
Forte, Union Pipe, Flute, & Violin.195 The new term was again used
1809 he appeared in Oscar and Malvina in Covent garden with yet another
harper ‘Mr nicholson’ (Caledonian Mercury, edinburgh, 28 Oct. 1809; Covent
garden handbill, 1 nov. 1809, in library of Congress, Washington DC) and
again in 1811 in the same piece and venue with nicholson (Covent garden hand-
bill, 6 June 1811, in library of Congress).
192
For details of editions etc. see Cannon 1980: 81–5.
193
Morning Post, london, 14 Apr. 1808.
194
Morning Chronicle, london, 11 Apr. 1803. In 1806 in london he was playing
the ‘Irish pipes’ (Morning Chronicle, london, 18 Mar. 1806). For his first name
see Sanger 2009: 20.
195
See Cannon 1980: 87.
by John Murphy finally publishing in Paisley about 1810: A

Collection of Irish Airs and Jiggs with Variations, Adapted for the
Pianoforte, Violin & Violoncello, by John Murphy, Performer on the
Union Pipes; at Eglinton Castle.196
With these new publications, intended for professional as well as for

amateur musicians, the term ‘union pipes’ could be said to have
achieved printed permanence after it had become firmly established
in stage performance. The degree to which the term had become de
rigueur in Britain is particularly evident in liverpool in 1819 when
a visiting piper from Ireland is seen in his advertisement in the very
act of turning from his native term to the new one:
Mr. Plunket, the celebrated Performer on the Irish pipes is arrived, and
attends the Mystic Tavern, hale-street... for the instruction of young
gentlemen on the Union Pipes...197
John Murphy had been performing in Scotland since the 1780s, as

seen, and richard Fitzmaurice there since about 1805, on the
evidence of his book, and frequently thereafter, but it is 1807 before
we find the earliest evidence of the term ‘union pipes’ linked to a
Scottish piper: ‘Monthly Obituary... At Port Dundas... in the 26th year
of his age, Mr. James M’Kenzie, whose abilities as a performer on
the Union Pipes stood unrivalled...’.198 From his age, M’Kenzie could
only have been using the term (if he did at all) after the death of
196
Murphy c. 1810: title page, quoted in Cannon 1980: 90–1. The musical earl of
eglinton had been president of the highland Society of london in 1779
(Highland Society of London 1873: 22), and may have been instrumental in
inviting Murphy to play for the Society in 1788, as above.
197
Liverpool Mercury, liverpool, 29 Jan. 1819.
198
Caledonian Mercury, edinburgh, 10 Oct. 1807; European Magazine, and
London Review, london, Oct. 1807: 324.
Courtney. The following year ‘Mr. Arbuckle, The Caledonian

Conjuror’ is presenting a show of ‘Magical Deceptions’ in Derby and
varying the proceedings by playing a selection of the ‘most ancient
and beautiful Scotch Airs on the grand Union Pipes’.199 In 1811 a
Philadelphia production of Oscar and Malvina featured ‘union pipes
to be played by Mr. Bunyie’, who also played on the ‘Scotch bag-
pipe’ and was by his name a Scotsman;200 the following year Bunyie
was again appearing on the ‘union pipes’ in another production of
the show in Baltimore.201 he was the first of a number of Scottish
players performing on the highland pipes and the union pipes in the
United States in the first half of the nineteenth century; they too re-
ferred to the latter instrument both as ‘union pipes’ and as ‘Irish union
pipes’.202 In 1812 a Malcolm Macgregor of glasgow (who had been
a prizewinner at the highland Society of london’s competitions for
the highland bagpipe from 1802)203 was awarded a premium by the
Society for ‘essential improvements made by him on the great
highland Pipe, and the Union and northumberland Pipes, on which
last instruments he played several tunes in an excellent style’.204
From 1818 Macgregor was appearing on the london stage playing
airs from Oscar and Malvina on ‘union pipes’, as well as ‘highland
pipes’ and flute, in both Scottish and Irish contexts: in a Caledonian
Melange in April 1818;205 an Irish ‘aqua-drama’ O’Donoghue and
his White Horse in June 1818;206 and a Sons of Caledonia fundraising
199
Derby Mercury, Derby, 11 Aug. 1808.
200
Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia, 23 Feb. 1811; Alexandria
Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 25 July 1811.
201
Federal Republican, Baltimore, 1 June 1812.
202
See below, and Carolan 2011: 22–5.
203
Manson 1901: 389; Campbell 2011: 23–5.
204
Minutes of the highland Society of london, quoted by Campbell 2011: 24.
205
The Times, london, 6 Apr. 1818.
206
The Times, london, 17 June 1818. M’gregor was accompanied on the harp by
O’Farrell’s former musical partner nicholson.
concert in november 1820.207 In 1815 in Sydney, Australia, a James

Stewart, again presumably a Scottish professional player, published
a newspaper notice about the attempted theft of his ‘Set of Union
Pipes’.208 In 1820 an unnamed native of edinburgh was playing
‘national Airs on the Union Pipes’ there in an entirely Scottish
evening of entertainment,209 and in 1821 John Mcgregor, piper to
the highland Society of london, was playing highland pipes and
‘Union pipe’ in Perth.210 A dancing and music master Mr Mackenzie,
again by his name Scottish, had died in Derby by 1835 and the
auction of his varied musical instrument collection included his
highland pipes and ‘his celebrated Set of Union Pipes’.211 robert
Millar (1789–1861), piper to the Aberdeen highland Society, when
referred to in 1836, was also in this multi-pipes playing tradition
which included union pipes. Millar played a set made by robert reid
of north Shields which was presented to him in 1830, and he com-
piled a manuscript of over 300 tunes begun by him in Montrose that
year for the ‘Union Bag-pipe, &’.212 As late as 1842, a ‘Mr. Donald,
the celebrated player on the Union pipe’ was entertaining the
Operative Conservative Society of ripon with ‘many beautiful
Scotch Airs’.213 even Scots in the new World, in Detroit, had a taste
207
The Times, london, 8 nov. 1820.
208
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Sydney, 20 May 1815.
209
Caledonian Mercury, edinburgh, 9 Mar. 1820.
210
Cannon 1980: 12; Campbell 2011: 22–3. On an undated item of sheet music ‘A
Favorite Waltz and March Composed for the Piano Forte…’ by Mcgregor and
published in london by J. Briggs, he describes himself as a ‘teacher of the union
pipes’ (University of Cambridge online library catalogue, 1 May 2012, which
dates it as [1815?]).
211
Derby Mercury, Derby, 22 Apr. 1835.
212
Edinburgh Evening Courant, edinburgh, 4 Feb. 1836, quoted in MacInnes 1986:
21; Cannon 1993: 30–6; Keith Sanger research notes, kindly communicated by
him, Apr. 2012.
213
Leeds Intelligencer, leeds, 21 Mar. 1842.
for the union pipes and are spoken of in the 1870s as having patronised
there ‘Mike gill, a Celebrated Player on the Union Pipes’, who may have
been Irish.214
There is some evidence too that Courtney’s term was occasionally

applied to the very different northumbrian bellows pipes. robert
eliot Bewick (1788–1849), son of the famous northumbrian en-
graver Thomas Bewick and a northumbrian piper, a pupil of John
Peacock’s, was described by an acquaintance as playing the ‘union
pipes’ when it is clear from his description that Bewick was playing
the northumbrian pipes.215 A Mr Walker of newcastle was reported
in 1866 as having played there at a function of the newcastle and
northumberland yeomanry Cavalry ‘a variety of selections on the
northumberland union pipes’.216
At least some Scottish and english makers of the highland pipes and
northumbrian pipes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century also turned to making what secondary sources call ‘union
pipes’. Although it is usually known when these pipe-makers flour-
ished, it does not seem possible to be certain when they individually
added these bellows pipes to their manufacturing repertory, or indeed
whether they themselves (as distinct from bagpipe studies and
museum catalogues of a later date) called their instruments ‘union
pipes’. At least some of their instruments so labelled are of the
geoghegan ‘pastoral pipes’ type of 1743.217 hugh robertson of
214
Wanless 1872: 48–51: ‘When Mike play’d up an Irish reel,/ We neither minded
maut or meal’.
215
William Scott Bell, Autobiography (1860), quoted by Bain 1982: 17 and Uglow
2006: 398–9 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
216
Newcastle Courant, newcastle-upon-Tyne, 26 Oct. 1866.
217
Cheape 2008: 96–100; Mcleod 2002: 2.05/ 1–2; McCandless 1998: 19.
edinburgh (c. 1733–1822) seems to be the earliest of these pipemakers,

possibly producing bellows pipes in the 1780s.218 There is also James
Sharp of Aberdeen (fl. 1828–63),219 John Dunn (1764–1820) of
newcastle-upon-Tyne,220 robert reid (1784–1837) and James reid
(1813–74) of north Shields,221 and a miscellany of others.222 A J.
Scorgie from Scotland was making ‘Scotch military, flat and Irish
union pipes’ in new york in 1817,223 and Donald MacDonald, a ‘pipe
maker’ and publisher of highland pipe music, advertised in edinburgh
about 1822 that he was teaching ‘highland, northumberland & Irish
bagpipes’; he may also have been manufacturing them.224
Irish professional players of the ‘union pipes’ began appearing in

some numbers in the United States in the early nineteenth century,
long after performers on the ‘Irish pipes’ had been recorded as
appearing there in the eighteenth century. The first known is a ‘Mr.
Curran, a celebrated performer, lately from Ireland’, who was playing
‘national airs’ on ‘union pipes’ in new york in February 1808.225 he
218
Cheape 2008: 17, 111, 118 refers to a ‘Union Pipe by hugh robertson of
edinburgh of the 1780s’, and to hallmarked bellows-blown bagpipes by
robertson from 1793–4 and 1808–9. For further information on robertson see
Sanger 2010: 44–6, who thinks that robertson was making ‘Irish pipes’ about
1793. Proud & Butler 1983: 16 refer to a John gibson of Jedburgh, died Sept.
1795, who ‘made and played Irish pipes’.
219
Campbell 2011: 29–30.
220
Proud and Butler 1983: 14–5.
221
Proud and Butler 1983: 29–30.
222
Cheape 2008: 118 refers to undated ‘part-sets and chanters for the Union Pipe’
by makers nicholas Kerr of edinburgh, and ‘Dunn, Bannon, Massie, Scott and
Weldon’ which were acquired by the national Museum of Scotland from an
edinburgh source. For Kerr (d. 1773 – Sanger, research notes) of edinburgh &
Massie of Aberdeen see Campbell 2011: 4 & 30. For other possible makers, see
Walstrom 2002: 2.15/ 1–4.
223
Carolan 2011: 2, 22–5.
224
Cannon 1980: 12, 118–20.
225
Evening Post, new york, 11 Feb. 1808.
was followed by, among others, a Mr edward reynolds, ‘late from

Dublin’ who was performing on the ‘Irish union pipes’ in Boston in
March 1812;226 and a Charles P.F. O’hara, a multi-instrumentalist
who had ‘resided many years in the west of Ireland’, and who
published The Gentleman’s Musical Repository; being a selection
from the ancient and modern music of Erin, and several original
pieces by the compiler; adapted to the violin, flute, flageolet, hautboy
and union pipes in new york in January 1813.227 Among these pipers,
the instrument was most commonly called the ‘Irish union pipes’;228
they were, seemingly, signalling an ethnic connection to their
audiences in a way that had not often happened in Britain. But these
Irish players also simply used the term ‘union pipes’. Both varieties
of the term are also found used by professional pipers, both Scottish
and Irish, in Australia (from 1815)229 and in Canada (from 1835).230
But by the fourth decade of the century, with its virtual disappearance
from the British stage, the instrument seems to have come to the end
of its run of popularity in Britain. It had by no means however dis-
appeared from more modest venues such as taverns and halls there.
Outstanding new Irish players on the ‘union pipes’, such as the blind
William Talbot from roscrea, Co Tiperary, about 1822,231 continued
to find it worth their while to play in Britain and arrived there from
226
Columbian Centinel, Boston, 22 Feb. 1812.
227
Columbian, new york, 2 Jan. 1813.
228
See Carolan 2011: 22–5.
229
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Sydney, 20 May 1815; 2 Sept.
1815. The newspaper of the first date has already been cited for the notice in-
serted by a presumably Scottish piper James Stewart about his ‘Set of Union
Pipes’; the second has an advertisement from a shop selling musical instruments
including ‘Union Pipes’.
230
Quebec Gazette, Quebec, 20 March 1835. The newspaper carries a notice of a
St Patrick’s Day dinner at which a Mr Macnally played on the ‘Irish Union
Pipes’. I am obliged to Patrick McSweeney, Quebec, for a copy of this reference.
231
Morning Chronicle, london, 13 Dec. 1822.
Ireland at intervals until the 1850s, and Irish street players occasion-
ally appear in court reports.232 P. O’Farrell was continuing with his
British career on the instrument as late as 1837.233 But, with the
advertisement in 1833 by a Mr Dixon in newcastle-upon-Tyne of a
‘Pair of Union Bag Pipes and a Pair of highland Bag-Pipes, no worse
than new, may be bought for half their Value’,234 there begins a litany
of ‘union pipes’ advertised for discounted disposal at auctions, pawn-
broker clearances and rummage sales which would last, decade after
decade, in england, Scotland and Ireland, for the rest of the
century.235 These advertisements do indicate however that a sub-
terranean union-pipes culture continued at some strength in all three
countries through the century. They show an appreciation of quality
of manufacture: ‘extra silver keys on chaunter’,236 ‘black ebony,
silver and ivory mounted, one note under concert pitch’;237 of cost:
‘set of Union bagpipes which cost £20’;238 and of makers: ‘Kenna’,239
‘M’Donald, edinburgh’,240 ‘first class Union Pipes, made by Coin’.241
Swaps are contemplated: ‘Wanted, a sharp Set of Union Pipes. Will
give money or sweet low set (bass attached)’.242
232
Morning Post, london, 14 Jan. 1830; Carolan 2005: 24–29; Matthews 2011:
15–23.
233
O’Farrell was still advertising as a teacher in london in Morning Post, london,
15 Mar. 1837.
234
Newcastle Courant, newcastle-upon-Tyne, 17, 31 Aug. 1833.
235
Pawnshop advertisements for unredeemed union pipes had been appearing at
least as early as 1818 (Caledonian Mercury, edinburgh, 18 June 1818) but there
is no indication in them that the pipes were being then discounted.
236
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Dublin, 4 July 1843.
237
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Dublin, 23 June 1896.
238
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Dublin, 7 Dec. 1887.
239
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Dublin, 7, 8 May 1846.
240
Glasgow Herald, glasgow, 3 Apr. 1857.
241
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Dublin, 25, 26 Aug. 1897.
242
Liverpool Mercury, liverpool, 29 Mar. 1887.
One english piper of Scottish origins, the noted travelling newcastle-

upon-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 1845244 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 1842250 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.
gandsey, one of the sights of Killarney, was playing the ‘Irish union
pipes’ to acclaim in edinburgh in 1841.252 In 1853 ‘Mr Thos. Mahon,
Professor of the Irish Union Bagpipes’ was even advertised in
Scotland as ‘Irish Piper to her Most gracious Majesty the Queen’.253
Courtney’s term is also found, but to a lesser extent, throughout the

nineteenth century in Ireland. There ‘Irish pipes’ is still more
favoured, presumably for reasons of national feeling and in reaction
to the term’s imagined connection with the Act of Union. In addition,
new Irish variant terms and some new terms are found. In 1802 in
Mullingar, Co Westmeath, Timothy Kenna is advertising ‘new Im-
proved Irish Pipes’;254 but by 1812 after he has moved to Dublin he
is advertising ‘grand Union Pipes’ for ‘the lovers of that ancient
national Instrument’.255 The professional limerick piper Patrick
O’Connor was advertised as playing these ‘grand Union pipes’ by
1816;256 and the Wexford piper S.T. Colclough was calling himself
‘Professor of the grand Union Pipes’ by about the same period.257
edward Plunket is playing in Dublin on the ‘national Union Pipes’
in 1814.258 In 1823 the professional William Talbot is playing on the
‘improved Union Pipe’,259 which is likely to be also Kenna’s
252
Sanger 2001: 90.
253
Caledonian Mercury, 26 Sept. 1853.
254
Dublin Evening Post, Dublin, 12 Aug. 1802.
255
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 23 March 1812 (reference
courtesy Seán Donnelly). A Scottish piper Arbuckle (see note 199 above) was
using the term earlier, but no connection with Kenna is apparent and the two
may have coined the term independently.
256
Donnelly 1994b: 81.
257
Colclough c 1815: title page.
258
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 30 July 1814 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
259
‘Pub. Augt. 1823, at the Artists Depository, 21 Charlotte St., Fitzroy Sq.’ – print,
reproduced in An Píobaire vol. 7, no 4 (Sept. 2011): 22.
instrument.260 On the other hand Patrick O’Connor’s only pupil,

griffin of limerick, describes his instrument in 1819 and again in
1841 as the ‘Chromatic Organ Pipes; being an improvement on the
construction of the ancient Irish pipes’.261 A Dublin Irish-english
dictionary of 1817262 refers to the ‘píobshionnaich, a pipe blown with
bellows’ (which is further developed by a Scottish dictionary of 1911
as ‘pìob-shionnaich, Irish bagpipe’, deriving it from ‘sionnach, valve
of bellows, pipe-reed’).263 In 1833 in Sydney a set of ‘Irish Union
Chord Bagpipes’ is advertised for sale.264 All the foregoing can be
considered trumped by the Scottish piper Mr graham who is 1836
was performing in hereford on the ‘”royal Patent” improved Union
Pipes’.265 Thomas O’hannigan, visiting Britain in 1844, is described
as the ‘celebrated Performer on the recently improved Chromatic and
Diatonic Union Pipes’.266 A late term for the instrument is also found:
the northumbrian bagpipes specialist William A. Cocks, writing in
1954, refers to ‘hybrid union pipes’;267 this seems to be a term of his
own devising which he applies ahistorically to bellows pipes with a
foot-joint resembling the earlier geoghegan ‘pastoral’ type of 1743.
260
‘There was some years ago, playing in the taverns of Dublin, a blind piper named
Talbot... his own pipes, which he called the “grand pipes”...’ – William Carleton,
Tales and Sketches, Illustrating the Character, Usages, Traditions, Sports and
Pastimes of the Irish Peasant, James Duffy, Dublin, 1845, quoted in An Píobaire
vol. 7, no 4 (Sept. 2011): 23–4
261
Donnelly 1994b: 94; Manchester Guardian, Manchester, 10 nov. 1841.
262
O’reilly 1817: ‘píobshionnaich’ [no pagination]. The term is also found in O’reilly’s
‘new edition’ of 1821, and in Armstrong 1825, a Scots gaelic dictionary.
263
MacBain 2nd ed 1911: 324 (these terms are not in his first edition of 1896) .
eamonn Ceannt, writing in An Claidheamh Soluis, Dublin, 29 July 1911, has
‘valve, an sionnach’ as an Irish term for a ‘union pipe’ valve.
264
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 9 nov. 1833
(reference courtesy Keith Sanger).
265
Hereford Journal, hereford, 24 Aug. 1836.
266
Carolan 1994: 48.
267
Cocks 1954: 345–6.
The disaster of the great Famine of the 1840s and the continuing
damage done to traditional social life by high consequent levels of
emigration to Britain and to the United States had of course a cata-
strophic effect on Irish bellows piping, and the instrument came close
to disappearing from Ireland by the end of the century. The termin-
ology for it was not however affected. The popular terms continued
to be used and ‘union pipes’ held its ground (although the pipes them-
selves are referred to less frequently, and even then usually in terms
of their decline). In the Dublin directories Maurice Coyne appears
from 1839 to 1861 as a ‘Maker of Union and Scotch Bagpipes’, and
John Coyne similarly from 1855 to 1864.268 In the early 1850s a
‘most ingenious mechanic, Denis harrington of Cork’ (who later had
to emigrate for lack of orders) was making and exhibiting ‘Union
pipes’.269 The instrument and its traditional terminology seemed to
limp on: in 1882 the pipe-maker Michael Doogan was exhibiting
three sets of ‘Irish Union Bagpipes’ at an exhibition of Irish arts and
manufacturers, in the rotunda, Dublin,270 and in 1888 he was still in
business as a bagpipe dealer in Dublin.271 It would seem that
Courtney’s term was by now hallowed by usage and by association
with the older race of pipers and the vanished glory days of the
instrument. even in the Dublin periodical Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge,
dedicated to the promotion of the Irish language, a blind galway
piper Peter Kelly is reported in 1897 without any adverse comment
as playing ‘Union Pipes’ at a gaelic league meeting in Belfast.272
268
Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 27, 29.
269
grainger 1986: 2. For his emigration to the United States or Australia see O’neill
1913: 159, Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 38.
270
Exhibition of Irish Arts and Manufacturers, Rotunda, 1882, catalogue in nlI
Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8117 (3).
271
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 14 June 1888 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
272
Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge. The Gaelic Journal, Dublin, Oct. 1897.
The Cork Pipers’ Club, the first Irish pipers’ club, was founded in
Cork city in March 1898 when the bellows instrument (as distinct
from the recently revived mouth-blown pipes) seemed on the verge
of disappearance.273 For bellows pipes, the Club seems from news-
paper reports of its early years to have favoured the term ‘Irish pipes’
but not infrequently used ‘union pipes’. The term had survived the
vicissitudes of the second half of the century and was being used nat-
urally by a purposeful group of nationally minded piping revivalists
and gaelic league supporters. ‘The piper with whom we are best ac-
quainted’, said Fáinne an Lae, a national gaelic league newspaper,
in the very last days of the century, ‘is the player of the Union pipes...
the Union piper’.274
In Irish America, to which many professional bellows pipers and even

pipe-makers emigrated after the Famine, the instrument led a com-
paratively flourishing existence when compared to its condition in the
homeland. The terms used for it reflected usage in Ireland: ‘Irish pipes’
was the most favoured term, but ‘union pipes’ was also widely used
among professional and amateur players there. Charles Ferguson of
limerick, for example, was playing ‘union pipes’ in new york in
1860;275 as was Thomas Kerrigan of longford there in 1876;276 ‘six
union pipers’ at a concert there in 1890;277 John Coleman and P.W.
Mulqueeney in new Orleans in 1892;278 and James C. McAuliffe of
limerick in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1899.279 At the end of the
273
Mitchell-Ingoldsby 1998: 6–12.
274
Fáinne an Lae, 9 Dec. 1899.
275
New York Herald, new york, 24 June 1860.
276
New York Herald, new york, 2 Apr. 1876.
277
Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, new york, 20 Dec. 1890.
278
Daily Picayune, new Orleans, 1 Feb. 1892.
279
Wilkes-Barre Times, Pennsylvania, 12 Oct. 1899.
century, in San Francisco in 1899, an Irish piper took possession of a

set of the ‘improved union bagpipes’ made by the Taylor Brothers of
Drogheda, Co louth, and Philadelphia.280 Irish bellows pipes sent for
exhibition in the Irish section of the World’s Fair in St louis in 1904,
and supplied by the Dublin musical-instrument firm Butler & Sons,
were identified in the exhibition as ‘Irish Union Pipes’.281
280
Irish Echo, Boston, January 1899.
281
Irish Industrial Exhibition 1904: 34. I am obliged to Seán Donnelly for a copy
of this source.
77 DeMISe OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
Demise of ‘Union Pipes’
In Ireland however, as a nationalist separatist political movement

gathered momentum at the turn of the century and as the Irish-language
revival spearheaded by the gaelic league was enjoying considerable
success, the term ‘union pipes’ must have stuck in the craw of many,
in spite of the strong traditional attachment of others to it. Its perceived
(though spurious) connection with the despised Act of Union would
have made it anathema to many of a nationalist political mindset, as
would its association with Ireland’s nineteenth-century move towards
the speaking of english and away from Irish. The fact that it was an
english-language term with no parallel Irish-language equivalent made
it alien (and awkward to use) for Irish speakers, and the available Irish-
language terms píob and píob mhála made no helpful distinction be-
tween mouth-blown and bellows-blown bagpipes.
The time was auspicious for another turn of the terminological wheel,
and for the introduction of a new term. When it came, it was again one
with little history or logic behind it, but one which would eventually
succeed, like ‘union pipes’ itself, for socio-political cultural reasons.
The new term was ‘uilleann pipes’. Although he claimed that ‘Union
pipes’ was a ‘strange Anglicised corruption’ which had been in decline
since he had first pointed out the correctness of uilleann in 1890,282
the idea of it was first publicly introduced, as far as is known, at a lec-
ture given in Dublin in October 1903 by the Co Wexford professional
church musician Dr W.h. grattan Flood:
Uillean or Cuish pipes are synonymous, insomuch as we have Uille or
Uillean, elbow, whilst cuish is the forearm… The name “Union” pipes
is an Anglicised corruption of Piobai Uileann, or elbow-pipes’.283
282
Grove’s Dictionary 1910: V, 194.
283
reported in The United Irishman, Dublin, 17 Oct. 1903 (for details see Carolan
Flood (1857–1928) was an industrious researcher and a prolific

writer on Irish music from the late nineteenth century until his death.
But he was criticised in his own time, even by his supporters, for
his failure to cite sources and for chauvinistically going beyond his
evidence, and his voluminous published writings are a confusing
mixture of the reliable and the unreliable.284 he had little or no Irish.
In this introduction of the new term he is reported as recycling
general Charles Vallancey’s coinage ‘Ullan pipes’ as published by
Joseph Cooper Walker in 1786, and as accepting its supposed
connection with the Irish word for elbow as cited by Walker above.
From the report of the lecture it is clear that Walker’s book (rather
than Vallancey directly) was Flood’s source. Flood subsequently
used a variety of spellings for his new term (all approximating to
inflected forms of uille, the Irish word for elbow, which also has the
alternative nominative form uillinn).285 he does not however address
the fact that this supposedly authentic Irish-language term is
nowhere found before Vallancey or Walker (neither of them Irish
speakers); on the contrary he implies that he is restoring an english-
corrupted term to its Irish-original purity.
By 1905, in the first edition of his influential History of Irish Music,

Flood was again bringing forward the new term, and again explicitly
1981: 4–9). ‘Cuish pipes’ are Vallancey’s ‘Cuisli Pipes’ passed on by Walker as
‘Cuisle Pipes’ (see notes 54–6 above).
284
In the 1980s the present writer saw a library notebook of his in the possession
of his son in Wexford, and found his writing close to illegible. Doubtless Flood
himself had difficulty in subsequently reading his hastily scribbled notes, copied
mostly from sources in Dublin and london libraries in intervals snatched from
his work as a church organist.
285
The now standard spelling ‘uilleann’ is the genitive singular of the nominative
uille, although the word is actually pronounced more like the alternative nomin-
ative uillinn. It has often been spelled with one l or one n. The confusion is a
symptom of the unhistorical origins of the term.
stating that ‘Uilleann was subsequently anglicised as “Union”’.286

he repeated this in the 1906 second edition of his History,287 in its
1913 third edition,288 and in its 1927 fourth edition;289 and in his
1911 The Story of the Bagpipe.290 he persuaded the editors of the
authoritative Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians that his
term was the correct one, and he wrote for the 1910 volume of the
Dictionary an article ‘Uilleann Pipes’ that survived until its fourth
edition of 1948.291 This constant propagation of the term over the
last three decades of his life by a writer who was regarded as the
chief Irish music historian of his day would eventually bear fruit,
although not without opposition.
A constituency which might be expected to take up Flood’s new term

enthusiastically was the Dublin Pipers Club, Cumann na bPíobairí,
founded in 1900. The Club, like its Cork forerunner, was made up to
a great extent of young nationalist learners of warpipes and bellows
pipes. Many of them were members of the gaelic league and dedi-
cated revivalist Irish speakers. It was in fact in a lecture to a meeting
of Cumann na bPíobairí that Flood introduced his new term in 1903.
In all its earlier publicity and concert programmes the Club had been
employing ‘union pipes’ as its standard term in english for bellows
pipes, and píob when it referred to them in Irish.292 In casual usage
‘pipes’ and ‘Irish pipes’ were its common terms.293 At its foundation
286
Flood 1905: 29–30, 251.
287
Flood 1906: 29–30, 251.
288
Flood 1913: 29–30, 251.
289
Flood 1927: 29–30, 251.
290
Flood 1911: 146 ff.
291
Grove’s Dictionary 1910: V, 194.
292
‘An Píobaire’, the manuscript newsletter of the Club, 1900–1902 passim, nlI
Séamus Ó Casaide MS 5453.
293
Ibid.
in February 1900 the printed objectives of the Club included the ‘pop-
ularisation of the various forms of Irish pipes... both the Union Pipes
and the Píob Mór [sic] or old Irish War Pipes’,294 and as if in response
a Dublin dealer in old musical instruments, in April of that year,
placed an advertisement for the sale of ‘Irish Bagpipes (union) by
Colgan, Coyne, Kenna, etc.’.295 Following the understanding of the
older pipers that the term referred to a concord of sounds or a union
of pipes, the Club continued to call the instrument ‘union pipes’ after
Flood’s lecture, and this remained its standard term. It was used until
the Club came to an end more than a decade afterwards, by it and by
its pipes teachers nicholas Markey and William n. Andrews, and
generally in newspaper reports of its activities at gaelic league
feiseanna and oireachtaisí. In a review of Flood’s 1911 volume The
Story of the Bagpipe,296 the Club’s scholarly piping historian Séamus
Ó Casaide challenges his derivation of ‘union’ from ‘uilleann’ as ‘a
doubtful etymology’.297 ‘Union pipes’ was the term used in a lecture
in 1912 by Éamonn Ceannt, a leading member of the Club who
would be executed for his part in the easter rebellion of 1916,298 and
in the same year its Secretary Micheál Ó Duibhginn was using the
term in writing to the press about the forthcoming Oireachtas ‘Union
pipes competition’.299 It is as late as January 1913 before Cumann
na bPíobairí is first found to use ‘Píobaí Uilleann’ in a festival pro-
gramme, and then it is only as the Irish-language equivalent of
‘Union Pipes’.300 In its festival programme of 1914, shortly before it
came to an end, the Club follows the same practice, but also uses the
294
reproduced in An Píobaire vol. 3, no 37 (Sept. 1998): 20–2.
295
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 30 Apr. 1900.
296
Flood 1911.
297
Ó Casaide 1912: 110–.2
298
Claidheamh Soluis, Dublin, 29 July 1911.
299
Claidheamh Soluis, Dublin, 25 May 1912.
300
Programme of Cumann na bPíobairí Pipers’ Festival, 10 Jan. 1913.
simple ‘píobaí’.301 Clearly the members of the Dublin Pipers’ Club

did not enthusiastically take up Flood’s term when he presented it to
them, but resisted it. As late as 1928 Séamus Ó Casaide was pointedly
referring to the ‘Irish Union Pipers of Dublin’ being represented at
the funeral of the bellows piper Pat Ward in Drogheda.302
The reaction of the Irish traditional-music collector and writer

Francis O’neill (1848–1936) of Chicago to Flood’s new term is
particularly interesting. reared in Irish-speaking rural west Cork
until 1865, and a good performer on bagpipes of several kinds,
O’neill had a keen life-long interest in the instrument, its music and
history.303 In his first major study of Irish music Irish Folk Music:
A Fascinating Hobby, published in 1910, O’neill throughout refers
in normal Irish and Irish-American parlance to ‘pipes’, ‘bagpipes’,
‘Irish pipes’, and, commonly, ‘Union pipes’ (thus capitalised). his
favourite formulation is ‘Irish or Union pipes’ and in this he seems
to have been influenced by the london publications of P. O’Farrell.
It is not until over three hundred pages into the book that ‘Uilleann
or Union pipes’ occurs for the first and only time. The term is not
otherwise explained, and it might seem that he was postponing a
decision on it. O’neill was a correspondent and friend of grattan
Flood’s, but not an uncritical one. In O’neill’s second study, the
massive Irish Minstrels and Musicians, published in 1913, he refers
a small number of times to ‘Uilleann pipes’ (sometimes in reference
to the Irish mouth-blown warpipes),304 and gives the uilleann =
301
Programme of Cumann na bPíobairí Pipers’ Festival, 23 May 1914.
302
Drogheda Independent, Drogheda, 14 April 1928, quoted in An Píobaire vol. 3,
no 27 (July 1996): 20.
303
See Carolan 1997.
304
O’neill 1913: 41. By applying the term to warpipes O’neill again seems to be
keeping his distance from it. All bagpipes are after all elbow-pipes. ‘Uilleann pipes’
was also used to denote warpipes by the well known Kerry-born uilleann piper
Br gildas O’Shea in a lecture he gave in 1922 (Southern Star, 10 June 1922).
elbow rationalisation. But it is evident that he is keeping a distance

from the term. his preferred terms throughout are again ‘Union
pipes’ or ‘Irish pipes’.
In Ireland however Flood’s term was creeping in, certainly in print.

As early as 1904 the nationalist Weekly Freeman of Dublin in an
obituary of the famous galway piper Martin reilly referred to him
as a performer on the ‘Uilleann (Union) pipes’,305 a term which
would certainly have been unknown to reilly. The rev. Patrick S.
Dinneen, a leading Irish lexicographer, included ‘píoba uilleann’ in
the 1904 first edition of his famous Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla.
An Irish-English Dictionary and (an each-way bet) translated it as
‘union pipes’, although oddly it appears only under the head-word
uille and not under píob.306 A Meath Chronicle festival report of
1907 speaks of prizes being awarded for performances on the ‘Union
or Uillean pipes’.307 The programme of the national Irish-language
Oireachtas festival of 1912 uses the heading ‘An Phíb Uilinn’ for
the bellows-pipes competition.308 An Claidheamh Soluis, the
national gaelic league newspaper, in 1915 speaks of a good
performer on the ‘Uilleann pipes’.309 The two terms then seem to
coexist, on a more or less equal basis, during the years of national
turmoil following the 1916 rebellion. When an unsuccessful attempt
was made in 1921 to revive the Dublin Pipers’ Club – in which
William rowsome was a leading spirit – it was as an ‘Irish Union
Pipers Club’.310
305
Weekly Freeman, Dublin, 9 July 1904.
306
Dinneen 1904: 775. The term is treated likewise in Dinneen’s second edition of
1927, which is still a standard work (Dinneen 1927: 1292). Since Flood’s term
was being widely used in the 1920s, and might be thought to have warranted an
entry under píob, it would seem that Dinneen also was keeping his distance from
it. The term does not appear in his A Smaller Irish-English Dictionary for the
Use of Schools (Irish Texts Society, Dublin, london, 1917).
307
Meath Chronicle, navan, 3 Aug. 1907.
309
Claidheamh Soluis, 2 Jan. 1915.
310
Moylan 2010: 14; Michael O’Connor, pers. comm., Dec. 2011.
But there was evidently contemporary contention about the two

terms, and it occasionally surfaces. ‘Cork Piper’, the pseudonymous
writer of a letter to the editor of The Gael of Dublin in 1921, in
reference to the ‘Feis Ceoil Union Pipes Competition’ and the
playing there of the ‘rowsome Family on the Union Pipes’, says
you will note, Mr. editor, that I hold to the adjective ‘Union’ through-
out, and in doing so I beg to state that I think it to be the one and only
title, for the obvious reason that the word implies what these pipes
convey, viz., union, concord or alliance of the various sounds emitted
from its various sections.
The editor of The Gael however was having none of it:

We are sorry to disagree with the final paragraph in the above letter.
“Uilean” is the proper name of these Pipes, and not “Union” – literally
“elbow” Pipes.311
It would seem that the tide began to turn in favour of ‘uilleann pipes’
as the new Irish Free State began to define itself in the course of the
1920s and to make decisions about its future. For the first time in
Irish history there was a perceived need for ‘official’ national terms
for administrative and cultural activities, and the development of
this terminology was heavily influenced, on all political sides, by
the philosophy of the gaelic league. Some felt that the Irish-english
hybrid ‘uilleann pipes’ was an acceptable national term, incorporat-
ing as it did a word in Irish. The new term held the field in 1924 at
the state-sponsored national Tailteann games, a revival of ancient
Irish athletic and cultural contests:
... let us hear no more of the detestable name “Union” pipes; the proper
designation, which has been rightly adopted by the Tailteann games
Committee, is “Uilleann” pipes, i.e. played by the elbow’.312
311
Issue of 12 Dec. 1921.
312
letter from W.h. grattan Flood in The Irish Independent, Dublin, 23 May 1924.
The newspapers duly reported on the ‘Uileann Pipes competition’

and the seven ‘Uileann Pipes’ entrants.313
More neutrally, the long-running Father Matthew Feis in Dublin, also

a competitive cultural festival, referred to the instrument in its
competitions of the following year as the ‘Irish pipes’.314 It hardly
mattered. In the aftermath of the Civil War of 1922–23 all nationally
minded cultural activities had suffered a drastic loss of support and in
1925 the Irish bellows pipes were again in danger of disappearing:
Pipes and harp Dying?... for two or three years back there has been a
distinct falling off in enthusiasm for things gaelic... A sadly noticeable
feature of the Feis in recent years is the absence of the Uillean pipes’.315
But of course the pipes didn’t die out, although it was a near-run
thing for a time, and the terminological contest continued.
An influential player was radio Éireann or 2rn, the new national

public-service radio station. Two Dublin bellows pipers, James
ennis (Séamus Mac Aonghusa) and William n. ‘Billy’ Andrews,
played on its first night of broadcasting on 1 January 1926, and were
listed as playing the ‘Irish pipes’.316 But thereafter, through the
1920s and the early 1930s, the term almost invariably employed in
newspaper programme listings was ‘uilleann pipes’ and not ‘union
pipes’. The more recent term was used during those years of Máire
McCarthy, leo rowsome, risteárd Ó Briain, Séamus Mac
Aonghusa (James ennis), liam Breathnach (liam Walsh), r.l.
O’Mealy, Philip Martin and Sean O’leary in publicity for their
occasional 10- or 15-minute radio recitals. The term was doubtless
313
Irish Independent, Dublin, 5 Aug. 1924.
314
Irish Times, Dublin, 22 Apr. 1925.
315
Irish Independent, Dublin, 7 Sept. 1925.
316
Irish Independent, Dublin, 1 Jan. 1926.
promoted by Seamus Clandillon of galway, the first director of the

station and an Irish-language enthusiast,317 and it was firmly
established in a radio context by the time he retired in 1934.
In 1928, the year of his death, grattan Flood was still actively
engaged in his campaign to have his term accepted: ‘Uilleann pipes
[are] incorrectly called the “union” pipes’.318 This was his last
known word on the matter, although his opinions would live on
influentially in print.
But among Irish bellows pipers usage still continued to vary. When
they began to record commercial 78s for the Irish market, in london
from the 1910s, ‘(Irish) union pipe’ was the term commonly used
on their record labels by such nationally known players as William
n. Andrews of Dublin and later leo rowsome of Dublin and liam
Walsh of Waterford.319 But in the course of the 1920s this was re-
placed first on labels by ‘Irish (bag)pipes’, and joined in the second
half of the decade by ‘(Irish) uilleann pipes’. From his frequent
newspaper concert reports and radio listings, and from record labels,
leo rowsome seems to have made the change-over in this latter
period. In letters published in The Evening Herald of Dublin in May
1930, he and Seamus Mac Aonghusa were in agreement in using the
new term, referring respectively to ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘uilleann pipes’,
while rowsome came back to refer to the ‘Irish (or uilleann) pipes’
317
he is reported as having used the term himself in 1931 when being interviewed
by a journalist for an article on ‘The Passing of the Irish Piper’ (Irish
Independent, 13 Feb. 1931).
318
W.h. grattan Flood, Cork Examiner, Cork, 14 July 1928, quoted in An Píobaire
vol. 2, no 2 (Sept. 1978): 4.
319
The very earliest Irish bellows players to record commercially were Coventry-
born Thomas garoghan in Britain (who used the term ‘Irish bagpipes’ on
Berliner discs of c. 1898) and limerick-born James C. McAuliffe in the United
States (who used ‘bagpipe’ on edison cylinders of 1899).
which had also the title of the ‘Irish Organ’.320 William n. Andrews
was billed as late as 1935 as playing the ‘union pipes’ on the radio,
but this happened in Belfast, on BBC northern Ireland, where the
political neutrality of Courtney’s term was evidently still useful. In
his Dublin advertising of the same time Andrews had succumbed to
‘Irish uillean pipes’.321 Kildare piper Sean Dempsey, recording com-
mercially for the regal Zonophone label in london and Dublin in
1936 and 1937, muddied the waters still further. In 1936 and 1937
respectively he is playing the ‘Irish union pipes’ and the ‘Irish pipes’
in london, according to his record labels,322 while in 1937 he is also
recording in Dublin on ‘Irish uilleann pipes’.323
In 1936 however a significant die was cast in the entire matter with
the publication of the first Irish bellows pipes tutors to appear since
those of the early nineteenth century: Tadhg Crowley’s How to Play
the Uillean Pipes, published in Cork by Crowley himself, and later
Leo Rowsome’s Tutor for the Uileann Pipes, published in Dublin by
the Dublin College of Music. In a move reminiscent of those of
O’Farrell, Fitzmaurice and Murphy over a hundred years earlier in
relation to ‘union pipes’, Flood’s new term was finally established
in printed music-book form and by authors who were themselves
pipers. Since he was a prize-winning performer, teacher, recording
artist, broadcaster, pipe-maker and repairer, and inheritor of a family
piping tradition, the example of leo rowsome must have been
highly influential, and by the mid-1920s, as said, he was commonly
using some form of the term ‘uilleann pipes’. Decisive in the
terminological struggle was the informal foundation in 1936 by
320
Evening Herald, Dublin, 15, 20 & 21 May 1930.
321
Campbell 2011: 185.
322
regal Zonophone IZ 603, regal Zonophone IZ 656.
323
regal Zonophone IZ 705.
rowsome and associates in Dublin of ‘Cumann na bPíobairí

Uilleann’ or the ‘Uilleann Pipers’ Club’, a social musical club in
Thomas Street which acted as a focus for the traditional musicians
of the city and beyond.324 This was formally established in 1940,325
during the years of the Second World War, and continued into the
1970s, chaired by rowsome until his death in 1970.
By the 1940s, the term ‘union pipes’ was obsolete, and feiseanna
and oireachtaisí were awarding certificates for participation in
competitions for an phíob uilleann.326 The older term was still
known and used in speech and print of course (as it still sometimes
is today), but instead of being a vigorous living term, it now had an
antiquarian flavour. It now had to be explained as being the same as
the uilleann pipes, and it is referred to as a term formerly in use.
Séamus Ó Casaide, the last champion of the Dublin Pipers’ Club’s
understanding of the term, died in 1943. A whole generation of Irish
bellows pipers and followers of the instrument had grown up with
‘uilleann pipes’ as a term of choice, and a decisive shift in usage had
taken place. A consequence was that the recent term would now be
used ahistorically to refer to all Irish bellows pipes, including those
belonging to the period before ‘uilleann pipes’ was coined.
When invitations were sent by Cumann na bPíobairí Uilleann to a

fleadh or festival in Athlone in May 1951 – an invitation that would
lead later in the year to the setting up in Dublin of a national (and
eventually international) traditional-music organisation Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCÉ) – ‘Uilleann Pipes’ was the term used.327
From its earliest competitive fleadhanna ceoil festivals, modelled
324
rowsome 1968: 58.
325
nPU Seán reid Collection, items SrF2D1-2.
326
See for instance a 1940 Feis Átha Cliath certificate for participation in the com-
petition for ‘An Phíb-Uilleann’ (nPU Seán reid Collection, item SrF2D1).
327
nPU Seán reid Collection, item SrF5D26.
on the gaelic league feiseanna, CCÉ also consistently used píob

uilleann, ‘uilleann pipes’ to designate its bellows piping
competitions,328 and among its early printed Aims and Objects was
‘to restore the playing of the harp and Uilleann Pipes in the national
life of Ireland’.329 Under the influence doubtless of Seamus ennis,
son of James and also a leading Irish bellows piper, who went to
work as a music collector for the station in Britain in 1951, the BBC
in london also called the instrument ‘uilleann pipes’,330 and this
doubtless spread the term in Britain in the 1950s through the highly
popular BBC folk programmes that ennis was involved in.
Occasional rear-guard actions in support of the older term took

place, notably in 1954 by William A. Cocks in the 5th edition of
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians – ‘Irish Union Pipes.
This is the correct name, the mock-gaelic term “Uilleann pipe” is
now discredited.’331 – and as late as 1958 in the periodical Céilidhe
Record, ‘the organ of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann’. This short-lived
publication consistently talked about ‘union pipes’ in editorial text,
to an extent that a puzzled reader wrote in to ask why it was referring
to uilleann pipes in this way.332
But when in 1968 a new Dublin-based international organisation

dedicated to the promotion of the Irish bellows pipes, and with full
membership confined to pipers, was set up with the title of na
Píobairí Uilleann,333 the twentieth-century term could be said to have
finally triumphed after more than sixty years of existence.
328
See various early fleadh programmes in nPU Seán reid Collection, passim.
329
nPU Seán reid Collection, item SrF49D21.
330
BBC internal documentation, accessed Oct. 1996.
331
Vol. I, 346.
332
Céilidhe Record, longford, May 1958.
333
The name was put forward by Seamus ennis at the first meeting, according to
participants, and agreed by acclaim.
The Irish shift from ‘union’ to ‘uilleann’ was not however paralleled
by an equivalent contemporary shift of usage in Irish America,
which had not been influenced to the extent that Ireland had by
either the ideology of the gaelic league or of the emergent Free
State. Although ‘uilleann pipes’ had appeared in print there as early
as 1904,334 copied from Irish newspaper sources, and was known to
at least some pipers there, older habits continued and oral tradition
was followed rather than print-introduced innovation. The
instrument continued to be commonly known in the United States
in the early twentieth century as ‘Irish’ or ‘union’ pipes. This was
the practice followed by prominent piper associates of Francis
O’neill such as Bernard Delaney of Offaly and Chicago335 Patsy
Touhey of galway and new york,336 and Tom ennis of Chicago.337
however when Irish pipers began to record in some numbers on
commercial 78s from the 1920s, issued on the ethnic series of
generalist record companies or on small Irish-American labels,
‘union pipes’ became a casualty of the commercial need for a term
that would be instantly understood by record buyers. In almost every
case the performers were described as playing ‘Irish (bag)pipes’ or
as playing Irish reels and jigs on simply ‘(bag)pipes’. This usage
continued through to about 1960, when a shift to the term ‘uilleann
pipes’ began to occur under the influence of uilleann pipers such as
Seamus ennis and leo rowsome coming to America on commercial
recordings or in person, and the foundation of branches of CCÉ
334
Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, new york, 23 July 1904.
335
See The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, 18 June 1909, for example.
336
Mitchell & Small 1986: passim. Jackie Small points out (pers. comm., Apr. 2012)
that in his spoken introductions to his cylinder recordings Touhey refers to the
instrument as ‘pipes’ and ‘Irish pipes’.
337
New Victor Records catalogue, July 1917. Confusingly, while this source says
that ‘Union Pipes’ is the correct name for the instrument, it goes on to say that
the term is ‘a corruption of the old Irish name, Uillean Pipes’. This information
presumably came from Tom ennis. his father Thomas senior spoke only of
which generally used the new term. This influence was greatly re-
inforced later in the decade by the commercial recordings of the
group The Chieftains (led by uilleann piper Paddy Moloney), by
Americans who became members of the organisation na Píobairí
Uilleann from 1968 and adopted its terminology, and from the 1970s
by touring solo uilleann pipers such as liam O’Flynn of the group
Planxty and Paddy Keenan of the Bothy Band. As part of this trend,
the first newsletter for American players of Irish bellows pipes was
The Uilleann Piper, a short-lived circular edited in 1974 by rev.
James MacKenzie of north Carolina. remaining to an extent with
the older usage however has been the society of Irish bellows pipers
which began life in 1979 as The Irish Pipers’ Club of San Francisco,
and which still flourishes as The Irish Pipers’ Club, based in Seattle
with connections to other north American Irish pipers clubs. Its
1979 constitution stated that it was formed to ‘preserve and promote
the playing of the Irish Union (Uilleann) Pipes’, and in its journal
Iris na bPíobairí – The Pipers’ Review, it has continued to actively
employ the term ‘union pipes’ as well as ‘uilleann pipes’.338
however, in the wider world of globalised Irish bellows piping, now

found on four continents, modern Irish usage has been almost
universally adapted and the instrument is formally known as the
‘uilleann pipes’, both in its contemporary forms and as an ahistorical
term of convenience for referring to its older forms. Breandán
Breathnach, founding chairman of na Píobairí Uilleann in 1968,
‘union pipes’ and ‘The Soft Irish Pipes’ when writing in 1902 (An gaodhal, new
york (Feb. 1902): 33
338
It was influenced at first in this by Denis Brooks, a founding member of the club
and the first editor of its journal. I am obliged to him for the information that he
favoured the Courtney term as it was what he had heard from older players in
the United States in the 1960s (pers. comm., 2 Oct. 2011). his 1985 manual for
the instrument is entitled The Tutor: Irish Union Pipes. A Workbook.
knew well by family tradition and by scholarship that ‘uilleann

pipes’ was a recent coinage, but he had, as often, the definitive
attitude to the matter: his friends and colleagues remember that he
regarded it as ‘pedantic’ to oppose the choice of practitioners in their
decisive adoption of ‘uilleann pipes’.
Some Considerations Arising
Were Denis Courtney’s ‘union pipes’ Irish pipes, or were they some-
thing else? On the present evidence, it would have to be said that they
did belong to the range of bellows pipes known to his contemporaries
by the catch-all term ‘Irish pipes’.339 As has been seen, this piper who
introduced and established the term was Irish, explicitly described as
such in contemporary sources; he played ‘Irish pipes’ and in Ireland
his ‘union pipes’ were called ‘our favourite national instrument’; he
played in recitals with the Irish bellows pipers Murphy and
McDonnell, both of whom at that time called their instrument ‘Irish
pipes’; his ‘union pipes’ were highly acceptable to his Irish audiences
who were familiar with the native form of the instrument; he played
Irish melodies, some with titles in Irish; his earliest successors as per-
formers on the union pipes (some of them music editors and publish-
ers) were mostly Irish; and the union pipes were frequently labeled
‘Irish’ after his death, even by Scottish players who used the term.
later again, in the United States, Australia and Canada, the union
pipes were more often than not also characterised as ‘Irish’, and in
Ireland even Irish-speaking and nationally minded pipers clung to
the term ‘union pipes’ as late as the mid-twentieth century.
Did Courtney introduce a ‘new species of music’, as was said by the

Times writer the morning after his 1788 london debut? Only as far
as his fashionable london audience in the Free Mason’s hall was
339
Both ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘union pipes’ have been used to cover a range of variant
forms of Irish bellows pipes, and the term may also sometimes have been later
applied in Britain to bellows pipes that were not Irish. ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘union
pipes’ have been applied also to ‘pastoral pipes’ of the type described in 1743
by John geoghegan and which survived into the next century, but to what degree
these were Irish is a question for another time.
93 SOMe COnSIDerATIOnS ArISIng
concerned, although not otherwise. As said, his audience in Vauxhall

gardens a few days later found his music ‘single and novel’, and a
contemporary writer considered that ‘his ingenuity seems to have
made a new discovery in Instrumental Music’. The pipes that these
londoners heard however would not have been new to his Irish
audiences, to the poor compatriots in london whose company he fre-
quented, or to the provincial audiences among whom he had first
made a reputation in Britain. They are unlikely to have been
particularly new to those in Britain who had been hearing Irish pipes
played informally and in private for some decades, such as lady
luxborough in 1751, the British king george II before 1760,340 the
Scottish highland piper Joseph MacDonald writing in 1760, blind
James Mullin’s audiences in the george Inn in Derby in 1766, the
employers of the young servant piper with the ‘real old egan in
Dublin’ set of pipes in 1779, the British music historian Charles
Burney studying the instrument about 1785,341 the artist and musician
John Baptist Malchair sketching a ‘blind Irish piper’ and writing
tunes from him in Oxford in 1785,342 or the Irish slum celebrants of
St Patrick’s Day in london in 1786.
What was really new was the term ‘union pipes’, and under this term
the audacious introduction to an elite audience, in classical music
terms, of an improved form of an alien instrument often associated
with the lower classes. There is nowadays a consensus, highly plau-
sible but based seemingly on deduction rather than on any precise
evidence, that an early eighteenth-century low-pitched and
340
Walker 1786: 81: ‘I have been informed that george II was so much delighted
with the performance of an Irish gentleman on the Bagpipes, that he ordered a
medal to be struck for him’. King george II died in 1760.
341
letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, quoted in Walker 1786: 78–9.
342
Wollenberg 2007: 151–61.
continuously sounding bellows pipes with a bell-like foot-piece

(resembling but not identical to John geoghegan’s ‘pastoral or new
bagpipe’ one-piece chanter of 1743) was improved about the 1750s
or 1760s by having its foot-piece removed.343 The chanter tenon thus
exposed could then be held against a knee-pad ad lib to create
moments of silence on the higher-pitched chanter and introduce
staccato playing with new kinds of ornamentation. These develop-
ments, with new high standards of wood-turning and manufacturing
finish and reliability, the hypothesis holds, had been taking place in
Ireland.344 Courtney’s influential patrons, his new emollient market-
ing term, and above all his musical abilities, enabled him, it seems,
to introduce these novel developments to the British capital, at the
highest social levels, and to enjoy continuous success there by means
of them for the rest of his short life. As far as his london concert
audiences were concerned, he had introduced a new species of
music, one which would live after him. But the term does not imply
a new organological development, merely a highly visible intro-
duction into london, by the first Irish piper to make a public name
for performance in Britain, of a development which had seemingly
taken place in Ireland some decades earlier. In this, Courtney can be
seen an important figure in the history of the globalisation of Irish
music. This process had been underway with regard to the Irish harp
in Britain and europe since elizabethan times, and with regard to
the Irish bellows pipes in Britain and north America (and even as
far as British India) from the earlier eighteenth century. But
Courtney clearly brought these pipes to a new level of international
attention in the late eighteenth century – and subsequently through
his continuing influence.
343
For a statement of this hypothesis see Brooks 1985a.
344
For pre-Courtney Irish-made bellows pipes, see Donnelly 1983, Donnelly 2002,
and Carolan 2006.
95 SOMe COnSIDerATIOnS ArISIng
If Denis Courtney’s ‘union pipes’ were not then in fact a new

instrument, but a new name for an existing instrument, there is a need
for some revision of bellows-bagpipe terminology as used hitherto in
bagpipe studies and museum catalogues. In such sources ‘union pipes’
has often been used as a convenient term to distinguish the earlier
eighteenth-century bellows legato bagpipes with a foot-joint, of the
1740s ‘pastoral’ type, from the later bellows pipes with a stoppable
end-tenon and a staccato capability, supposedly of the ‘union’ type.
Without doubt players and makers after Courtney’s time did use his
term to refer to bellows pipes of this latter type, but it cannot be accu-
rately used to label all such bellows pipes, and certainly not those that
pre-date his death in 1794, unless there is future agreement among
organologists to employ it deliberately as an ahistorical but convenient
diagnostic term, much as Irish writers now use ‘uilleann pipes’ for
forms of the instrument in existence before 1903.
Discussions of bellows pipes in Britain and Ireland have frequently

been bedeviled by the lack of a clear chronology for the history of the
various forms of the instruments. It is hoped that the unrolling above
of a chronology for terms used for the Irish bellows pipes, indicating
as it does both exact moments of change and of less exactly datable
trends in terminology, will provide a scaffolding for greater projects:
for the building of an accurate chronology for the physical develop-
ment of the instrument itself, and the compiling of a history of its per-
formance practice. here the best hope still remains a programme of
detailed organological description of older surviving sets, newly con-
textualised by contemporary information about the instrument which
continues to emerge from ongoing print digitisation projects and also
by the surprising number of visual illustrations of early instruments
and piping practice that have recently come to light. This programme
will be animated by the large body of sound and video recordings of
Irish piping that now exist, by the insights of the many contemporary
uilleann pipes makers who are now at work, and by the instrument’s
vigorous and international playing tradition.
With thanks especially to Seán Donnelly, Terry Moylan, Keith Sanger,

Lisa Shields, and Jackie Small who read and commented on earlier
drafts of this essay, and to Treasa Harkin and Jackie Small who
prepared it for the ITMA website. Thanks also to the staffs of the Irish
Traditional Music Archive, Dublin; Na Píobairí Uilleann, Dublin;
the New York Public Library at Lincoln Centre; the Library of Trinity
College Dublin; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Library
of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; the National Folklore Collection,
University College Dublin; the Library of the Royal Irish Academy
of Music, Dublin; and the Dublin City Library and Archive; and for
information and help of various kinds to Denis Brooks, Faith and
Ellen Carney, Patrick McSweeney, Michael O’Connor, Susan
O’Regan, and Philip Shields.
A version of this essay – ‘The Union Pipes: Their Birth and Death’ –
was given by the author as the 2011 Breandán Breathnach Memorial
Lecture of Na Píobairí Uilleann in 15 Henrietta St, Dublin, on 3
December 2011, and transmitted as a simultaneous webcast by NPU.
Musical illustrations were played by Michael O’Brien, Dublin,
uilleann pipes.
97 InFOrMATIOn SOUrCeS
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What is the main topic being discussed in the document?

What is the main topic being discussed in the document?

What terminology is being examined?

What terminology is being examined?

Denis Courtney on stage in Oscar and Malvina, Theatre Royal, Covent

Garden, London. Engraving by Barlow after Isaac Cruikshank. From The

Nicholas Carolan, Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin

Version 1.0 as at 14 May 20121

Irish uilleann pipers and followers of the uilleann pipes generally

There is nevertheless uncertainty about the term ‘union pipes’ – its

here to examine these aspects, and to establish an outline history of

It must be emphasised that only the history of the term is being

But to provide a context for the discussion of piping terminology,

The late european innovation of using a bellows worked by the

In the course of the seventeenth century an awareness of bellows pipes

forms of bellows pipes appear to have been in existence by the late

There is no reason to think that the different insular bellows-pipes traditions

Introduction of ‘Union Pipes’

long processes of invention and experimentation normally leave no

Before Courtney’s debut, no bagpiper of any kind is known to have

1730;15 the sale (and probably the manufacture) of bellows bagpipes in

the piper was once compared.20 ‘Courtney’ on the other hand is a

To understand why Courtney or his promoters may have felt this, it is

of a threatening Continental religion, and they spoke a barbarous tongue,

This situation began to change in london in the 1780s: the Dublin

harper-composer Turlough Carolan (1670–1738) and other Irish

Forerunners of ‘Union Pipes’

As an Irish player of bellows-blown bagpipes, Denis Courtney would

of the new bagpipe enabled it to play in ensemble with these

In an english letter of 10 July 1751 the ‘Irish Bag-pipes’ are

In 1758 a ‘pair of fine Irish bagpipes’ was being raffled in Traquair on

In 1766 a blind professional musician Mr James Mullin had come

at least one Irish-made bellows bagpipe by a recognised Irish maker is

modern by the bellows at the elbow or Uilean’,54 the latter word a

Vallancey’s coinage of ‘Ullan Pipes’ was motivated by a wish to

Establishment of ‘Union Pipes’

It is necessary to detail what is known of Denis Courtney’s career in

Courtney in London 1788–1792

The promotion was highly successful. According to an anonymous

having seen an advertisement ‘for the benefit of one Courtney, performer

Courtney’s success was quickly followed up on the same day as The

Another newspaper review was in agreement with this assessment.

The reference to the ‘dregs of democracy’ is a reminder that the

Illustration on following pages:

howard was for a time a close companion of ‘Prinny’, the dissolute

Courtney’s establishing of the bagpipes as an instrument acceptable to

been supporting the highland pipes since 1781 by organising annual

Courtney next appears in print – ‘Concerto Union Pipes, Mr. Courtney’

By this time Courtney had begun to make guest appearances in the

‘With a variety of entertainments. In which will be introduced the

The spectacular production opened in Covent garden on 20 October

Music from William reeve’s score of Oscar and Malvina would

One newspaper correspondent, styling himself ‘The ghost of Carolan’

Favourite Overture in Oscar and Malvina’. he is supported by

At this time Courtney was beginning to be noticed in books as well as in

Courtney in Ireland 1793

his pre-eminence on that favourite instrument. —his first appearance will

A fanfare notice for Courtney’s Dublin debut on 4 January, headed

national Music. The celebrated Courtney, whose superior character,