THE PIPER AS A MAN OF PEACE.
“Dear to the Lowland reaper,
And plaided mountaineer—
To the cottage and the castle
The Scottish pipes are dear—
Sweet sounds the ancient pibroch
O’er mountain, loch, and glade;
But the sweetest of all music
The pipes at Lucknow played.”
—_Whittier._
Clan pipers—Chief’s retinue—At weddings—Pipers prohibited—In sorrow—At
funerals—Queen Victoria’s funeral—To lighten labour—The harvest
dance—The shepherd’s pipe—In church architecture—In church services—
As a call to church—Ministers and the pipes—Falling into disrepute—
“As proud as a piper”—Jealousy of the old masters—“As fou as a
piper”—An Irish piper.
The pipers of old were hereditary pipers, and lived from generation to
generation in the family of the chief who ruled their clan. They were
trained from childhood to the use of the pipes, and grew up as retainers
of the family, whose services no chief would dare to dispense with. They
were often sent by their employers to the great masters of Highland
music for instruction, and when they were old they acted as mediums
through which all that was best in Celtic lore and music was passed down
to future generations. The piper was, in the days of his splendour, a
living exhibition of his clan’s glory and greatness. Every chief had a
piper. “It’s a poor estate,” said the piper of Glengarry, in 1801, to a
lady who asked him why he did not work some in his leisure time, “that
cannot keep the laird and piper without working.” Not only was the piper
not expected to work; he had lands for his support, and was of superior
rank to the other members of his chief’s retinue or “tail.” He
accompanied his chief everywhere, and with the harper—when there were
harpers—had a right to appear at all public meetings. The “tail” of a
chief of the old time was rather an interesting company. Its
composition, according to Sir Walter Scott, was as follows:—
The henchman, or right hand man.
The _filidh_ or bard.
The _bleadaire_ or orator, whose duty it was to make harangues to the
great folks his chief visited.
The _gille-mor_ or armourer, who carried his sword, target, and gun.
The _gille-casfhliuch_, who carried the chief on his back over the
brooks.
The _gille-comshreang_, who led his chief’s horse in difficult paths.
The _gille-truisernis_, who carried his knapsack.
The _piobair_ or piper.
The _gille-piobair_ or piper’s man, who carried the pipes; with
probably a dozen lads besides, who were always ready to do the bidding
of their chief.
The chief of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a retinue twice
as large as that of the chief of the degenerate eighteenth century.
Besides those named, he had his gentlemen of the house, his harper, his
_seneschal_, his treasurer, his standard-bearer, his jester, his body
guard, his quartermaster, his cup-bearer, and his forester, all with
clearly defined duties and rights. The offices of piper, standard-
bearer, harper, cup-bearer, and treasurer descended from father to son.
These “tails” were indeed so formidable that they were at last
prohibited from appearing in Edinburgh.
In 1809, out of all the big retinue, only the piper remained. He remains
still, not exactly as a clan piper—where there are no clans there cannot
be clan pipers—but as an appendage to families having a Highland
lineage, and to many that have but the remotest connection with the
Highlands. His duties are still pretty much what they were. He has not
now a _gille_, for the piper of those days is not too proud to carry his
pipes himself, but the description written in the early years of the
century is still partly applicable to pipers at houses where the
Highland traditions are reverenced:—
“In a morning when the chief is dressing, he walks backwards and
forwards close under the window without doors, playing on his bagpipe,
with a most upright attitude and majestic stride. It is a proverb in
Scotland, namely, the stately stride of the piper. When required he
plays at meals, and in the evening to divert the guests with music
when the chief has company with him. His gilley holds the pipe till he
begins, and the moment he has done with the instrument he disdainfully
throws it down upon the ground, as being only the passive means of
conveying his skill to the ear, and not a proper weight for him to
carry or bear at other times. But for a contrary reason his gilley
snatches it up, which is that the pipe may not suffer indignity from
its neglect.”
The last half of the paragraph is not applicable, and never was. One
might as well expect a professional violinist to throw down his
instrument on the stage after playing a solo, leaving the fragments for
a super to pick up. Pipers respect the bagpipe as much as other
musicians respect their own peculiar instruments, and they were never so
“daft” as to indulge in the antics described by this writer. But then,
the writer was an Englishman, and may therefore be excused.
[Illustration:
DANCING TO PIPE MUSIC
(_Highland Dress with Belted Plaid._)
]
The piper was a professional gentleman, a skilled musician, who went to
college, and had a seat at the table with his chief. As a favoured
retainer, he enjoyed certain perquisites. When, for instance, an animal
was slaughtered for the family of the chief, a certain part of the
carcase was allotted to the piper. When the civil wars broke up the clan
system, the chiefs ceased to keep hereditary pipers, and the race soon
became extinct. Afterwards, when a man considered he had enough of this
world’s goods to warrant the expenditure, and felt that he would like to
hark back a little to the ways of the fathers, he got the best piper he
could, just as he got any other servant. In this way the system of
family pipers is perpetuated, and will be so as long as the Sovereign
and others of high rank set the example.
The pipes took an important part in the enjoyments of Highlanders. They
were always to the front at weddings or where the people were making
merry. An old time poet puts it plainly, if rather quaintly, when he
says:—
“A braithel where the broth was fat,
In ancient times a token sure,
The bridegroom was na reckoned poor;
A vast o’ fouk a’ roun about
Came to the feast then dined thereout,
Twa pair o’ pipers playing gade
About the table as they fed.”
Our present day equivalent for this verse is much better rhyme, if
farther from the truth:—
“At the wedding of Shon Mac Lean,
’Twas wet and windy weather,
Yet through the wind and rain
Cam twenty pipers together!
Erach and Dugald Dhu,
Sandy of Isla, too,
Each with his bonnet of blue,
And every piper was fou,
Twenty pipers together.”
The pipers, however, could not have been very “fou,” at least until
after the wedding, for,
“The twenty pipers at break of day
In twenty different bog-holes lay,
Serenely sleeping on their way
From the wedding of Shon Mac Lean.”
Had they been totally incapable they could hardly have got to twenty
different “bog-holes.” It is difficult to define exactly the meaning of
the phrases, “as drunk as a piper” and “as fou as a piper,” but they
seem to have generally meant half seas over, not helplessly inebriated.
The piper, being an important social personage, could hardly escape the
reproach of being addicted to liquor, although there is nothing to show
that his class were in this respect any worse than the average of the
people of their day.
[Illustration:
HIGHLAND FAMILY PARTY RETURNING FROM A FAIR AFTER A DANCE—_Sketched
from Nature. 1829._
]
That the piper was a principal character at weddings in old times is
certain. The wedding morn was ushered in by the music of the pipers, who
followed the bridegroom and his friends on a round of early calls
intended to warn the guests of their engagements. These joined the
party, and before the circuit, which sometimes occupied several hours,
had ended, some hundreds perhaps had gathered. The bride made a similar
tour round her friends, and thus the complete company was collected.
After the wedding a procession was formed, and with flags flying and
pipers playing, and all kinds of demonstrations of joy, passed through
the neighbourhood. Festivities were generally prolonged to a late hour,
the pipers never ceasing their playing. The company danced either
outside to the music of the pipes or inside to that of the fiddle. The
Irish bagpipe was long used at festivities in Erin, and at a wedding the
hat was sent round three times, the first twice for the priest and the
third time for the piper. The piper did not always, however, lead to
peace and goodwill at weddings, for at one time the ecclesiastical
ordinances of Scotland interposed to prohibit the presence of above
“fifteine persons on both sydes” at marriage feasts, among whom there
were to be “no pypers.” These ordinances were frequently made, and in
connection with one it is on record that “still their chief delight at
marriages was bagpipes, and home they go with loud bagpipes and dance
upon the green.”
The bagpipe joined in the sorrow as well as the mirth of the people. The
coronach, a wailing recitation which recapitulated the good deeds of the
deceased, came most immediately after death, and corresponded to the old
ecclesiastical dirge and the Irish “keen” of the present day. The
laments on the pipes were performed after the coronach, and accompanied
the progress of the obsequies, a number of pipers attending the funeral
of any eminent person. The coronach and the lament existed
contemporaneously for some time, but gradually the coronach died out.
The use of the pipes continued for many years later, more especially in
the Lochaber district and also in Aberdeenshire. At a funeral in Skye of
a notable chief the procession was two miles in length, six men walking
abreast. Seven pipers were in attendance, and, placed at different
positions in the procession, played the lament all the way from the
residence of the deceased to the cemetery, and “upwards of three hundred
imperial gallons of whisky were provided for the occasion, with every
other necessary refreshment.” In these days a funeral was a funeral.
There was a burial in Inverness in the seventeenth century where few
besides Highlanders in their usual garb were present, and all the way
before them a piper played, having his drones hung with streamers of
crape. In 1737 at the funeral of an eminent performer in Ireland his
cortege was preceded by “eight couple of pipers” playing a funeral
dirge, and it is alleged that when Lord Lovat was condemned for
participating in the rebellion of 1745, he desired that his body might
be carried to Scotland for burial, saying “he had once made it a part of
his will that all the pipers between Johnnie Groat’s House and Edinburgh
should be invited to play at his funeral.” Rob Roy’s funeral in 1736 was
the last for many years at which a piper occupied an official position,
although we read that in 1820 the pipes were played at the funeral of
Sir John Murray Macgregor, of Lanrick, and that in Edinburgh in 1835 a
Highland corps attended the funeral of a sergeant, the piper playing
“Lochaber no more.” In later years, however, the custom has been
revived, and the piper now frequently accompanies military funerals or
the funerals of those connected with the Highlands. When the then Sirdar
entered Khartoum after the Battle of Omdurman, one of the first things
he did was to hold a formal funeral service on the spot where General
Gordon was murdered, the pipers playing a dirge and the Soudanese band
playing the hero’s favourite hymn, “Abide with me.” In old times, if the
poet Dunbar may be believed, the bagpipe was preferred to other forms of
honouring the dead:—
“I will na preistis for me sing,
Na yit na bellis for me ring,
Bot a bag pipe to play a spryng.”
In connection with funerals it only remains to be added that at the
magnificent ceremonial in February last (1901), when the body of Queen
Victoria was conveyed from Osborne to Windsor, Her Majesty’s two
Highland pipers had an honourable place in the procession. When the
cortege left Osborne they played the dirge of the Black Watch, and later
on they changed into “The Flowers of the Forest,” a tune that has been
played over many a soldier’s grave. It was appropriate that the
association of the Queen with the 42nd Royal Highlanders should be kept
up to the last. In 1854, when the regiment was in Chobham Camp, Her
Majesty and the Prince Consort visited them weekly, and the Queen was so
pleased with the Highlanders that when she decided to have a piper, she
chose Pipe-major Ross of the 42nd, who remained in her service until his
death about ten years ago. Mr. James C. Campbell, the present royal
pipe-major, was taken from the same regiment.
The bagpipe was also used to lighten labour. While the inhabitants of
Skye were engaged in making roads in 1786, each party of workers had a
piper, and in the North of Scotland men engaged in work requiring
strength and unity of purpose, such as launching a large boat, had a
piper to help them pull or lift together. In the harvest time a piper
was often employed to animate the reapers, keeping them working in time
to the music, like a file of soldiers, he himself following behind the
slowest worker. This custom is alluded to in Hamilton’s elegy on Habbie
Simpson, the piper of Kilbarchan:—
“Or wha will cause our shearers shear?
Wha will bend up the brags of weir?”
The dance of the kirn or harvest home was always danced with peculiar
glee by the reapers of the farm where the harvest was first finished. On
these occasions they danced on an eminence in full view of as many other
reapers as possible, to the music of the Lowland bagpipe, commencing the
dance with loud shouts of triumph and tossing their hooks in the air.
The dance was retained for a time by Highlanders visiting the South of
Scotland as harvesters, but it has now been more than a century in
disuetude. In a poem of great antiquity, called _Cockilby’s Sow_, which
describes such a dance, we are told that—
“Davy Doyte of the dale,
Was thair mad menstrale,
He blew on a pype he
Maid of a borit bourtre.”
Also that—
“Olarus the lang clype
Playit on a bag pype.”
In a manuscript of the seventeenth century, a song descriptive of
shepherd life says—
“The life of a shepherd is void of all care,
With his bag and his bottle he maketh good fare;
He hath yon green meadow to walk in at will-a,
With a pair of fine bagpipes upon a green hill-a;
Tringdilla, tringdilla, tring down-adown dilla,
With a pair of fine bagpipes upon a green hill-a.”
It may sound irreverent to connect the bagpipe with religious
ordinances, though why one form of musical instrument should be deemed
sacred and another profane is a hard question. To the modern Highlander
a blast from the pipes on Sunday would be considered enough to bring a
curse on the whole land, but our forefathers were not all so strict.
They worked references to the pipes into the architecture of many of
their churches, particularly in England and on the Continent. In St.
James’s Church, Norwich, there used to be a window on which a piper was
shown with a bagpipe with one drone; under a stall in Ripon Cathedral
there is carved in oak a representation of two hogs dancing to a third
playing on a bagpipe; in Beverley Minster, a group of pigs is carved in
wood, all dancing round a trough to the music of one of their number,
who plays a bagpipe having two drones and one chanter; among the
numerous carvings in Westminster Abbey, there is a woodland scene
representing a group of monkeys along with a bear, the latter playing
the bagpipe; and in St. John’s Church, Cirencester, a monkey is depicted
playing on the bagpipe. Then at Rosslyn and in Melrose Abbey, we have
the pieces of architecture mentioned in a previous chapter.[9] Perhaps
the most curious of these semi-ecclesiastical carvings is a
representation of an ass playing on a bagpipe, which is graven on an
ancient tombstone in the Cathedral Church of Hamburg. The animal walks
on its hind legs, holding the instrument between its forelegs, and
carved on the stone are the words—
Footnote 9:
See pages 37 and 45.
“The vicissitudes of the world compel me,
Poor ass, to learn the bagpipe.”
Pipers, apparently, were not rich then more than they are now.
It is difficult to understand why sculptors should have connected sacred
architecture with animals in the way they did. Artists, like poets, have
a license, but this hardly accounts for their associating the pig, which
never was venerated in any way, with sacred things. The carvings,
however, while hardly respectful to the instrument, associate it, if
only in a sarcastic way, with ecclesiastical affairs, and show that the
foolish prejudice which considers the pipes profane did not always
exist. It is possible that the connection between the pipes and churches
was confined to ecclesiastical carvings, but as to that we cannot now
speak definitely. The early reformers in their reforming zeal practised
vandalism, and in rooting out the religion they wished to supersede,
they left us but fragments of an architecture we would now have been
glad to preserve. The references to the bagpipe in churches are so
fragmentary it is impossible to draw any very reliable inference.
The pipes have, however, been associated with religious services on a
good many occasions. The Italian shepherds, when visiting Rome to
celebrate the Nativity, carry their pipes with them, and play to images
of the Virgin Mary and the infant Messiah, which are placed at the
corners of the streets. The pipes were used in the services of the
Catholic Church in Edinburgh in 1536. In 1556 there was a procession in
Edinburgh in honour of St. Giles, the patron saint of the town. The
procession was led by the Queen Regent and was attended by bagpipers.
When James I. came to Scotland in 1617, he did not take the organ from
Holyrood chapel, when he was clearing out every other symptom of
idolatry, because “there is some affinity between it and the bagpipes.”
“I know a priest,” says an old English writer, “who, when any of his
friends should be marryed, would take his back-pype and so fetch them to
church, playing sweetlye afore them, and then he would lay his
instrument handsomely upon the aultare till he had marryed them, and
sayd masse, which thyng being done, he would gentylle bring them home
agayne with back-pype.”
Then we have Dunbar, in his _Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy_, throwing
some light on the manners and customs of the Carrick district of
Ayrshire, when he makes a brother churchman, with whom he held poetic
jousts, desire that no priest may sing over his grave:—
“Bot a bag pipe to play a spryng,
_Et unum ail wosp ante me_,
In stayd of baneris for to bring,
_Quatuor lagenas ceruisie_.
Within the graif to set sic thing,
_In modum crucis juxta me_,
To fle the fendis than hardely sing,
_De terra plasmasti me_.”[10]
Footnote 10:
Scottish Text Society’s version.
So the poet knew the sound of the “bag pipe,” and thought it an
instrument fit to “fie the fendis.” Here some lowlanders would, no
doubt, be willing to agree with him.
We have at least one instance, and that from the far north, of the pipes
being used to call people to church. In that corner of Caithness in
which John o’ Groat’s House is situated there lived, more than two
hundred years ago, a parish minister named Rev. Andrew Houston, or
Hogston. Mr. Houston somehow could not get his people to attend church,
and at last he decided to invoke the aid of the pipes. Accordingly, each
Sabbath morning, a short time previous to the hour of service, a piper
began at one of the more outlying portions of the parish and played his
way to the church. The plan worked well, for the people, attracted by
the novelty, followed the music Sabbath after Sabbath, and thus the
minister gathered together a good congregation. This Mr. Houston was the
first Protestant minister of the parish, and there is a tradition to the
effect that not only did he use the pipes for the purpose mentioned, but
that after the close of the service he allowed his congregation to have
a game at shinty before going home. There is a large headstone to his
memory in the kirkyard of his parish. It bears a Latin inscription and
the date 1620.
In our own day the most notable instance of the pipes in church was at
the first commemoration service held in York Minster in memory of the
Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The 1st Royal Scots were stationed in
York at the time, and three pipers, under the leadership of Pipe-Major
Matheson—a Golspie man—played selections of Highland music inside the
Cathedral. The King’s Own Scottish Borderers relieved the Royal Scots,
their pipers playing “The Flowers of the Forest.” Afterwards the pipers
of the Black Watch played.
The late Rev. Dr. George Mackay, of the Free Church, Inverness, was a
man of a humorous disposition, and after referring one Sunday in an
adverse manner to a proposal to introduce instrumental music into the
church, said that if they (the congregation) were obliged to fall back
upon a “human instrument” to aid them in the service of praise, they
would have nothing to do with the organ—it was an instrument of foreign
manufacture—they would use the bagpipe. What was more appropriate than
that Highland people should use a Highland instrument? Some time later,
when the question of instrumental music was being discussed at Inverness
Free Church Presbytery, the Doctor, with a twinkle in his eye, turned to
an elder who was a member of Presbytery, and who in his younger days was
known to play the pipes occasionally, and asked him, “Could you let us
have ‘French’ on the bagpipe?” The elder, however, was an austere
individual, and, with an attempt at a smile, he replied, “Yes, and
‘Balerma’ too, doctor; but when I want to sing God’s praises, I use my
own pipe.”
This antipathy towards their national music, showed itself very
frequently among the “unco guid” of the Highlands. Two ministers in the
north of Scotland were going along a country road in a gig towards a
town where the following day was to be Communion Sunday. While on their
way they heard the sound of pipe music in a field near a roadside
cottage. They stopped the gig, and after listening intently to the notes
of a pibroch, one of the good men jumped out, walked up to the piper,
told him he was quite wrong with the tune, and said that if he (the
piper) would lend him his pipes he would show him how the pibroch should
be played. The piper, with some astonishment, consented, when the
minister struck up the tune, and went through it in such a masterly
manner that the piper was fairly overcome with delight, and thanked his
reverend tutor. During the time the performance was going on the other
minister sat in the carriage, quite horrified to see and hear what his
fellow-traveller was about. When the piper minister returned to proceed
on the journey, the other began a sermon on the wickedness of his
conduct. The former replied that on hearing the piper perform he thought
it his duty to correct him, as otherwise the false notes would be
running in his head during the sermon, but now that he had played the
tune he would think no more about it, and be able to preach a good
sermon on the morrow.
In this connection it is only fair to ministers to add that they were
generally not nearly so prejudiced as their people, especially their
elders, were. Elders nearly always professed more religious knowledge
than ministers, and were always less tolerant of what did not agree with
their own opinions. In one Highland parish not quite a hundred years
ago, a few people set themselves up as judges of what was right and
wrong, and let the exercise of their powers become such that a young man
learning to play the pipes laid himself open to exclusion from church
privileges. Happily we are long past that stage now.
There is no denying, however, that at one time the race fell into
disrepute. In _Cockilby’s Sow_, a poem already referred to,[11] the
bagpipe is mentioned as appropriated to swine herds, and in 1641 a
sarcastic writer tells us, “The troopers rode from citie to court and
from court to country with their trumpets before them, which made the
people run out to see them, as fast as if it had been the bagge-pype
playing before the Beares.”
Footnote 11:
See page 155.
Rather a nasty allusion that to the bagpipe and the bears. It reminds us
of the dancing bear, or the organ and the monkey of our own day.
Whatever the piper might think of himself, people seemed disposed to
think the worst of him, and innumerable petty offences were laid to his
charge. In 1570 three St. Andrews pipers were admonished to keep the
Sabbath day holy, to attend sermon, and to abstain from playing on the
streets after supper or during the night. Playing and dancing on Sunday
came so often under clerical censure as to show very plainly the general
use of the instrument on the one hand, and on the other its adoption in
connection with dancing, particularly in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh.
In 1574 a great complaint was made by a burgess of Stirling to the Privy
Council of an assault “by are namit Edmond Broun, are Highland piper,”
when bit to the effusion of blood “by the said pyperis dog.” In 1591 and
1593 George Bennet, piper in the Water of Leith, and James Brakenrig,
agreed to abstain from playing on the bagpipes on Sunday; in 1595 and
1596 Thomas Cairns, following the same vocation there, fell under
displeasure for playing and dancing on Sunday; and William Aiken pledged
himself never to profane the Sabbath day again with the pipes. In 1598
“Duncan Ure and Johnne Forbes, pyper,” were sentenced to imprisonment,
and to be fed on bread and water, on confessing that they had sat up all
night “playing at the dys quhill iiij hours in the morning,” when they
quarrelled. In 1606 Richard Watsone, piper in the Water of Leith, was
threatened with censure, and in 1624 James Clark was “fined of xxsh. for
having an pyper playing in his house in tyme of sermon, vpoun the Lord
his Sabbath.” “William Wallace, pyper,” was sentenced by the kirk
session of St. Cuthbert’s “to stand for one day upon the pillar, and
thereafter to remove furth of the parochine, ay an quhill he be ane
renewit man of his manneris, and to get lief of presbyterie to retourne,
after they sie amendiment in his lyf and conversatioun,” and in Galloway
there is still the “great well of Larg,” of which it is said a piper
stole the offering, but when he was drinking ale, which he intended to
pay for with the stolen money, the gout seized on him, of which he could
not be cured but at that well and after he had restored the money.
At length the immoralities of the humble musicians became a bye-word, so
much so that a slanderous biographer of Archbishop Sharpe thought he had
blackened his character enough when he said, “As for his father, he was
a piper.” There was nothing to be said after that. So late as 1860, a
traveller in Caithness-shire who visited Brawl Castle, one of the county
seats, wrote, more let us hope in joke than in earnest—“John Gunn, their
piper, played extremely well, but it was sometimes necessary to station
him in a distant room, as the skirl was a little too harsh to be enjoyed
at close quarters, particularly when John made too free with whisky,
without which, however, it was not easy to get John to play at all.”
Gambling, ebriety, nocturnal revels, and gross immoralities, says the
author of _Musical Memoirs of Scotland_, accompanied this subordinate
species of music, to the manifest annoyance of the more tranquil part of
the community, and even then (1849) where frequent in towns,
licentiousness was seldom far removed from it. In 1661 the minister of a
Scottish parish has left it on record, “he found two women of his
congregation ‘full’ on a week day, and dancing with pipers playing to
them.” Truly a severe indictment.
From these things it is refreshing to turn to the story of William Mac
Donald of Badenoch, who played so well, even when rivals had given him
too much drink, that he always got a prize at competitions. His son was
piper to the Prince of Wales, but owing to religious scruples he
resigned his situation and burned his pipes. He evidently did not think
there was anything sacred about the instrument.
The evil that men do lives after them. So these stories derogatory to
pipers have been preserved while many equally good and reflecting credit
on their characters as public men have no doubt been buried with their
bones. They always had a “guid conceit o’ themselves,” and were apt to
think they were better than average humanity, so much so that “as proud
as a piper” passed into a proverb. When the late Duke of Edinburgh
required a piper he asked the advice of the Prince of Wales’s piper as
to how he should get one. The Prince’s piper asked the Duke what kind of
a piper he wanted, whereupon the Duke said “Oh, just a piper like
yourself, Donald.” “Oh, it’s easy to get a piper,” said Donald, “but
it’s no easy to get a piper like me.” Then there was Mac Donel, the
famous Irish piper, who lived in great style, keeping servants and
horses. One day he was sent for to play to a large company during
dinner, and a table and chair were placed for him on the landing outside
the door, a bottle of claret and a glass on the table and a servant
waiting behind the chair. Mac Donel appeared, took a rapid survey of the
preparations, filled his glass, stepped to the dining room door, looked
full in the midst of the gathering, said “Mr. Grant your health, and
company,” drank off the dram, threw half-a-crown on the table with the
remark to the servant, “There, my lad, is two shillings for my bottle of
wine and a sixpence for yourself,” then ran out, mounted his horse and
galloped off, followed by his groom. An almost similar story is told of
_Ian Dall_, the Gairloch piper, but in his case the language used was
hardly so choice. It was of the kind which is best represented
thus * * * *
Not only were the old masters proud, they were also jealous. When the
colleges for training pipers were in Skye, the Mac Crimmons had some
private “tips” on pipe music which they did not give away to their
pupils. A girl friend, however, learned how some of the secret notes
were produced, and in private she taught her sweetheart. When her
nearest relatives learned what she had done, they instantly cut off her
fingers that she might show no more how they practised their tunes.
Ross, a grand old Breadalbane piper, in a mad fit of jealousy, thrust
the right hand of his boy brother into the fire, and held it there till
it became a charred lump, to prevent the boy becoming a better piper
than himself, which seemed likely. Neil Munro’s story of _Red Hand_ is
but a variation of the same theme. Giorsal, jealous of her stepson
Tearlach’s piping being better than that of her husband, cuts off
Tearlach’s hand while he sleeps. It is beautifully told, but that is the
whole story.
And they have always been a happy lot who could enjoy themselves to the
utmost with pipe and music and song and dance, and also perhaps with
some of the national beverage of Scotland, which is still rather
unfairly coupled with the tartan and the pipes. When the Princess of
Thule came back to the Lewis, John the Piper was told—“Put down your
pipes, and tek off your bonnet, and we will have a good dram together
this night! And it is Sheila herself will pour out the whisky for you,
John, and she is a good Highland girl, and she knows the piper was
neffer born that could be hurt by whisky. And the whisky was never made
that could hurt a piper.” This, too, passed into a proverb—“As fou as a
piper”—but however true it may have been in one generation it has
nowadays no more than a figurative meaning. Pipers now are as much in
the public eye as ever they were, but they are matter-of-fact people,
who have their livings to make and their characters to uphold. They are
therefore neither over proud, over jealous, nor over jolly. They have
fitted themselves into nineteenth century circumstances, and do not care
how much the public eye is upon them.
The piper as a man of peace has been and still is closely concerned with
every side of the social life of the Highland people, but his name is
not writ nearly so large on history’s page as is that of the piper as a
man of war. In _Whistlebinkie_ we have verses by Alex. A. Ritchie, which
illustrate the attachment of the Irish piper to his pipes, and which,
for lack of a better opening, may be inserted here. They are too good to
leave out altogether:—
“Ould Murphy the Piper lay on his deathbed,
To his only son Tim, the last words he said,
‘My eyes they grow dim, and my bosom grows could,
But ye’ll get all I have, Tim, when I slip my hould,
Ye’ll get all I have, boy, when I slip my hould.
“‘There’s three cows and three pigs, and three acres of land,
And this house shall be yours, Tim, as long as ’twill stand;
All my fortune is threescore bright guineas of gould,
An ye’ll get all I have, Tim, when I slip my hould,
Ye’ll get all I have, Tim, when I slip my hould.
“‘Go fetch me my pipes, Tim, till I play my last tune,
For death is coming, he’ll be here very soon;
Those pipes I have played on, ne’er let them be sould,
If you sell all I have, Tim, when I slip my hould,
If you sell all I have, Tim, when I slip my hould.’
“Then ould Murphy the Piper, wid the last breath he drew,
He played on his pipes like an Irishman true,
He played up the anthem of Green Erin so bould—
Then calmly he lay down and so slipt his hould!
Then gently he lay down and slipt his last hould.”
[Illustration]