Maker of
unique
Northumbrian
Bagpipes

Morpeth,
North East England

Large loud outdoor bagpipes were known in Europe from at least the late 12th Century. The first use of bellows in combination with a bagpipe appears to have occurred around 1530 but it was not until nearer the end of the 16th Century that the true small bagpipe with a cylindrically-bored chanter appeared. The French version, the musette de cour, with its distinctive canister-like shuttle drones, attained considerable popularity with the aristocracy and survived until the 1770s. The Northern European version, known in Germany by various names, including hummelschen, was at first still mouth-blown, but became bellows-blown, probably in the late 17th Century and certainly in the first third of the 18th Century. Its appearance, with three separate drones grouped in a single stock, suggests that it is most likely to be the progenitor of the Northumbrian small-pipes, particularly bearing in mind the close trade links between Newcastle and the Baltic ports. Such instruments would seem to be not totally unknown in Britain, at least on the basis of a surviving reference to such an instrument in the important unpublished treatise on musical instruments compiled by James Talbot circa 1694.

However, the earliest surviving Northumbrian small-pipes wnich can be securely dated would seem to have been produced in the late 18th Century when the vogue amongst the upper classes for 'domestic' musical instruments such as the flageolet and the dital harp was gathering momentum. Most of the earliest ones were made of ivory and had keyless chanters. In the first decade of the 19th Century, probably as a result of collaboration between the pipe maker John Dunn and the professional piper John Peacock, four or five keys were added to the chanter. Shortly after this the number of keys was increased to seven almost certainly by the pipe maker Robert Reid (b 1784 - d 1837) who from then on came to dominate pipe making the the North East of England.. He continued to add further keywork and other refinements to the small-pipes. It may well have been he who devised the seventeen-keyed chanter, giving two chromatic octaves, although the actual production of such a chanter has traditonally been acredited to his son James (b 1813 - d 1874).

Although never totally abandoned, the small-pipes suffered a decline in the mid-19th Century. Interest in them was kept alive by largely local academics. In the first half of the 20th Century a healthy new interest in them developed amongst the farming and mining fraternity of Northumberland. The instrument received still further attention with the 'folk' revival of the 1960's. Current interest is now international and on a scale that could have never been conceived when it was the object of enthusiastic but strictly regional focus in the first half of the 19th Century.