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?