Welsh bagpipes 1: The double chanter in the Welsh folk museum

This edition is from our archives, so it is presented as scanned pages rather than text.

Welsh Bagpipes
(1) The Double Chanter in the Welsh Folk Museum

This article first appeared in Taplas April/May 1987
The existence of ‘the Welsh Bagpipes’ has posed a point of discussion to musicologists and historians for quite some time now. Although it is now generally accepted that Wales, at one time, possessed the pipes, as such, as a native instrument, many questions remain unanswered.
The first question that arises is the one on the origin of the ‘Welsh double chanter’ in the collection of the Welsh Folk Museum, St. Fagans.
I first read about this instrument some twelve years ago, at which point I immediately reacted the same way as most people remotely interested in the subject did. My conclusion was that the instrument had to be North African, probably from a Berber source. My ideas were reinforced by the few lines on the subject in Anthony Baines’ book Bagpipes (still the principal reference book on bagpipes around the world). Baines writes: “A strange instrument of broadly similar construction (he is referring to another instrument from Beirut) is in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. Said to have come from a village in North Wales (Peate, 1947) it is inscribed with the date 1701.”
Years went by when I didn’t even think of Wales (I lived in the Netherlands at the time) until, by sheer coincidence, I enrolled for a course in musical instrument making near Caerphilly. Although the course was directed at violin making, I couldn’t help but follow my great love, the pipes, and decided to have a look at the instrument I had read about.
At first glance I was not convinced at all, rather sticking to my original thoughts; but on subsequent visits to St. Fagans I began to have doubts. Time passed and the uillean pipes seemed more important than two bits of cane with horns on the end.
In 1985, after a death in the family, I had to leave Wales and return to Holland, it seemed for good. Little did I realise that my soul had also become nationalised, just as a Dutchman abroad wears clogs, whereas before it never crossed his mind to do so. I became intrigued by the Welsh pipes. I simply went crazy about the idea and started experimenting with pibgyrn (the Welsh horn pipe — see Jonathan Shorland’s article, Taplas 17).
Last December I visited Roy Saer, an authority on Welsh culture and music, at St. Fagans and had some brief discussions with him on the subject. I also discovered that Jonathan Shorland, a maker of fine pibgyrn, had briefly referred to the Welsh double chanter in Taplas. He supported the generally accepted view, that this instrument was North African. I greatly respect Jonathan for his work and research on the much more clearly defined pibgorn, but I still have to place an enormous question mark behind his thoughts with regard to the pipes.
Over the years, I have observed a number of Bedouin and Berber pipes and, so far, have not come across an instrument that strongly resembles that in St. Fagans. One of the differences is the bevel on the yoke. I confess that the majority of yokes that I have seen were indeed of the disc type, as in the North African zukra.

28
Chanter

I am not convinced that the instrument in St. Fagans is a remnant of a bagpipe, and not a pibgorn, as some suggest. I challenge those who support theories to the contrary to give me a tune on an instrument with a bevelled yoke, bearing in mind that two single reeds of considerable length would be vibrating violently in close proximity to the lips.

A point that many overlook is the clearly engraved date on the instrument. The inscription might have been made in some desert far away from Europe. It is commonly known that our modern numerals have their roots in Arabic script. There are several points of interest concerning this matter:

The actual writing styles do seem to differ, as indeed do the shapes of the numerals.

I always assumed that, since the normal Arabic sentence runs from right to left, the numerals would do so too. However, this does not appear to be so. The date does indeed read 1701 and not 1071.

This is important. It was recently brought to my attention that all Arab nations started their timescale at 0 some six hundred years after the Europeans did. Hence, the Arab nations have not yet reached the year 1701.

We might, therefore, conclude that the inscription is a later, European, addition … or we might even claim the instrument to be manufactured in Europe, yes even in Wales.

The inscription does, however, appear to be at least two centuries out of date, as the heyday of double-bell chanter bagpipes in Europe was during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Again, this can be explained by assuming that we are talking about an extremely isolated area. (Even now, we find long-lost knowledge in isolated regions of Wales).

I would like to point out that there is significant evidence in drawings and sculpture to assume that western European musical evolution can be viewed as a whole. There are sixteenth-century Welsh drawings of double chanter bagpipes, and on the roof of St. Mary’s Church, Shrewsbury (just over the border) sits an angel, carved in the fifteenth century, playing the double-bell chanter pipes.

All this could lead to the conclusion that Welsh double-chantered pipes have indeed been played, and that the instrument in St. Fagans could well be a Welsh instrument, from an area that had remained isolated for at least two centuries, or kept up its tradition for this length of time.

Our tendency to exaggerate could turn the tradition of perhaps one man (most likely to be a male shepherd) into the culture of an area or, sometimes, as the chauvinists prefer it, into the culture of a country.

Some food for thought is offered by a recently published report by Genetic and Population Studies in Wales. The results of a survey of 24,000 blood donors in Wales suggest that the generally accepted view, that the Welsh have their roots deeply engrained in the Celtic cultures, is, to say the least, shaky in its foundations. It is claimed that the Welsh, or rather the North Welsh, are related to the Berbers of North Africa.

Chanter 29

To summarise, there is only one way to establish the facts. This is to take some microscopic samples and check for the origins of the materials used to make the instrument. Modern carbon dating methods could be applied. Not enough has been done about this instrument, perhaps for fear of it not being Welsh. I do not know. Funding and time are, of course, always a problem, but it must be realised how important this sole relic is for musicology worldwide.

                                               Theo Schuurmans

Welsh Bagpipes
(2) The bagpipes in Wales in recent centuries

This article first appeared in Taplas April/May 1987
Unlike Theo I am not a piper but I hope that my observations will complement what he has said by providing a brief historical account of the bagpipe in Wales during the post-Tudor centuries. Some of the questions raised by Theo must remain unanswered at this stage, I am afraid, but what follows should throw additional light in a few directions and, perhaps, lead us nearer to eventual solutions.

Let’s start with the illustrations themselves. The double-chanter (Fig. 1) — currently on public display at the Welsh Folk Museum — was acquired by the National Museum of Wales in 1937, from an elderly lady in Goodwick, near Fishguard. She was then the widow of Rev. John Morris, sometime vicar of Llanybydder, near Lampeter, and it was he who had, in 1913 or a little earlier, discovered the instrument “in a cottage in North Wales” and bought it for two shillings. Sadly, nothing at all is chronicled of the specimen’s history prior to this.

The chanter, which measures 42 cm in length, comprises:

a) a circular wooden stock, bevelled or slope-cut at one end and externally grooved around the other end, extending to form a semi-circular yoke with a flat upper face,

b) Two pipes of cane, with 6:6 finger-holes and accommodating two short and narrower cane pipes that link into the stock, all four pipes being wax-bedded, and tied with thread on to the yoke, and

c) two bells of cowhorn (each treble-pierced near the outer rim) fitted and secured with thread on to the main pipes.

30 Chanter

The Bagpipe Society

Welsh bagpipes 1: The double chanter in the Welsh folk museum