![]() Well I recall being issued with a large black wooden box the size of a child’s coffin and inside, a mass of black shiny wooden tubes, a woolen tartan and a strange sweet, treacle, musty smell. By joining the BB’s I would get a uniform and a place in their pipe band and a Set of Bagpipes. However, to obtain a set of pipes was not an easy task for a family on a small income, so it was suggested that I join the Boys Brigade in a nearby area of Edinburgh. Each week I learned some more about the arcane bagpiping world of Grips, Birls, Torluaths, Tachums, Doublings, GDE’s, D throws, Gracenotes, High A doublings, Crunluaths, and about blowing, breathing and ‘The Reed’.Īs I grew, the road seemed to get shorter until after two years learning the chanter and some easy tunes, I was told that I was now ready for the ‘Bagpipes’. The piper’s roadĮvery Saturday afternoon for several years I walked that road, with my chanter and tutor in a little carrying bag with the reed in the top half sealed with a cork keeping it safe. And so I set out on the road, a road that would lead me to many places both in present time and in the long past, and where I would experience an on-going Love / Hate relationship with the Bagpipes that would continue to inspire and amuse me, while also at times causing untold frustration and despair. My dad took me to the first lesson and we were told that I needed to get two items: a practice chanter and a copy of Logan’s Tutor for the Bagpipes. ![]() To obtain lessons on piping I would have to walk the miles (or so it seemed) from our Council Estate on the other side of the hill. His name was Hance Gates and he was a retired policeman who lived in a nice bungalow in the ‘bought houses’ of Corstorphine, a pleasant residential suburb of the City. So we found a teacher, who was none other than a former Pipe Major of the Edinburgh City Police Pipe Band. (In the 1950’s Fyffes, the banana importer, gave away yellow plastic banana-shaped whistles if you saved a dozen stickers off bunches of bananas.) ![]() It took some time to find a teacher near to my home, but eventually my mother got tired of my continual pleading and my shrill untutored blowing of a plastic “banana flute”.
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