THE BAGPIPES.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5465, 23 August 1929, Page 4

THE BAGPIPES.

AN ANCIENT INSTRUMENT. A SCOTTISH PROHIBITION.. A town in Scotland has banned the bagpipes ! It sounds incredible, but it remains ineradicably a fact. The town council of Largs, in Ayrshire, has decided to prohibit the playing of bagpipes on the local beach. Grievous news to Scotsmen abroad that their home folk are banning the national instrument. However, the highland man will have his satisfaction by gaining another opportunity to say what queer folk the lowlanders are. Bagpipes and Scotsmen have been associated from time long distant in British history. But the reed and bladder go further into and beyond the dawn of known history. The Chinese.. Persians, and Egyptians were playing them centuries before the birth of Christ, and when the inhabitants of Britain were not far removed from the life of animals. A terracotta figure dug up near Susa, in Persia, the Shushan of the Bible, belonging the the eighth century before Christ, represented musicians at work on the bagpipes. It is thought that Nero, besides his aptitude with the fiddles, could get a tune out of the pipes, and it was the Romans themselves who introduced the much-abused instrument into ancient Britain. The Romans had no doubt come across it in their wars in Persia, where it had been brought by the Chinese in one of their irresistible Asian conquests.

Thus Scotland, and also Ireland, have to thank China for their national instrument. The Irish pipes differ somewhat from the Scottish,, having drifted less from the prototype in that theirs are smaller and have less pipes than the Caledonian offshoot. The small present-day Chinese one remains a replica of the ones by which the awe-inspiring troops of China centuries before Christ marched to victory.

However much the bagpipes are abused ; however much libellous wit is showered on them, the fact remains that there is no finer instrument in the world to march by. All those Diggers who have inarched in Europe and Asia Minor to their strains can bear out what life they put into one’s feet. And Diggers, too, can bear out the fact that their old pals, the ( “Gyppos,” had their pipes bands. The only reasc n, perhaps, why bagpipes should be banned is in the interests of peace, as they are essentially an instrument of war, as they have been adopted because of their affinity to belligerent deeds by some of the most warlike cf races—lrish, Scots, and Sikhs included.

The writer remembers the pipes being the cause of a near riot at Boulogne. A battalion of the Chinese Labour Corps, consisting mostly of gigantic Manchurian ex-cavalry and infantrymen, had just landed fiom a transport, and were marching with guard-like precision through the streets of the town to the railway station, headed by their bagpipes band playing music which was utterly unintelligible as such to the onlookers. Some Highland troops who were numbered among the spectators took it as a national insult, ignorant of the fact that they were listening to the prototype of their own beloved instrument, and it was all the detested “red caps” could do to check a Sinc-Scot-tish war.