MADE IN LONDON

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 October 1942, Page 4

MADE IN LONDON

SCOTTISH BAGPIPES. SOME SKIRLING EVEN IN GERMANY. Stands Scotland where she did? Today London is making bagpipes for the proud regiments of Caledonia. It is, indeed, an old story, although probably the Scots Guards have never heard of it. For as long as 28 years, the Ist, 2nd and 3rd battalions of that regiment have had their pipes made up Kentish Town way.

No fewer than 200 sets have recently gone to the Wai’ Office for issue to Scottish regiments. The ivory used for the fittings cost £5OO. The sheep of the Scottish Highlands supplied the skins for the bags, clad later in their annropriate tartan. The wood for the drones and chanters which send out the pipes’ wild and melancholy notes comes from darkest Africa —African blackwood arriving as rough logs to be cut up in Kentish Town. The reeds arc from Spanish cane. The makers made their first set of bagpipes for Queen Victoria’s piper in a London back room sixty-six years ago. Their founder’s son started the pipe band of the London Irish. They have supplied bagpipes for the Royal Irish Inniskillings. They make flutes for the Grenadier Guards, for the young .women of the A.T.S.. for the Army Cadets and the lads of the Air Training Corps. And their bagpipes are even now skirling among the Nazis. They have sent 12 sets into the heart of Germany—through the Red Cross to prisoners of war.