Features

Bob Brown … played winning tunes for the King.

Sovereign’s Piper on the Army payroll and a tune called ‘Mallorca’

• From the July 2000 Piping Times. The final part of our story on the office of Sovereign’s Piper, with excerpts from articles by Neville T. McKay and Bryan Douglas, Royal Scottish Pipers Society, the latter an interesting tale concerning King Edward VIII and Society member, Colonel CM Usher. In […]

Henry Forsyth leads the royal children in some drill.

Bonfires, state banquets, a flying ham and a thirsty Cameron

• From the June 2001 Piping Times. More on the office of Sovereign’s Piper with excerpts from the previously published article by Neville T. McKay and from a book by the late Duke of Windsor William Ross was succeeded by James Campbell, who had been appointed in 1881 to replace […]

Fording the River Tarf as John Macpherson and Aeneas Rose play.

Playing waist deep in a river – all part of royal duty for pipers

• From the May 2001 Piping Times. Neville T. McKay continues his history of the office of Sovereign’s Piper Angus MacKay’s successor at the royal household was William Ross who came from the Royal Highland Regiment, The Black Watch, where he had served 17 years. A memorandum from the Department […]

Queen Victoria’s legacy to piping and pipe bands

Queen Victoria’s legacy to piping and pipe bands

From the April 2001 Piping Times “The pipes must lead.” So stated Queen Victoria to her Army top brass in the 1870s, thus ending an unseemly squabble over whether pipes or drums should form the front or rear ranks in the newly formed musical ensemble known as the pipe band. […]

The value of a picture

The value of a picture

GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #60, 2012. We live in the most documented world there ever was: everyone has a digital camera and everyone uses it. Not just that, almost everyone leaves their easily-seen fingerprints all over the internet for their friends to see, for their families to […]

For love nor money

For love nor money

GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #59, 2012. What makes us do what we do? Cross a street with the red man aglow, hold the door open for someone, jump the queue at an airport check-in? We might be in a rush, we might just love people — or […]

The rose-tinted glasses of time

The rose-tinted glasses of time

GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #58, 2012. There’s one sure thing about being involved in the piping game: there’s never a shortage of memory-making material. The bagpipe seems to have a way of finding the centre of the most percolating social action. Or maybe it’s the pipes that […]

An extrasensory sense of place

An extrasensory sense of place

GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #57, 2012. It seems to me that the more we visit a place and the more we get to know it, the stronger are our feelings for that place. It dovetails, maybe, that the deeper our memories connect with a place then the […]