I hear Inveraray Pipe Band are to pipe in the New Year on BBC Scotland’s Hogmanay television show. It caps off a great year for the band after they were crowned World Champions on Glasgow Green last August.
Add to that the fact that P/Sgt Alasdair Henderson won the Gold Medal at the Northern Meeting and Leading Drummer Steven McWhirter the World Solos and you can see that the band has something to celebrate come the bells welcoming in 2018. Hearty congratulations to them. Here’s Steven winning the drumming with a little help from Callum Beaumont, another Inveraray champion piper:
Still in Argyll, Allan Hamilton tells me that he has completed video interviews with I’ray P/M Stuart Liddell and Angus MacColl, the latest in the Pipers Persuasion series. The videos will go live possibly at the end of the month; watch PP for notification. This series has become increasingly important as time takes its toll. Thanks to Allan we have interviews with recently deceased luminaries such as Lt Col David Murray.
I met Allan at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow yesterday to do a voiceover and film for him on the exhibition celebrating the founding of the Boys Brigade in Glasgow in 1883 by Sir William Smith. In a remarkable coincidence a woman, Mrs Irene McClue, was there from Melbourne, Australia. She overheard me talking about the 214 BB company, Gordon Park Church and our minister the Rev. Harry Thompson. Mrs McClue rightly interrupted to tell us that that was the company her husband, David McClue, formerly of 1237, Dumbarton Road, Whiteinch, Glasgow, and now living near to Melbourne Australia, formerly a BB bugler, had belonged to as a youngster in the 1950s.
Allan kept on filming as she talked of his friendship with Joe Noble the well known drumming judge, and other bits from her time in Glasgow pre-emigration and how the BB was thriving in Australia. I was able to tell her of the 214 ex-members association and asked her to ask her husband to make a short video message for our annual dinner next March. Allan has it all on film and will be making it available once the editing is complete. Serendipitous or what.
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Considerable response to my article on judges and when they should retire – and to the accompanying poll. Please let us have your thoughts: [polldaddy poll=9879967]
Iain Duncan (pictured), former archivist for the RSPBA, has kindly forwarded this: Taking the opportunity of going through more storage boxes of which I’d forgotten their contents, I came across this curio (attached). It’s an original cutting from the Daily Record and Mail (presumably the forerunner of the Daily Record and Sunday Mail) of Monday, 6th May 1935. It looks like there was more newspaper interest in piping back in those days, certainly enough to promote a tune composing competition. 
Some interesting gracing and inconsistencies in the notation and it’s surprising that whoever adjudicated the entries did not even sort things out for the composer. I’ve checked my big tune index and there is no sign of it ever having been followed up. Anyway, hope you find it of some interest.
Very interesting Iain and I see what you mean about the gracing – look at the way the grips and taorluaths were presented as recently as the 1930s (if that is recent). It was these inconsistencies that P/M Willie Ross standardised in his famous collection and all pipe music written today now follows the P/M Ross pattern.
Would that the Daily Record still showed some interest in piping other than children at the Worlds wearing glengarries and licking ice cream and visiting footballers trying to blow sets of plastic pipes. Along with tripods, lenses etc., these used to be standard photographic equipment for the tabloids and probably still are.
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