Kenny Macleod has responded to this week’s story on the Clan MacRae band. Kenny: ‘My uncle Alec Macleod was the P/M of the Clan MacRae when they won the Grade 1 Worlds in 1953 [left of the trophy, facing], and my father Jimmy, pictured third from the left, was the pipe sergeant. ‘He left the band in 1968 and started the Glasgow Skye Association band along with Eddie MacLellan, who…

We are grateful to reader Francis Chamberlain for his research and for forwarding this article to us. It is a historically interesting account of an interview by a Victorian age journalist Henry Mayhew. Mayhew was a ‘street journalist’ who approached and interviewed street musicians, vendors, costers, thieves, prostitutes etc. of the period. This article appeared in ‘London Labour & The London Poor’, 1851. It features an (unfortunately) unnamed piper of…