BAGPIPES’ SKIRL

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXXI, Issue 8835, 21 October 1942, Page 3

BAGPIPES’ SKIRL

HEARD IN GERMANY 200 SETS TO WAR OFFICE Stands London where she did? To-day 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 British War Office for issue to Scottish regiments. The ivory used for the fittings cost £SOO. The sheep of the Scottish Highlands supplied the skins for the bags, clad later in thoir appropriate tartan. The wood for the drones and chanters which send out the pipes’ wild and melancholy notps 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 backroom 60 years ago. Their founder’s son started the pipe band of the London Irish. They have supplied bagpipos for the Royal Trish 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 Ger-many-through the Red Cross to prisoners of war.