The piper and scholar Jimmy O’Brein Moran told me about a mention of a harper in a piping manuscript in the National Library in Dublin. I went and looked at the manuscript. This post is to discuss what (if anything) we can usefully say about the harper.
The manuscript is one of Henry Hudson’s tune books; it got separated from the others and is now in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, with the shelfmark MS 7260.
The manuscript contains a lot of tunes which we are not interested in here. At the back of the manuscript, on the free endpaper, our text is written. I think it is in Henry Hudson’s handwriting.
This manuscript book is a pre-formed music book in its original binding, (i.e. it was purchased as a blank bound book from a stationary supplier), and the music was written in to it in 1841 (Colette Moloney and Deirdre McDonald, ‘The Irish music manuscripts of Henry Hudson’, Irish Musical Studies 12, 2019, p140). So we can surmise that the information written on the endpaper may well have been added to the book in or after 1841.
Tom Bell Junr. with Mr Mulvany, Gillespey
NLI MS 7260, rear free endpaper
& 2 Galway acquaintences of theirs (named Ashe)
sailed from Kingstown to Hoath in a Pilot
Boat (45 Tons) on 1st day of Races. Walked
about Race Course &c. at last strolled
[~~~~~~~] off towards the shore –
[~~] “as we were going along the
Road down the Hill towards the
Town, we heard Bag-Pipes playing
in a House by the Road Side – on
going in found only a Piper
(aged about 35) & the Woman of the
House (which was very clean & re=
=spectable)” — Piper played for them
several tunes which he said he
did not play genenerally for they
were “rale ould Irish Tunes &
nobody about there understood
them” – The Ashe’s asked for
several Tunes with “unheard
of” names, all of which he
knew – They were much sur=
=prised as they never heard them
from any one before except one
Piper who lived near Ballina=
=sloe – He played besides
(2) “Hares in the Corn”
(3) “Fox Hunts” –
The Fox Huntir’s Jigg
“Carolan’s Receipt for drinking Whiskey”
& “The Real Receipt for Do –” ————-
which he had from his Father who was
an Old Irish Harper from the Co.
Tyrone – Piper lives near Malahide
& is a relative of the Woman in whose
House he lived – Believes his name
is O’Connor – He said “the Country
People in the West liked him better than
his neighbours, but he never plays
the rale Tunes for any of them”, “it
is no use” – Refused any money for playing
those tunes for us “which he said he had
not played for years” & that he had a
great number of old Irish Tunes, tho’
he could not easily remember them.
The text is a bit tricky to understand because there are three levels of reporting going on here. Hudson is writing down a story told to him by his friends, some of which is presented as verbatim quotation. The friends are reporting on their visit to a piper, and they occasionally quote the piper’s words. The piper is telling them about his father who was our harper.
In this post I am going to try and tease out the information about the harper. I am not going to talk about the piper except for how if helps us understand who the harper was. Hopefully at some point Jimmy O’Brein Moran will write a study of the piper. I think that if the piper could be identified based on the information given about him, and his places in Howth and Malahide, then this could potentially help us to identify our harper. But this is a job for a piping scholar.
My header image is a detail of the 1837 OS map (County Dublin sheet 15, from the National Library of Scotland cc- by), showing the race course on the left, and Howth town on the right.
Dating the events
The text tells us that Tom Bell, Mr Mulvany, Gillespie, and the two Ashes took a boat from Kingstown to Howth, to go to the races. According to John Slusar, Racecourses: Here today and Gone tomorrow, “The first races were organised by the 3rd Earl of Howth in August 1831… The final three day meeting was staged from Tuesday 20th to Thursday 22nd September 1842”. Given that we have a date for the manuscript book itself of 1841, then it seems most plausible that the report was written in either 1841 or 1842.
The harper’s name
The text says “Believes his name is O’Connor”, but it is not clear who has that belief. I suppose the most likely is that the Gentleman who reported the information back to Hudson. But the information is not very definite. It is possible that this is wrong, that the name of the piper (and therefore also of his harper father) may not have been O’Connor, but was something else. I note that Margaret Connell is listed as having a house in Howth in the Griffith Valuation of 1850; but this may be totally unconnected and the Griffith maps anyway don’t show us the location of the houses in the town.
Our man here is obviously not Mr O’Connor from Limerick, who was a pupil at the Belfast harp school under Valentine Rennie in the late 1820s or early 1830s.
The piper’s information about his father
The piper mentioned that he had learned a tune “from his Father who was an Old Irish Harper from the Co. Tyrone”. I think that when he says “was” this might imply that the father was already dead by 1841-2, though this is not definite. We also have no information to connect the father to Malahide or Howth; these are places associated with the son. The only place we can connect the harper to is County Tyrone, where he was from.
The tune(s)
The manuscript is not very clear about which tunes the piper son had learned from the harper father. At the minimum, it would be “The Real Receipt for Do –”, i.e. the real Receipt for Drinking Whiskey. Now, I don’t know what this is. It is obviously referring to a different tune from Carolan’s Receipt (Dr. John Stafford). I mentioned on my rather outdated post on traditional harpers’ tune lists, that Carolan’s reciept was a standard of the traditional harpers through the 19th century, though it does not seem to have continued in the living tradition into the 20th century; as far as I can see, it has been reintroduced from the classical keyboard settings. This is a nice fiddle performance for you to listen to:
But this doesn’t help us know what “the Real Receipt” is.
The manuscript seems pretty clear that the piper had learned “the Real Receipt” from his harper father, but it is less clear to me whether the piper had also learned Carolan’s Receipt (John Stafford) from his father; the text is not really very clear. I think it is much less likely that the piper also got the Fox Hunt and the Hare in the Corn from his father, since these seem to me to be more pipers’ tunes.
Working out the dates.
We can try and work out the dates, to see if we can pin this all down.
The Gentlemen visited the son (the piper) in 1841-2, and said he was “aged about 35”.
The son must have been born “about” 1806-7. Allowing a few years error on the age, we can suggest 1804-1810 as a plausible date range for the son’s birth.
Before 1806-7 the father (the harper) must have been married. I presume the marriage would have been after he had finished his training as a harper, and had become professional. Therefore:
At the latest, c.1800 – 1810 the father must have been a harp pupil. I imagine this would be between the ages of 10 and 20. But also I assume he was at least 16 before having the son. Therefore:
At the latest 1795, the father must have been born.
A possible scenario
We know that Arthur O’Neill planned to set up a harp school in Benburb, county Tyrone, in 1805, to teach the traditional wire-strung Irish harp. I think it is possible that our man O’Connor may have been a pupil at that school. This would fit with his age, and with him being from County Tyrone.
Alternatively, it is possible that he may have been a pupil at Arthur O’Neill’s harp school in Virginia, County Cavan, in 1793, alongside Bridget O’Reilly. But then we would have to explain how O’Connor from Tyrone went to harp school in County Cavan. The fact that Bridget O’Reilly was herself from Virginia, suggests to me that these early harp schools that Arthur O’Neill was setting up, were recruiting their pupils from the local area. Though I should point out that Bridget O’Reilly is the only pupil from these schools we have any information about at the moment.
Other possibilities
If we push everything as early as seems plausible, the harper could have been a contemporary of Patrick Quin. He could have been born in the 1740s, and had a son at an advanced age in about 1802, who learned the pipes as a young prodigy, learning a tune from his father at age perhaps 7 or 8, just before the father died before 1810. But that is pushing it, and I don’t really believe we should think of the father as being of that earlier generation.
Is it possible that we are being too cautious? Could the Gentlemen have over-estimated the piper’s age? If he was only 30 in 1842, he could have been born in 1812; the father could have been 16 or 18 in that year, and could have just finished learning the harp under Arthur O’Neill at the Pottinger’s Entry harp school. Our Gentlemen could have got the name of the piper and his father wrong; the father could have been one of the boys who we know were at that school. You can see them all on my timeline: Patrick Carolan, William Gorman, Patrick McGrath, Edward McBride, James McMolaghan, Valentine Rennie, Patrick O’Neill, James O’Neill, Abraham Wilkinson, Edward O’Neill, John Wallace, John MacLoughlin, and Hugh Dornan.
But I think he was most likely a bit older than that.
Conclusion
I have an entry for the traditional Irish harper, Mr. O’Connor from County Tyrone, on my timeline. But at this stage we only have the one reference to him, as a passing comment in this rather unsatisfactory account. It is possible we have his name wrong, and it is also possible that he is completely invented or that the account is somehow garbled or confused.
But I wanted to write up what we do know so we can have a marker or a place to keep an eye on him if something else ever turns up in the future.
Fascinating as always, thank you Simon!