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Donald Cameron’s third son, Sandy Cameron (1848-1923), was marked out for piping greatness from early on in life, winning the prize pipes at Inverness in 1867 when he was only 19. It was the same year that his father, Donald, became Champion of Champions at the same gathering, and when Donald’s youngest son, Keith, (1853-1899) was only eleven he was awarded a special prize there for his playing.
What it effectively did was to endorse the Cameron style (or more properly, the John MacKay style) as the gold standard of pibroch playing at the premier and oldest meeting in Scotland.
In 1870 Sandy won the gold medal for former winners at Inverness when he was only 22, and had already been appointed piper to the Marquis of Huntly at Aboyne Castle on what became known as Royal Deeside, for Balmoral Castle was only about 20 miles or so to the west, while the City of Aberdeen, on the coast, was 32 miles to the east.
He was described as piper/valet in the 1871 census and is said to have worked for 20 years at Aboyne Castle, but in the 1881 census he was described solely as “valet”, indicating he may not have played pipes so regularly, and rarely competed.
In 1875, however, he was placed 3rd in the strathspey and reel contest at Braemar although he may not even have entered the pibroch contest which attracted only three competitors. It was won by John MacDougall Gillies, then aged 20, who was awarded the silver cup and £1 by Braemar Royal Highland Society. He was also awarded a shoulder brooch valued at £3, a highly successful launch for Gillies into competitive piping.
A fortnight later Gillies was awarded first for pibroch at Aboyne Games when Sandy Cameron, only seven years older, was one of three piping judges, and could never have given him 1st prize if Gillies had then been a pupil, which came later.
John MacDougall Gillies (1855-1925) was born in Aberdeen, although his family came from Cowal and had gone to live in the city where he learned pipes as a boy and became keenly interested in pibroch, which he probably first learned from P.M. Alex. Fettes, a most musical man. He composed the Glendaruel Highlanders, which has remained a popular 6/8 march to this day, especially after G.S, MacLennan added two more parts to the original two.
The year after the emergent star’s important win at Braemar in 1875, MacDougall Gillies, by then a corporal-piper in the Aberdeen City Rifles, was very much the up-and-coming young piper in the Deeside area and won the pibroch at the Lonach Gathering across the hill at Strathdon. That was on Saturday, 26 August, 1876, when the “handsome silver cup” was presented to him by Mrs Charles Forbes of Castle Newe (pronounced N’yowe) who “added a few words of encouragement” to the trim young piper as she handed him the cup, according to the Aberdeen Journal of 30 August, 1876.
These words may have conveyed the worst message possible, if, as seems more than likely, Mrs Forbes mentioned a certain pibroch manuscript, or a version of it, to Gillies, for he then vanished into a piping wilderness for six years.
The original manuscript was said to have been copied out from Angus MacKay’s MSS by the Castle Newe piper, Duncan Campbell, about twenty years earlier and had been around. It contained 88 pibrochs, only four of which did not come from Angus’s papers, but not one was from his published book. On the surface, they were treasure trove to the young piper, but Gillies was being asked to sup from a poisoned chalice.
Duncan Campbell ,1816-1860, had earlier been piper to the Duke of Atholl at Blair Castle in northern Perthshire, and had moved on because of castle gossip. He had copied out the manuscript for his new employer to whom it was supposedly inscribed: “Sir Charles Forbes of Newe, 21st February 1853, Highland Bagpipe Music.”
Sir Charles may well have paid him to copy out Angus’s manuscript and was evidence of the family’s dedication in helping to save Highland culture, which was then all the rage among the landed classes, for Duncan Campbell left the manuscript behind when he departed from Newe. It was certainly through other hands afterwards, and other copies were apparently made.
Duncan was born at Balintyre, Glen Lyon, in the parish of Fortingall in Perthshire, on 1 June 1816, and was reputedly a friend of Angus MacKay, according to Campbell-K, who also claimed Duncan had been a pupil of John MacKay, but the dates do not marry up. Perhaps the ex-judge was at his mendacious worst because the claim insinuated that Duncan had copied out The Big Spree from the father’s music and not Angus’s , meaning both were identical, which was simply untrue. (See Link: The John MacKay fraud ).
Duncan went south to become pipe major of the Edinburgh City Volunteers, but sadly he afterwards fell off a scaffold on which he was working in the city in 1860 and was killed.
Gillies somehow had access to a copy of Angus MacKay’s manuscripts when he was compiling the contents of his own bound MS book, because many of the settings are almost identical and came from the same source. The first tune, The Big Spree, was dated December, 1879, and was said to differ from the Cameron style but has become the standard setting, because Angus took his version of the same tune for the MacArthur MS..
It is also possible that Gillies had access to Duncan Campbell’s MS to learn tunes from it, long before beginning to copy them – with disastrous results. The final date in Gillies’s MS book is 20 October 1884. Corroboration slyly came almost a century later in book 9 of the Piob. Society’s 2nd series, edited by Campbell-K, when he mentined a tune, The Battle of Balladruishaig.
He stressed in his editorial notes that the MSS of Angus MacKay and Duncan Campbell were "the only two authorities known for this tune", yet it also appeared in Gillies's MS book while it was known he never saw Angus MacKay's original MS books. Campbell-K drew attention to the similarity.
Another tune, Fair Honey, was also in the same MSS books. Gillies copied it out on on 27 October 1884, while Welcome Johnny Back Again appeared, too, in all three MSS books, indicating in the unbroken chain of evidence from Mrs Forbes of Newe to MacDougall Gillies that he had been allowed to copy tunes from Duncan Campbell’s MS book, in turn copied from Angus MacKay, which led to his temporary downfall and to Campbell-K’s self-induced delusion that Gillies’s MS book was written in the Cameron style, which it specifically was not.
If Campbell-K had in truth been familiar with Gillies’s playing he would have known that fact. He therefore fooled himself and anyone else who would listen into believing that Robert Reid had departed from the true Gillies style. Campbell-K thus re-invented himself as the prize pibroch dupe of all time, and led to his attempted destruction of the Cameron style, written out by Gillies on the half-takes for his star pupil, Robert Reid.
The pibroch Gillies was taught in Aberdeen had originally pleased the judges, including Sandy Cameron, for he won prizes. He then must have played the Duncan Campbell versions and it wasn’t until he was re-trained by Sandy Cameron that he began to win prizes again.
Remember, this was long before the Piob. Society had been founded and long before Campbell-K and Grant had decided the later Angus MacKay MSS books were their new tablets and that Angus was their shining-bright Messiah.
In them he scrawled elongated “E cadence” notes whenever his nib made contact with the staff paper and he was certainly the first to give full-note value to these E’s, which meant something entirely different, although they have ever since been shoved on to the music like Loch Fyne barnacles to cacophonise pibroch.
Contrarily, Gillies, a Gaelic speaker, must have realised his MS book, with all its beautiful hand-written Celtic headings and embellishments, was worthless from a musical point of view. Out of sentiment he kept the book and rarely added new tunes to his collection, which he described as “just a scrawl” and presumably put it aside for a rainy day. Perhaps Gillies hoped to sell it to some avid but gullible “collector” to provide for his wife after he died, as pensions were then almost non-existent.
And he returned to his best form in 1882 when he won the prize pipes at Inverness, the Oban gold medal in 1884 and the Inverness gold medal in 1885. It must have been just before then that he had asked Sandy Cameron what he had been doing wrong, and Sandy showed him the real manuscript book, which I was told had been begun by John MacKenzie, and had passed to Sandy’s father, Donald, remembering he had been taught by both MacKenzie and John MacKay, Angus’s father.
In turn the book passed to Sandy who had uttered his famous assessment: “Angus had a style all of his own”, and he began to retrain Gillies in the true Cameron/John MacKay style, which obviously differed completely from the contents of Gillies’s original MS book, otherwise why would he have needed retrained?
The following year, 1886, Gillies had found more favour and was appointed to the prestigious post of leading piper at Taymouth Castle, around the time that Sandy Cameron left the employment of the Marquis of Huntly at Aboyne Castle.
MacDougall Gillies and Sandy Cameron "would adjourn to the Tower and play there..." Sandy was known to have visited Gillies at Taymouth Castle, for MacDougall Gillies’s obituary revealed that he and Sandy Cameron “would adjourn to the Tower and there play to their hearts’ content. Mr Gillies used to say he never heard anything finer than Sandy’s playing of ‘The Ribean Gorm’ (The Blue Ribbon) on a fine summer evening with a gentle breeze carrying it far up the glen. Variation after variation of this most symmetrical and beautiful tune, rolled around singlings, doublings and treblings… as even as a wheel on a mill-lade.”
Taymouth Castle was owned by the Marquis of Breadalbane, who was a highland enthusiast. The problem was his lady-wife, who was regarded as a bitch supreme.
To this day it is said on Loch Tay-side that she would burst into the estate-workers’ houses and if she found meat cooking on the stove, the entire family was thrown off the estate and made homeless by nightfall, for the meat must have been stolen or poached, according to her edict.
The fiery Leonora Charlotta was also an astronomical gambler, and it is claimed that after losing £72,000 on a single card at the tables in London one night, she returned to the castle in a hideous temper and ordered the pipers, including Gillies, to sweep the castle drive instead of hanging around doing nothing. Gillies promptly shoved his pipes in their box and returned to Aberdeen.
But he kept in touch with the area, his daughter-in-law, Mrs Elizabeth Gillies, told me, and when the 1914-18 War broke out his pipes were taken to the small inn behind the castle for safe-keeping. They survived the feared Zeppelin bombs, but not the light fingers of the person who stole the bagpipes and they were never seen again.
Sandy Cameron must have then decided to move south to Glasgow where he tested pipe chanters for Peter Henderson at his Renfrew Street shop and also worked at the City Chambers when he was said to have been piper to the lord provost. But it must have been an informal arrangement, for despite exhaustive research by patient librarians, no record of his employment as piper can be found, although he certainly worked in Glasgow as a clerk around that time.
Gillies’s wife died in early 1890, and, bereaved, he also decided to travel south to Glasgow where he lodged with Sandy Cameron at 61 Grove Street, Cowcaddens. All of the families living in the tenement homes had moved to the city from the Highlands, Islands and other rural areas, presumably to find work. Six Gaelic/English speakers lived in the close, including two sisters, both dressmakers, from Craignish in Argyllshire, and their lodger, a whisky salesman from Fochabers in Morayshire.
The other Gaelic speakers in the opposite flat on the stair were, of course, Sandy Cameron and John MacDougall Gillies, along with their fellow-lodger, John Mackenzie, a waiter, from Contin in Ross-shire. Sandy Cameron was registered as a piper “working on his own account”, which might explain why no records could be found to show he had been the Lord Provost’s piper.
The pipers had work to do, transposing pibrochs from the long rolls of paper on which they were written, and carried in leathern telescope cases for safety, slung over the piper’s shoulder. The master pipers were writing out the perfected scores of our national music into the real book, page by page, leaving behind a record of our authentic pibroch derived in an unbroken line from John MacKay, an unparalleled treasure house of the Scottish nation’s music.
It was at Grove Street that the master pipers undertook their monumental task of “perfecting pibroch”, which as Robert Reid always told me, began in Glasgow just before the turn of the 19th century. Gillies had remarried in September 1891 and was appointed manager of Peter Henderson’s bagpipe-makers’ business in 1905.
It was from this real book that Gillies, in turn, copied out the tunes on to single sheets for his protégé, Robert Reid, who began tuition with him in 1907 at the age of twelve, which went on until Gillies died in 1925.
These were the sheets, which we used to call half-takes, that Robert Reid ordered to be destroyed after his death, because he would no longer be around to safeguard their integrity from the deceit and treachery imposed by Campbell-K and Bones Grant, as they strutted about in their tartan fantasy, imposing their fabrications on decent pipers. Robert Reid must have been fey, judging from what later happened…
All these sheets were destroyed but true photographic copies were made of certain sheets and copies were promised to me. They were retrieved by me in 1988, and absolutely proved the point for they differed from the contents of Gillies’s earlier MS book and graphically showed that the sheets from which Robert Reid was taught absolutely differed from the contents of the earlier MS book, which Campbell-K later “acquired” after he was secretly permitted to go through Gillies’s papers after his death.
But another Gillies MS book was given to me, also in 1988, by P.M. Craigie Calder, a life-long friend of Robert Reid, during one of the interminable bouts of mouth-violence instigated mainly by Seumas MacNeill in the Herald newspaper.
Craigie, who had begun his pibroch education with MacDougall Gillies at the start of World War I in 1914, phoned me and said: “You’d better get down here quickly”. And later told me if I hadn’t, the MS book was destined for the flames too.
It sounded urgent so I jumped in the car and headed down fastish to East Kilbride, where he lived with his daughter. I was shown up to his room where he had several manuscripts laid out on his bed. "That one's for you," he said. It had a lovely old-fashioned engraving in gold on the black cover: "MUSIC".
When I opened it I was speechless. It was full of pibrochs written out in MacDougall Gillies's unmistakeable script. Included was a loose sheet in Sandy Cameron's hand. All my dreams had come true. It was complete and utter corroboration of the photocopies. To discover what happened to Craigie Calder for his kindness, go to Smear Campaigns and be ashamed for Scotland.
The Piob. Society and MacNeill, who was still head presenter of BBC piping programmes, were well aware of this evidence but made no approach to me, prolonging this deplorable situation for another twenty years. All that happened was that a BBC outsider phoned me up and actually asked to borrow the MS book. All I could do was laugh at his impudence and enquire: “Why don’t you do a programme about it?” In turn he laughed and did nothing.
And all this duplicity occurred, unknown to the citizenry, within the square mile around Glasgow’s City Chambers in George Square. Here should be a guided tourist trail to mark the city’s successful bid to become a Unesco City of Music, which would reveal its involvement in conserving the oldest classical music in the West.
Gillies took over from Sandy Cameron as pipe-major of the 1st Highland Light Infantry Volunteer Battalion, later the 5th HLI. In 1896 the Highland Society of London presented its first gold clasp to former winners of the gold medal at the Northern Meeting. It was won by MacDougall Gillies.
The Piob Society began to publish its 1st collection; the first part was dated 1905 and printed by Logan and Co., Inverness. Four other parts followed from 1906-1912 published by Peter Henderson, bagpipe maker, at either 24 or 100 Renfrew Street, Glasgow. No printer’s name is given.
Part 4 did acknowledge the help allegedly given by pipers: “Pipe-Majors John Macdonald, William Ross, 2nd Scots Guards, and J. MacDougall Gillies”, and thereafter by Mr Alexander Cameron, “who had by then moved to Achnacarry as piper to Cameron of Locheil.” What was not admitted was that their “advice” was almost totally rejected, leading to MacDougall Gillies’s undying hatred of the Society, which was about to intensify.
Sandy Cameron was simply not suited to life in a city, especially one then as smoke-ridden as Glasgow, and when he was offered the post of piper to Cameron of Locheil at Achnacarry, he gladly accepted it. . He was a gentle man and had a great affinity with nature. At Achnacarry, the deer would follow him in the home park like children and the birds of the air would come to him and land on his shoulders to be fed. But he no longer played pipes although leading pipers like John MacColl and Willie Ross still came to him for final polishing before the major contests at Oban and Inverness every year, so highly was he regarded, and he put a traditional lustre on their playing.
His duties at Achnacarry included walking the working hounds in the morning, and a draw-chain had somehow become entangled around the vital little finger of his right hand, breaking it to bits. The pinkie never recovered and although his close friend and associate, MacDougall Gillies, had a special chanter made for him with a metal key on the low G, he decided to stop playing altogether. Campbell-K therefore never heard him blow a pipe.
Before Sandy had gone north to Achnacarry he was living with a master carpenter, Neil Cameron, at 85 Gloucester Street, Tradeston, Glasgow, which was used as a refuge for older pipers, dancers and singers. There, Sandy taught pibroch to Neil’s son, who was simultaneously being taught Highland dancing by John “Stump” MacKenzie, a former champion dancer from Aberdeenshire. Sandy and Stump shared a room and were given three square meals a day as tuition fees, an arrangement which was more commonplace than is now remembered.
As a guest in the house, with a young family around, there was no question of strong drink. P.M. Craigie Calder, who was Stump’s nephew, was taken by his father in August 1910, when he was six years old, to say goodbye to Sandy Cameron before he went north. “Goodbye, Mr Cameron,” young Craigie said, but the great piper leaned forward and replied: “No, son, it’s Sandy Cameron.”
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The valuation roll for Achnacarry Estate confirms that Sandy Cameron went there in 1910 as piper to Locheil. He had his own cottage, a steady income and was cared for. But there was a sombre and sinister cloud beating up from India like a monsoon gone bad. Campbell-K was on the rampage.
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