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If a book about pibroch, based on impeccable information from first-hand traditional sources, creates such panic that its anonymous detractors assert the book is blasphemous of the Piobaireachd Society, thus alleging it "offers contempt or indignity to God", it indicates the Society itself should be scrutinised for other Messianic traits before the misrepresentation of the book is corrected.
A previous long-term secretary of the Society, Seumas MacNeill, stated for example in a newspaper interview after teaching at an annual summer school in California: “In North America it is so different from Scotland. There I feel like a god.” The newspaper commented he said so “with the far-away look of a prophet who has yet to find honour in his own country”.
Scotland on Sunday July 7, 1991
He only took over the position on condition that he was given sole rights for selling the Society books internationally despite informing another Scottish newspaper in 1954: “It is true that the tunes as written by the Piobaireachd Society are not correct.” The books concerned have never been withdrawn nor revised.
MacNeill was also editor of a magazine called Piping Times in which an anonymous informant asserted that one of the founders of the Society, an Archibald Campbell, had been taught by “a God-head of teachers, a Holy Trinity by whom he was fortunate enough to have had intensive lessons at different times.” It was not admitted that Campbell was taught for periods of only three weeks each by two of the teachers, and a day here and there by the third, John MacDougall Gillies.
Emboldened by such erudition, Campbell then told Gillies’s principal pupil and protégé, Robert Reid, that he had distorted the music but Society experts (meaning himself) had fortunately written it down for posterity and any deviation from the Society’s settings, by even a grace-note, would not be tolerated.
Robert Reid had a choice. He either adopted the distortions attributed by the Society to his teacher in their publications – or he was out. Steadfastly, he refused to change his playing from the scripts written out for him by MacDougall Gillies from which his teacher had taught him over a period of eighteen-and-a-half years.
The Society lairds jeered at the scripts, mocking them as worthless, and Robert Reid, a former miner, was falsely accused of altering the music taught to him by his revered teacher, an unthinkable proposition. Robert Reid was ostracised and was forced to abandon competing, although he was known to his peers as the King of Pipers.
Rather than have the scripts further tarnished by the Society, when he was “no longer around to protect their authenticity” he ordered the scripts to be burned after his death, and tape-recorded the best tunes for future pipers. These tapes have now apparently been corrupted. (Parts of the Gillies scripts have been retrieved, plus an MS book written out in his unmistakeable hand and dated, and are to be published by the Pipers Press).
No outsider can know who is responsible for the article on piobaireachd in Wikipedia which, with its liberal approach, accepted the distortions in good faith. Outrageously, they were not contrived until almost 30 years after the MacCrimmon book was published.
The article originally stated the book “blasphemously casts doubt on the work of the Piobaireachd Society in the early days of the XXth century”, and added under External Links, “The online text of Alistair Campsie’s book is at www.piperspress.com/”. The word “blasphemous” has now apparently been removed, but not its odour.
The impression is therefore maliciously given that the contents of the website are identical to the contents of the original book. The assertion is completely false and can only have been devised to deceive Wikipedia readers over the true contents of the book.
One reason for the deceit is that the Wikipedia article still extolled the MacCrimmon legend as alive and well in 2010 although, according to reviewers, it was “killed stone dead” thirty years ago after the book was published in 1980. Every facet of the legend was scrutinised in the book and found to be spurious. For an “ancient” legend, it was symptomatic that its theme song was not composed until 1818, when Walter Scott did so for political and commercial reasons. It is still not appreciated what a skilled government propagandist he was. Such prolonged uproar over solely a legend?
So what else did the book contain to so petrify the historical fraudsters?
As a corrective to the centuries of deception and suppression, the book included a short chapter Manners of the Masters, which gave a more factual glimpse into the treacherous behaviour of the Highland chiefs concerned.
Bonnie Prince Charlie Ever since Bonnie Prince Charlie went on the run after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the fiction has been peddled to explain away how he eluded capture, was that no Highlander of high or low birth would have ever betrayed their prince for the £30,000 of English gold on his head.
The romantic claptrap was spread through Europe as a symbol of how a nation of noble savages, in defeat, still saved their emblematic prince, disguised as a maidservant and accompanied by a Flora MacDonald, who became an international heroine.
The truth was that the £30,000 was a British government reward and the Highlanders themselves were high on the list as far as betrayal went, but they could not penetrate the security network around him which has still not been properly identified. Time after time many attempts were made to betray him.
Worst of all was Norman MacLeod, chief of the MacLeods of Dunvegan, feudal owners of the MacCrimmon pipers. Arson, rape, pillage, stoving in boats, ham-stringing of cattle, mutilation of horses. . .even the stones used to grind the corn were smashed and the remaining cattle driven off to subjugate their fellow Highlanders by starvation and force them to yield up the Prince.
Plus blackmail, at which Norman MacLeod was a specialist. He wrote a classic letter to the factor, or land agent of Sir Alexander Macdonald who was absent from Skye, lodging at the headquarters of Butcher Cumberland in Fort William, actively conspiring in hunting down the Prince.
Back in Skye, Norman MacLeod completed his letter to the MacDonald factor, trying patriotism as the final lever, urging him to betray Flora MacDonald and the Prince, should they turn up (the chiefs’ spy network was extensive). “You know your power,” Norman wrote, “and I hope you will see to it to aggrandise your family beyond many in Scotland... You know your reward and I hope you will do your duty to yourself, your family and your country.”
Norman, had good reason to espouse false patriotism, as you will learn.
He and Sir Alexander Macdonald and their agents were earlier caught red-handed in kidnapping their own clanspeople, intending to sell them as slaves in the Americas.
They were detected because the slave-ship, The William, had called in at Donaghadee in Ulster for a refit before the Atlantic crossing in late 1739. The slaves escaped and were placed under the protective custody of the magistrates, who began a protracted legal investigation.
The chiefs of the MacLeods of Dunvegan and the Macdonalds of Skye were shown to be deeply implicated and criminal charges were to be brought but the enquiry was dragged out for year after year while the feared invasion by Bonnie Prince Charlie became imminent and the Southern government had mobilised its own network of informers, using its own unsavoury methods of coercion.
A few days after 3 August, 1745, when the Prince landed in Scotland in his attempt to claim the crown of Britain for his father, Norman MacLeod of Dunvegan and Sir Alexander Macdonald betrayed the Prince’s actual landing and his meagre following to the chief law officer in Scotland, in writing.
Yet the MacLeod chief’s eldest son and heir, John, known as MacLeod the Younger, had already kissed hands with the prince in Paris promising his fealty and had urged him to come to Scotland to claim his birthright.
Charges over the slavery episode were somehow never brought to court, and the behaviour was only one facet of the treachery of which the MacLeod chief, known as The Wicked Man, was capable. The betrayal of the bonnie prince’s landing and his strength, almost certainly altered the course of Scottish history, and perhaps revealed the darker arts practised at Dunvegan, where acts of genocidal terrorism were devised against other clans and later enacted to ingratiate themselves with Gen. “Butcher” Cumberland, whose forces they joined to “fight” against the prince.
Despite this behaviour, the MacLeod chiefs were always romanticised and adulated over after Walter Scott’s visit to Dunvegan in 1814, obscuring their true nature. During the recent Year of Slavery 2008, many media references were made to Scotland’s involvement, stressing the tenuous connection with slavery involving certain Glasgow tobacco companies, but never once during the year were the Skye slaves and the serious political consequences of the chiefs’ behaviour publicly exposed, a shocking omission, if not a serious admission of double standards. Why Glasgow and not Skye?
It is fair to say that the truth-manipulators were already terrified in case normal people were left to browse over the original MacCrimmon book and had come to their own conclusions, for the entire charade would have collapsed in an explosion of ribald laughter, tinged with historical recrimination.
The book has long been out of print, however, and is difficult to obtain. Internet prices have spiralled upwards to an astonishing degree, although cheaper copies can be found, and it would seem that a facsimile paperback edition is long overdue.
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The book also scrutinised the Society’s hero, the eponymous Angus MacKay, who was Queen Victoria’s first piper and had been certified insane at Bedlam in 1854, after an incident personally involving the Queen the previous Christmas. His case history was scientifically re-appraised to determine the onset of his condition as he had been covertly disturbed for some time before certification, revealing how suspect his surviving work was. Yet the Piobaireachd Society forced his versions of pibroch on pipers by illicit means for many years.
The persons culpable for the present Wikipedia article were panic-stricken in case the true contents of the book were revealed, exposing their trickery from beginning to end, and have merely joined in the thirty-year farrago of abuse over the book to deflect the persons most concerned – the pipers – from reading it in peace and realising how badly they had been brain-washed.
The present website, in contrast, defines pibroch and its genesis, and how the Society corrupted the music it arrogantly set itself up to save.
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The Society was founded in 1903 by a group of minor landowners in the Scottish Highlands to “conserve the music”, which was needless as it had already been done by the pipers themselves. Nevertheless, a 1st edition of pibroch in five parts was published but was claimed to be so filled with errors it had to be withdrawn. The Society had come under the autocratic control of two men, one the Archibald Campbell (above), a future High Court judge at Lahore, then in India. The other person was a sheriff (the equivalent of an English county court judge) at Inverness, Scotland. Both of these men were from Protestant families, whose antecedents had taken the Hanoverian side in the 1745 Civil War against Bonnie Prince Charlie and had served in General “Butcher” Cumberland’s army.
This 1st edition was suppressed and in 1925 the Society began to publish a 2nd edition, insinuating it was the real 1st edition. It was surreptitiously based on the versions of Angus MacKay, principally because he was an excellent calligrapher, who had neatly written down a vast collection of pibroch, but without regard to its musicality, with which the Society was not over-burdened. His name had earlier appeared as editor of a book of 61 pibrochs published in 1838 in a previously unknown style of notation and had later rewritten his own collection of pibroch in the same unknown style. For justification, the two Society autocrats had obtained a photographic copy of a fair copy of the manuscript books by Angus MacKay.
The Society collaborators were a John Peter Grant of Rothiemurchus, who owned the territorial title, and Campbell (above) who falsely styled himself “of Kilberry” by which name he demanded to be always called, although the title was owned by his niece. Campbell was said to have “lusted” after the minor title, indicating both his veracity and his inadequacy.
To lend authenticity to their work, they claimed the versions of the tunes they published in the actual 2nd edition had been taught to them by the two famous contemporary pipers, Sandy Cameron (1848-1923) and his pupil John MacDougall Gillies (1854-1925), after they were named as editors of the 1st “suspect” edition.
Brodick Castle
The originals of Angus MacKay’s MSS books from which the fair copy had been taken were not discovered until June 1925 to be in a smoking-room drawer in Brodick Castle on the Isle of Arran, owned by the Duke of Hamilton. Bound into one volume was a Gaelic narrative, which included a separate sheet in English by Angus MacKay who had written on it an account of his own family, including the assertion that his father had been taken into the home of a Capt. Malcolm MacLeod of Eyre, who had in fact been the Bonnie Prince’s bodyguard and guide when he was on the run in Skye after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Capt. Malcolm was later pilot to Johnson and Boswell during their Hebridean tour, and was also a close friend of Flora MacDonald, the prince’s companion. According to the note Malcolm taught Angus McKay’s father, John, to play pipes and “afterwards sent him to the college of the MacCrummins and to the MacKays of Gearloch”.
It was all true then, Campbell and Grant asserted, all the justification they needed to proceed. His music had come down unchanged from the MacCrimmons through his father to Angus himself. The Holy Grail itself, but to use one of their favourite schoolboy epithets, they had not done their homework.
Shamefacedly, Arch. Campbell was later forced to admit in a letter to the Duchess on 18 September 1929 the diary was “apparently a rambling and somewhat incoherent Gaelic preface to one of the volumes.
“Poor Angus MacKay was, I think, a ‘mental Case’ when he wrote it and one does not feel quite sure of what may or may not be in the screed,” Campbell apprehensively added. He had already edited book 2 of the Society’s 2nd edition, published in 1928, after retiring from India. Grant had edited book 1, dated 1925, while Campbell was still abroad, after the two famous pipers (above) had safely died and could not protest about the liberties taken with their names.
It transpired that Angus MacKay wrote the diary, complaining of his alleged ill-treatment, while he was an inmate of Bedlam, London, the Victorian lunatic asylum, where he was certified insane in 1854. Doctors then discovered he was convinced he was married to Queen Victoria, the royal children were his, and he was going to murder Prince Albert for defrauding him of his marital rights (i.e. having sex with the Queen whom Angus insisted was his wife).
He was also found to suffer from advanced syphilis, for which he was self-medicating with iodide of potassium, was an alcoholic and had been committed after an incident personally involving Queen Victoria in Windsor Castle, at Christmas, 1853, when MacKay was witlessly intoxicated with "ardent spirits”. He later became “the most violent (mental) patient in England”.
The collaborators were stuck with the wrong source but they had already published two parts of their 2nd edition, swearing they were correct, their entire excuse for republishing in the first place. Now they had discovered their source was utterly tainted. Normal people would have owned up. They were too feudally vain to do so.
The Society’s principal aim seems thereafter to prove that Angus MacKay was normal until he completed rewriting his MSS books which I showed he began after the 1838 book was published, a formidable confidence trick in the making.
More honourable men than Campbell and Grant would have quailed and probably abandoned the project but salvation was at hand in the form of the page on which Angus had written in English an account of his own family, including the allegation his father had been sent to “the college of the MacCrummins”, which outweighed any other consideration like the truth.
With this difference. Whenever the assertion was mentioned, Angus was said to have written it down in his own hand, and it became “holograph evidence” of the best legal kind, while the Society collaborators concealed the truth that the account had been written in Bedlam after Angus had been certified insane, and was worthless.
And this was the basis for the entire MacCrimmon sham.
The 1838 pibroch book, on which Angus MacKay’s name appeared as editor, also contained the first definitive account of the MacCrimmon pipers, from which all other accounts have proliferated. The family was said to have invented pibroch and composed all the best tunes at a place on Skye called Borreraig where they allegedly ran a famous piping college for 300 unbroken years, from 1500-1800. All the clan chiefs, mostly impoverished, allegedly sent their best pipers there for a seven-year apprenticeship -- how they could afford it was never explained -- but, no matter how hard the pipers practised, the legend asserted, they could never play as well as the MacCrimmons who were the finest pipers in the world, for all time to come.
Even here Angus MacKay’s book, dealing with a place so enshrined in the legend, was shown to be hopelessly wrong, stating that Borreraig was “eight miles north of Dunvegan Castle”. Instead, Borreraig is about five miles W.N.W. of the castle, on the far side of a sea loch.
For such an important family in the clan, few existing written records are extant to prove their earlier existence at Borreraig and their name did not appear on the first rent-rolls, dated 1683-6, of the MacLeods of Dunvegan, their feudal masters. The name did not surface until 1706 when Patrick MacCrimmon, “MacLeod’s principal pyper” was paid a promised dowry, presumably to enable him to marry, possibly as one of the terms of his employment.
Correlation revealed that almost all the famous MacCrimmon tunes had earlier and different names. The earliest record of pibroch, the Campbell Canntaireachd (1797) did not once mention the name MacCrimmon. The MacCrimmons were rarely at Borreraig. The MacCrimmon pipes, kept at Dunvegan Castle, home of the MacLeod chiefs, were shown to be fake. An indenture which reliably purported to prove that MacCrimmon pupils went to Borreraig for seven years, showed on examination to have proved that only one pupil, described as a “body-servant”, went to Skye for about 70 days, including travelling time, although he was later identified as a sub-landlord who may have been a courier for Lord Lovat, during the run-up to the 1745 Civil War. The indenture wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Every facet of the “legend” was shown to be suspect, if not spurious.
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When I was urged to write the book by the publishers, Canongate of Edinburgh, I could not reconcile the fact that Angus MacKay, although suffering from advanced syphilis, had not infected his wife nor children, the youngest of whom was 14 months old when Angus MacKay was admitted to Bedlam. I therefore obtained his case history from the Royal Bethlem Hospital archives, and had it re-assessed by a regional venereologist, who concluded that MacKay had suffered from cerebral syphilis which becomes non-infectious 30 months after the illness is contracted.
Angus MacKay married on 25 May, 1841, and applying the 30-month period meant that he must have become infected at the latest by November, 1839, and possibly long beforehand.
The book bearing his name as editor was published in July, 1838, and it has been credibly asserted his name had been merely put on it as a commercial draw and that he had little if anything to do with the contents which were badly flawed. I showed it was not until after the book was published that Angus MacKay rewrote his MS books in the same previously unknown style used in the published book, on paper watermarked 1839 and 1840. Paper is customarily not used for several years after the date of the watermark, and the collections may not have been started until long after these dates, by when his illness was entrenched.
The 1838 book was the first to give melody-note status to the unique and intrusive “E cadence” notes, which have cacophonised the melodies and in fact meant something totally different, which Angus did not understand, and could not be correctly interpreted by the Society “experts”, nor by pipers who were not traditionally trained.
Angus MacKay’s famous father, John, left a collection of his own tunes which demonstrated Angus had altered his father’s music, meaning it could never have come unchanged from the MacCrimmons in any event. Besides, the published 1838 book nowhere claimed that John MacKay had been trained by the “last” MacCrimmon, which would have been an extraordinarily powerful sales tool for the book, but John was still alive in 1840, while the only evidence for his alleged MacCrimmon training, as stated, was written by Angus MacKay in Bedlam after he had been certified insane and was bound into the same MS book which contained the Gaelic diary.
The above material was incorporated into The MacCrimmon Legend or The Madness of Angus MacKay, plus other pibroch and text correlations.
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The present website has been written as an experimental book published directly on the Web without interference, because serious errors were written into the corrected final proofs of the original book after they left my hands. Included was the scientific re-diagnosis of Angus MacKay which was altered and totally reversed, but neither the corrected proofs nor the typescript of the book could ever be recovered, although they are the property of the author. The handwriting on the proofs, of course, would have identified the guilty person(s).
The Piobaireachd Society, after an initial convulsion and rejection of the facts disclosed in the book, pretended it did not exist and continues almost 30 years later to assert the deconstructed legend was absolute fact, virtually written on tablets of stone. It remains in denial even after the first version of the website appeared in February 2008, to ensure that future generations of pipers would understand what was done to the ancient music out of a pastiche of envy, class warfare, feudal inadequacy and a gulch of musical incomprehension, bringing the history of this ageless music to the present day.
Its story has been told because of an unspoken promise to my pibroch teacher, Robert Reid, who was the final doyen of traditional pibroch (See the link The ordeal of Robert Reid ) who gave me all my traditional training for nothing and would so often tell me: “We can trace ourselves back through the best players of each generation to John MacKay, but no farther. We know he existed because we can prove he existed. But we know nothing about the MacCrimmons. Their legend was a hoax.” (This vital quote was completely omitted from the original index of the book).
Robert Reid’s provenance was unequalled. He was not taught for three weeks by his teacher, nor three years for that matter. He was with his teacher, John MacDougall Gillies, for eighteen-and-a-half years, rather than the “day here and there” by Campbell, who deliberately smeared Reid by falsely accusing him of altering his teacher’s music.
Gillies was taught by Sandy Cameron, who was taught by his father, Donald Cameron (1810-68) who was taught by both John MacKenzie (1796-1864) and by John MacKay (c.1767-c.1840) who was the father of Angus MacKay, but their music differed from Angus's disturbed versions of pibroch, and he was never in the direct line of teaching. As Sandy Cameron so mildly but tellingly said: “Angus had a style all of his own”.
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Now, I would not have written the book nor the original website if I did not have a marked aversion to distortion of the truth, and the constant malign effect it has had on our national music. I saw no reason why its timeless melodies should have been left debased for future generations without an account of what had been done to it by the persons concerned.
And I will say this to them, writing from the experience gained from many years as a communicator:- If you have to lie for your cause, your cause is not worth lying for.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia, with its liberality, has been tainted by these anonymous smear merchants, who are differ little from the inadequates who write poison-pen letters to avenge their perceived slights, and have found the organisation an irresistible magnet for their dishonesty.
Mr Mike Peel, chairman of Wikipedia UK, has announced it is taking action to prevent “bogus” entries by editing entries, mainly affecting living people, before they can be seen on the internet.
In my case I was accused by smear of being “blasphemous” which, although it has now apparently been removed, I still find obnoxious, if only out of my continued regard and affection for my late mother, a life-long member of her church. And the contents of my book have been totally misrepresented, along with my reputation as an author, for reasons which may now stare out of the page at you.
The instant remedy is simple. Perversely, the punishment a liar most fears is being exposed as one. I would therefore ask Wikipedia to name and shame those culpable and possibly adopt such a measure as standard practice.
All that I have done, without financial reward of any sort, is to tell the story of my country’s national music from a privileged position. If I have made mistakes, they are unintentional, and I will happily correct them if they are made known to me, in contrast to the less informed, who have often used and disbursed public money to deceive and corrupt, and now find themselves emeshed in a tangled web of their own weaving.
Finally, to revert to the self-deification of The Piobaireachd Society, if there is a God in the terms arrogated to itself by the Society, it would seem a remarkable celestial joke has been played on it for trying to "standardise" the oldest classical music in the West, to prove they were right. For their sacrilege the eccentrics concerned somehow substituted the timeless melodies with the confused versions of a covertly disturbed piper who insisted he was married to Queen Victoria – and they were so submusical they could not tell the difference.
Alistair Campsie
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