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Certain tomes on pibroch, incessantly hailed by the blogging fraternity as works of 'great scholarship', 'subtle and elegant writing' and 'immaculate accuracy' are here, for a change, professionally reviewed and properly scrutinised for distortion of the truth, lucidity and plausibility.
INDEX
1. The Highland Bagpipe by Roderick Cannon (John Donald, 1988)
a. The Spiked Cannon
b. Cannonballs
This is now a Birlinn Book , subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council.
2. PIOBAIREACHD and its Interpretation by Seumas MacNeill and Frank Richardson (John Donald, 1987)
a. ‘This self-contradictory book’
This is now a Birlinn Book, subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council.
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1. The Highland Bagpipe
a. The Spiked Cannon
In the Scots tongue we have a word "scunnered". It means "to shudder with repugnance", and when I discovered the existence of Roderick Cannon's book and realised how its false allegations had been used to permanently smear the MacCrimmon book and internationally blacken my reputation as a good and accurate author. I was duly scunnered.
But the abuse intensified and I realised, to my disbelief, that Cannon, the superior and respectable university lecturer (in chemistry), had scunnered me even more than I thought possible, with what was no more than abuse by proxy.
At the end of the book, he had incited his audience to read the ugly misrepresentations of Dixon and Grant in their letters to The Scotsman, asserting in the text they were “reviews” which had “adequately dealt with” the MacCrimmon book.
Seated at my kitchen desk, I had an instant flashback over the years, months and days of the public vituperation, inflicted by these and others, inexorably hounding me into a heart attack with unanswerable lies, vilified throughout the world. Now, unknown to me, they had been repeated for many more years, giving the impression I had no reply.
And the truth was these were the odious letters which The Scotsman editor had considered with alarm to have gone “too far” and has asked me to shut down the correspondence with a final letter. After which I had taken legal advice and was informed in writing there appeared to be “a prima facie case of defamation” in the letters concerned.
Far worse was that it had taken me around twelve years to discover Cannon’s book had been permitted, unknown to me and thus unanswerable by me, to publicly malign me in the library at Montrose, where we had lived for twenty years and had brought up our children, meaning they too had been exposed to even more hurt, and I could not even defend them.
The hurt was manifold and would not go away. I kept on thinking of the conversation I had in Glasgow when I was recording the radio series and was told: “Everyone knows you’ve had a heart attack.” They all had known of the dangers to life I faced. Now this. Equally repellent was that the Cannon’s book was the only copy owned by Angus District Council, yet was held in Montrose, a pibroch desert, where it was permanently on show on a shelf and could be borrowed for a month at a time for study.
In a horrid contrast, we discovered that the two copies of the MacCrimmon book in the area had been withdrawn from circulation and were kept locked in a glass case in the reference section of Montrose Library marked “Local History”.. They could not be borrowed from the library for long-term study, and could only be read on the premises during opening hours.
The situation became even more odious. My wife, Robbie, spoke to an Angus Council librarian who examined the library computer index and told her: “Right, we do have a copy at Forfar and it’s in the James C Ewing collection.” It was available for lending. The librarian added: “Montrose has a copy but you wouldn’t get their copy out.”
Why not? “Because it is in the local history collection…so you wouldn’t get that one out. And there’s only the one copy. If we’ve got two local history copies, we normally lend one. But we’ve only got the one copy, and we have a copy and that’s it. Nowhere else.”
But there was a second copy locked in the glass case at Montrose library. Now it was no longer listed in the computer index. It had been vanished. As a squalid bonus, my wife and I found, when we went to photograph the books beside a daily newspaper to date the picture, the copies were concealed behind the overlap of the sliding doors. It rendered the copies so invisible I could not even spot the distinctive spine and covers of my own book first time round.
When I looked again, I was utterly shocked to discover that the other copies of my other books had been stuffed in the same locked cupboard. My identity as an author had been obliterated in the town where I lived. This was freedom of speech for authors under the Scottish National Party, which ran Angus District Council, and had asked me to stand as a regional councillor which I courteously declined, explaining I had never joined a political party in my life, and had no wish to do so. There was also the appalling rudeness of Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, which I will later reveal.
Cannon’s book had been published the year after the Piob Society’s Historical Committee had suppressed the existence of the John MacKay MS book and the John Macdonald letters in the National Library of Scotland in 1986. Neither appeared in the Checklist.
By coincidence, it was the same year that Cannon, described as an “expert”, had been appointed by the Piob. Society to examine the John MacKay MS book which had already been deposited in the Library. Although he had admitted to a friend of mine: “I’m not really much of a piper, you know.” He had then come up with the zany pronouncement that it had been written by the son, John, although his brother, Angus, had written on it that it was a collection of their father’s tunes, and no other evidence of authorship existed. No one had samples of either the father’s or son’s script to assert it was the son who had written it. That was apparently no problem to Cannon, who probably found it in a test tube in the University of East Anglia, where he worked.
How Cannon could have examined the John MacKay MS book at the National Library which his “Checklist” claimed was not there was unknown. Admittedly it had only been in the ownership of the Piob. Society for 60 years.
Once more Cannon’s book had been published by John Donald, Edinburgh, which had also published his earlier Bibliography and MacNeill and Richardson’s disreputable and dishonest book. It, too, had suppressed the existence of the John Macdonald letters and the John MacKay MS, which proved that Angus MacKay had altered his father’s music, meaning it could never have come unchanged from the MacCrimmons in the first place. Why Cannon, the “expert”, did not draw attention to these facts is equally unknown.
Once again the Scottish Arts Council heavily subsidised a book by Cannon and had now in fact subsidised the publication of all three books, which purported to give an accurate historical account of pibroch up to the present day.
Cannon’s new effort, the Highland Bagpipe and its Music, contained a preface by him in which he claimed to be both a piper and a piping historian, and was date-lined “Norwich 1987”, normally the date of publication. Curiously, it did not appear until the following year. Perhaps it had to take its place in the queue.
In the preface Cannon asserted he had “aimed for the best and at the same time the most typical examples of the various traditions.” He also claimed that bagpipe history partly depended on “tradition (which) has too often been compounded by ill-informed speculation and sheer romantic invention.” His assertion is worth remembering. He had, he claimed, avoided “these dangers by referring back to original sources whenever possible, and by leaning heavily on other people’s research.”
Original sources, huh? Whenever possible? A piping historian? All of it indicated his book would be learned, balanced, unbiased, scholarly and accurate.
A certain type of “academic” prowler often displays an almost sexual pleasure in picking out errors in punctuation, like a comma given for a semi-colon (ooh, they quiver) or a wrong word in a lengthy quotation (aaah, they softly moan), then bombastically assert they are entitled to denounce the book in its entirety as unscholarly, and somehow claim such behaviour is not infantile. Conversely, if they encounter an inconvenient fact, which ruins their often specious argument, almost all of them seem to have a compulsion to suppress the dangerous truth out of existence.
The last time I was asked, as an experienced book critic, to review a definitive biography by a university teacher, I was so moved by the author’s habit of suppressing anything which was “inconvenient”, I devised a new test for books by university teachers, called the Hokey-Chokey School of History Test, which I defined in verse:-
You put your good fact in,
You leave your bad fact out,
And you put your smart fact in,
And you brandish it about.
And you do the Hokey Chokey and you spin it round,
And that’s what it’s all about –
SEE!
Let us now apply the Hokey-Chokey School of History Test to Cannon’s vicious book, for its text bulged with errors, distortions and blunders, yet was contrarily emaciated by disgraceful omissions that concealed the scam worked on pipers, which I had exposed in my book and subsequent broadcasts.
In a specialist book of this nature, the reader has every right to expect that the author should be an expert. In this case, Cannon revealed that he was in ignorance of such a basic and fundamental part of pibroch technique, it dwarfed his other blunders, which are themselves extremely serious. His book stands or falls by such a disclosure. Yet Cannon did not even known that only favoured pupils were taught how to play their taorluaths and crunluaths properly and traditionally, with what is not the ugly and insulting term, “redundant A”, but the graceful and musical “essential A”, which is played internally and is essential to achieve a consistent, balanced and rounded movement.
MacDougall Gillies, for example, refused to teach the secret to Campbell-K for obvious reasons, but Donald MacPherson himself told me that his own father, who was taught by Gillies, was not taught to play the “essential A”. Instead Gillies taught it to Robert Reid, and in turn Robert Reid taught it to me, but seems not to have taught the secret to another pupil who was said not to play it.
In fact the traditional style is far easier to play, when properly taught and practised, and leads to identical and almost foolproof grace note groupings. One has only to listen to the tattered taorluaths and crumbling crunluaths in BBC recordings by MacNeill and MacFadyen, to realise that almost every group has been uttered differently and defectively.
b. CANNONBALLS
The first time I flipped through Cannon’s book I discovered about 40 serious discrepancies and also found that when Cannon turned to his peculiar data on pibroch, it became obvious how Johnny-come-lately his information was, implying he had never heard traditional pibroch in his life. His remarks about notation confirmed it.
· Cannon asserted that the graceful and rounded bundle of five gracenotes called the taorluath, which traditionally resemble the ripples of a harp,“are always played with a kind of crackling effect” . Presumably like a good-going fire…a veritable funeral pyre of pibroch, forsooth.
· Cannon then explored the “pibroch birl” which was invented in its present form by Campbell-K (aka “Sausage Fingers”), and if properly interpreted, his flaccid fingers can be heard desperately clinging to the over-stretched first E before he plucked up enough courage to slap his pork-link digits downwards in the hope he made enough contact with the chanter to execute (literally) a double whack on the low G.
· Cannon asserted “the changeover… seems to have taken place around 1860-1870…but the echoes of the controversy had died away in the present century” (20th). Odd that, as the traditional and musical form with the first short E and an open D were played at equal length before the birl itself was played on the low A right until the mid-1950s at the old Highlanders’ Institute in Elmbank Street, Glasgow, when the malignant influence of the “Kilberry” book forced pipers to abandon the traditional style.
Indeed I was lectured for playing the new-style birl in the 1985 broadcasts, which I did on the grounds that if they wanted to hear it played properly, this was how to do it. My critic grudgingly agreed but still insisted that I knew better and should have played it in the traditional style, as it had been played for centuries.
· Cannon wrongly claimed that Donald Cameron was “Angus MacKay’s pupil”, falsely insinuating that the master piper played like the mentally disturbed son of John MacKay. He did not.
· Cannon elsewhere insisted: “Pibrochs are always played extremely slowly”, then disastrously asserted that tunes like The Blind Piper’s Obstinacy, originally called The Anger of the Blind, cannot be considered as ‘tunes’ at all…employing perhaps only two or three notes.”
· The truth is that the urlar should be played briskly and the doublings are played faster than the variation itself, and the treblings faster than the doublings.
· The tune in fact uses seven notes: F, E, D, C, B, low A and low G, which is written as a grace note but is in fact given demi-semi-quaver value.
· As for Cannon’s claim that “many pipers do not care for” the tune; well, it is difficult, isn’t it? And especially if the performer has not been traditionally trained on how to play the rapid E throws.
· The doublings of the variations of the Desperate Battle (of The Birds) are also played at speed.
· It should be stressed that the Camerons wrote and played the tune differently from the stuff in Angus MacKay’s MS book, thus disposing of Cannon’s unpleasant assertion that Angus MacKay had taught Donald Cameron.
Unhappily for Cannon, these facts are corroborated by John Macdonald himself, who wrote on 25 September 1942: “I had McRae on Wednesday afternoon and was very pleased with the progress he is making. He played ‘Cille Chriosda’, ‘MacRimmons’ Sweetheart’ and the ‘Desperate Battle’, the latter as played and taught by Colin and Sandy Cameron, which differs somewhat from the P.S.’s version.”
As yet another example of Arch “Sausage Fingers” Campbell’s dishonesty, he published Angus MacKay’s sprawling version of the tune in the Piob Society’s Book 7 (2nd Series) dated March 1938 and falsely asserted: “The setting which is now printed was taught by Alexander” (i.e. Sandy) “Cameron…” No, it wasn’t.
· Cannon falsely gave the name “Donald MacCruimen” purporting to be in a legal document dated 1614 when the name was in fact “MacCruinnen”, then asserted that “Angus MacKay (1838) ascribes a pibroch MacDonald’s Salute to Donald Mor MacCrimmon in 1603”, without any other explanation, which should be carefully remembered.
· Cannon then gave the loony version of MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart with the last note of the first phrase on the wrong side of the bar line as the first note of the next phrase, claiming “the rhythm is rather subtle.” (Pause for applause).
· He then published the Earl of Seaforth’s Salute (actually a lament) upside down, and claimed Donald Cameron was the earl’s piper, although the title had been defunct from long before Donald Cameron was born.
· Cannon avoided mentioning that the MacCrimmons’ theme tune, MacCrimmon No More, had been stolen from the emigrants’ lament, I Shall Return No More, although it was specified in the radio broadcasts.
· Cannon repeated the claim that John MacKay was “sent for tuition to the MacCrimmons and the MacKays of Gairloch", without admitting the only foundation for the claim was written in a Victorian lunatic asylum by Angus MacKay after he had been officially certified insane, and was therefore worthless.
Fascinated, I read on through the morass until I was stopped in my tracks by a section headed “Cameron and MacPherson styles”. These were the two original styles which the Piob Society had tried to destroy and supplant with the distorted versions of Angus MacKay.
· Cannon asserted (p86) that “Glengarry’s March” (Cille Chriosda) was played by the Camerons with a short E and by the MacPhersons with the first E three times longer.
· The truth instead was that in both styles the first E was played short, until the demented E “cacophony” note was forced on pipers through John Macdonald, the Society’s chief instructor, on the orders of “Sausage Fingers”.
In fact the elasticated E came solely from Angus MacKay’s MS book written after his 1838 book was published, but was a travesty of traditional playing. In fact it meant something totally different of which Cannon and his listed “advisers” were not to know.
What Cannon had done was to insinuate that Angus MacKay’s distortions represented the authentic MacPherson style of playing, which had been the Tartan Triad’s long-term dishonest aim.
· Cannon asserted it was “difficult to be sure just how far back these differences really go”, then quoted a leading piper, Robert Meldrum, who began competing around 1870. He allegedly insisted “in his early days” the short E was still played in both styles, insinuating that it was before Calum Piobaire MacPherson (b.1834) taught John Macdonald (b.1854) to play the first E long (which he specifically did not)..
One of Cannon’s listed informants was a Robert Wallace, who was said to be a pupil of a P.M. Donald MacLeod, in turn trained by John Macdonald. (Before he died Donald MacLeod was said to have stated he had no pupils). In 1947 Donald MacLeod won the Inverness Gold Medal playing the tune with the short E and went to his teacher next day, expecting to be complimented. Macdonald instead snarled at him: “I didn’t think you had it in you, MacLeod”, outraged because MacLeod had played it traditionally with the short E – and proceeded to brainwash him into playing it with the madman’s long E, thereafter taught to MacLeod’s pupils.
Anyone who knew Donald MacLeod knew the story because he told everyone how hurt he had been by Macdonald’s behaviour. The tune is still played traditionally and why Cannon was in ignorance of such a cardinal fact beggars belief.
The facts of the matter were detailed by Mr David McLeod from the famous piping family at Tain, who wrote to me on 11 July 1984, about the Piob Society judges and their antics, and stated: “I well remember Angus Macpherson regularly being asked by the judges: ‘What setting are you going to play?’
“The reply always was: ‘What my father taught me’. So he never got into the prize-list…but for 20 years Angus wouldn’t play the Pibroch Society’s setting – John Mcpherson” (Angus’s brother) “stayed away 20 years from the Northern Meeting – he wouldn’t accept their settings either.
“Given fair play the Macphersons could have won the Gold Medal and several clasps but not unless they would submit.”
.
So much for the Piob Society’s latter-day and untruthful claim that the stuff they published was in the Macpherson style to give it any authenticity. The Macphersons despised and hated the Society and its disturbed settings every bit as much as the Cameron-style pipers. And with rightful justice. Once more, pipers have been seriously and inexcusably duped over the situation.
· Cannon wrongfully puffed up Arch. Campbell, falsely claiming he held the “title – Kilberry”, and that he was “himself an able amateur player”, despite the evidence of Debrett and leading pipe majors, who heard him play.
By coincidence the false claims were made two years after the Tangled Web broadcasts exposed his real character, which later Cannon proceeded to whitewash in the most remarkable way.
· The existence of the John Macdonald letters which blew his Society to smithereens and in particular, Arch. “Sausage Fingers” Campbell and his book of bent vanity, the Kilberry Book of Ceol Mor, was suppressed by the Society’s Historical Committee, of which Cannon was secretary.
In the fourth programme, Who Changed The People’s Music, I quoted what John Macdonald had written about the Kilberry book: --
“It is the beginning of the end of our traditional piobaireachd playing as handed down to us. I certainly don’t agree with any of Campbell’s comments on the Camerons or Gillies…I am almost justified in saying he is untruthful…I am not continuing teaching the tunes for this Year’s competitions as written by the P.S.” – meaning he had been doing so all along and had now repented.
· Despite this damning evidence, which he had declined to publish, Cannon then enthused that Campbell’s work was “firmly based on detailed and critical research. Moreover, the Kilberry book has been widely ready by pipers, and must have done much to encourage the high standard of writing of the next generation.” (p171).
This purported “high standard” hopefully did not refer to their quality of writing, and was presumably exemplified by MacNeill and Richardson, wrongly giving John Macdonald’s name throughout with the Society’s self-inflicted large D for Dunce. If he didn’t like it he could, presumably, change it to their version, in the same way they had changed his music for him, and substituted the versions of a madman which the eccentrics concerned insisted were normal.
· Cannon continued to lay down his barrage by asserting that nothing “can deny the importance of the cultural rescue operation which the Piobaireachd Society has achieved over the last sixty years.”
This self-serving rubbish was, of course, demolished in the letter written by John Macdonald from Tongue Hotel to Seton Gordon on 8 September 1940, which was also quoted in the broadcast concerned: -
“To me it seems quite evident, from the results of the last 15 years” (ie. from 1925 when the first booklet of the Piob Society’s 2nd series was published) “that the preservation of our ancient and traditional music, with all its beautiful and melodious airs and sentiment, has passed into the wrong hands, and it will take a long time, if ever, it can be restored to its original standard, unless a few of you influential members get together and do something to preserve what is left.” Nothing was done, apart from Seton Gordon filing the letter among his papers.
· Cannon maundered on: “The standard of playing has been kept up…”
Oh, really? On 2 December 1947, John Macdonald wrote: “’Piobaireachd’ is passing through a rather ‘serious period’ at the moment by the incompetent way it is handled by the P. Society’s Music Committee and, I believe, the playing was of a very poor standard at Inverness…”
Cannon appeared to make out that not merely did the John Macdonald letters not exist; neither did the broadcasts which published the letters for the first time. Had they really been “vanished” to such an extent that no-one was supposed to know of the existence of either?
Could nothing stop this fellow? Apparently not.
* * *
· Cannon then railed against me for faithfully quoting my revered teacher, Robert Reid, who had often told me that “pibroch was perfected in Glasgow around the turn of the century.”
· Cannon scoured the text of the MacCrimmon book for all three mentions of the quote, which he listed, and proceeded to insinuate that either Reid, or me, or both of us, were liars.
· With all the authority of a chemistry lecturer at a provincial English university, Cannon then boomed it was “certainly not so” that pibroch had been “perfected” there.
How he claimed to know when neither he nor any of his listed advisers were ever in the loop is merely another example of the academic vacuity implicit in his next allegation when he sneered that “most of the leading players were living in the poorer suburbs of Clydeside.” It also indicated his knowledge of Scottish geography equalled the sum of his information on traditional pibroch.
In turn I remembered a letter which Robert Reid wrote to me on 22 March 1954: “Probably another case of someone who has never really been in touch trying to impress those who have never been in touch.
“These ‘Musical Jesters’ can be funny and give me no end of amusement in their small way. The tragedy is – the ruination of the Bagpipe which is about complete as far as Piob (pibroch) is concerned.”
'Poisonous piffle'
Cannon then completely distorted the contents, aims and impact of the MacCrimmon book. In the bibliography he even suppressed its sub-title, The Madness of Angus MacKay, which had caused so much outraged anguish to his Piob Society cronies, in case the truth about their idol came out. Or that the only “evidence” for his father being trained by the MacCrimmons was written by Angus in Bedlam after he was certified insane, and was worthless.
And with true academic detachment Cannon simply suppressed my name from the index, along with all mention of The Tangled Web broadcasts. Modestly he instead gave separate entries in the bibliography to his own remarkable articles in MacNeill’s little magazine, Piping Times, even including a letter, and unpublished material which he obviously considered of far greater importance than the John MacKay MS book, which he had also omitted, and the letters of John Macdonald, which met the same anonymous fate.
Cannon tried to play down the importance of my book by claiming it merely caused “a considerable sensation” in 1980 when the truth was that it had “hit the piping world like the H-bomb” and had “split” the Piob Society “right down the middle.” And the so-called “sensation” and lies about it noisily persist to this day.
· He then falsely asserted my book set out to prove that the “contribution of the MacCrimmon family to piping has been grossly exaggerated” . This is untrue.
· The facts were that the book had methodically demolished the MacCrimmon legend, showing it was a hoax, and that almost all of the so-called MacCrimmon tunes had earlier and different names, meaning they had been stolen and re-named as props for the emergent “legend”. Included was the emigrants’ lament, I Shall Return No More, which was thieved by Walter Scott and became the larcenous theme tune of the family, as late as 1818.
The book, before the deliberate falsification of the Angus MacKay diagnosis, also showed that he had been mentally disturbed long before “his” 1838 book was published, which may have accounted for the many serious musical errors in it. These had been forced on pipers by the Piob. Society, which constantly and falsely claimed the book was “The Pipers’ Bible”.
The suppressed broadcasts also wrecked the Society’s mendacious claims that Angus had handed on unchanged the music allegedly taught by the MacCrimmons to John MacKay -–when he was only five or six.
Cannon then alleged that I “claims in particular” that Angus MacKay had been guilty of “extensive plagiarism” of the Campbell Canntaireachd, but his “reliability is undermined by his mental illness.”
· Instead the MacCrimmon book exposed the Society’s trickery that Angus MacKay had written down all his work before he went mad, when he instead had been covertly insane for years. And the “plagiarism” claim was merely the Society’s smoke-screen which had been peddled by Kenneth and others to conceal the truth about where in reality the tunes had been stolen from.
In fact, the chapter on the CC in the MacCrimmon book (p103) mentioned the Highland Society of London MS and stated: “There is good reason for believing that it was the real source for much of what appeared in MacKay’s published book.
“And the change in tune names regrettably gives credence to the allegation (to be discussed later) that he had little or nothing to do with his book, apart from lending his name to the title page.” And out pops yet another reason for the hysteria – their scam had been blown once more.
· Cannon, who alleged that “academic scholars” (like himself, one assumes) “might have been expected to contribute most of our knowledge”, omitted both statements. He did, however, despite the contrived furore over the mis-spelling of the MacLeod historian’s forename, manage to spell it wrongly, calling her Isobel F. Grant. Cannon’s crony, G. A. Dixon is not so far known to have publicly protested, not even when the blunder was repeated in the 2nd paperback edition published by John Donald (Birlinn) in 2002.
After this farrago, Cannon then unbelievably claimed “There is no space here to enter into a detailed critique (sic) of Campsie’s arguments”, which he had already unwisely attempted.
To my consternation, Cannon asserted: “The two points just mentioned have been adequately dealt with in reviews by G.A. Dixon (1980) and A.G. Kenneth (1980), referring to Dixon’s muck-raking in The Scotsman and Kenneth’s cornucopia of distortion in MacNeill’s wee mag.
The allegation concerning Dixon and Grant is false. At no time was Dixon asked to write a review for The Scotsman, nor did he. Instead, uninvited and therefore without any legal protection, he was culpable of three of the most abusive and scurrilous letters ever published in the newspaper. In fact they made the editor so “very worried” that he asked me to write a final letter, shutting down the correspondence.
As for the assertion that either Dixon or Grant “adequately dealt” with the book, such poisonous piffle is best disposed of by referring to Cannon's index, which in turn deals with both of them.
But Cannon stayed silent on their dismantled credibility. If he had even admitted one of their host of solecisms, it would have aided his vaunted academic balance. Instead he chose to omit them in their entirety.
Worse still, when I checked the bibliography I discovered that Cannon had aggravated the situation by listing Dixon’s associate, Ian Grant, who was nowhere mentioned in the text. But somehow Cannon omitted mentioning his host of solecisms, too.
Here is a selection of his other omissions.
· Cannon completely suppressed the near-religious and unequivocal belief published as late as 1979 by a Piob Society vice-president, that the Indenture was at Dunvegan Castle and allegedly proved pipers were sent to Borreraig for seven years’ tuition.
· Cannon avoided mentioning that, when G A Dixon and I Grant falsely claimed to be familiar with the wording of the Indenture, and had volubly abused and defamed me for mistakenly missing out a single word, they had not even seen the Indenture.
· Cannon declined to admit they did they did not know where it was. Or that Dixon and Grant never owned up that the version they had quoted contained 133 errors, including a paragraph of 82 words, which had been completely excised.
· Cannon then vulgarly accused me of “an exaggerated rebuttal” for revealing for the first time what Cannon had concealed -- that the Indenture destroyed its own legend by proving that a piper had been sent to Skye (actual destination unspecified) for less than three months.
· Cannon omitted all mention of the set-in-stone tradition that the MacCrimmon college had been at Borreraig for 300 unbroken years. He then claimed that his material was “borne out both by tradition and by historical records.” Quite so.
· Cannon omitted all mention of the note attached to the Indenture -- but suppressed by Dixon -- that the document was used as an insurance policy in the event of the 1745 Rising going bad for Lord Lovat, in a legal action to get the balance of seven years’ wages for the tacksman concerned.
· Cannon unquestioningly quoted material from the discredited historical notes in Angus MacKay’s 1838 book, from which all accounts had been embroidered, naming the alleged piping colleges, but nowhere mentioned the possibility of Catholic colleges.
· Cannon omitted to mention the earlier howlers by Dixon and Grant that a piper had allegedly been sent to be trained by the MacCrimmons after the family “had long gone”, proved by a letter quoted in the Tangled Web broadcasts.
· But Cannon then bizarrely went to great pains to extol G A Dixon for showing that a piper was allegedly sent to Skye for training in 1774 (admitting “we do not know who taught him”), two years after the reputed college had closed.
· Cannon omitted to mention the existence of the Sir Aeneas Mackintosh memoir, on which Dixon and his crony, Ian Grant, made their scurrilous allegations and over which had fomented their defamatory attacks on me for not publishing its contents, which were shown to be false.
· Cannon avoided mentioning the existence of the petition written by Alexander MacArthur asking Lord MacDonald for a job as a piper and a lease of ground.
· Cannon avoided mentioning Dixon’s false claim that Alexander MacArthur had written the petition to ask Lord MacDonald’s help in becoming a pupil of Donald MacCrimmon – then boasted that I was unaware of the petition’s existence.
· Cannon declined to mention that Dixon had suppressed the fact that Alexander was the son of the “celebrated” Charles MacArthur, hereditary piper to the MacDonalds of Skye.
· Infinitely worse, Cannon refused to admit the petition in fact proved that the so-called “last” MacCrimmon was instead trained by Charles MacArthur, shattering the MacCrimmon legend to bits, which had also been suppressed by Dixon. The information was mentioned in the first broadcast script but censored out of the first broadcast, called Controversy’s Dark Harvest.
· Cannon also praised, without naming him, Archie Kenneth, who became enraged after I had pointed out that no one knew why the Piob. Society published Rory McLouds Lament upside down in defiance of tradition.
· Kenneth then “wrote” an abusive and untruthful account of my book, under the spurious heading, “Music Mistakes in The MacCrimmon Legend”, including the false allegation that the book asserted Angus MacKay had extensively “pirated” (ie plagiarised) the CC, which was seen to be a Piob Society smoke-screen to conceal from where the tunes had really been stolen.
· Cannon omitted to mention how Kenneth had made himself look foolish by attacking me for setting the trap for Dixon and Grant, leading to the title concerned, Controversy’s Dark Harvest.
· Cannon refused to admit that Kenneth had also falsified and cacophonised the tune by inserting ridiculous E “cadence notes” wherever his notions took him, although not one had appeared in the original text and Kenneth had even falsified other melody notes at his whim.
Such behaviour was utterly condemned as “vandalism” by Kenneth’s mentor, Arch. Campbell, in a note attached to the John MacKay MS which Cannon could never wriggle out of admitting he had seen, but refrained from quoting.
Instead, to justify the behaviour, Cannon added: “The source gives only the melody notes and basic finger movements…” Here are the first phrases of the urlar containing the grace notes given in the CC, betraying where Kenneth shoved in his cacaphonic E cadence notes...without admitting it.
(MUSIC TO COME)
If even a few of these reprehensible omissions had been published, which should anyway have been done in the interests of Cannon’s purported “academic” accuracy and balance, it would have permitted readers to make up their own minds about the worth, if any, of the bluster by Dixon and Grant, and Kenneth’s sly distortions to conceal his sub-musical activities.
Smears by proxy
My final letter exposed the entire sham of the Society, which instantly dropped its “Omerta” ploy of public silence and panic-stricken revenged itself by launching the worst smear campaign against a Scottish author in the 20th or possibly any other century.
Now Cannon was inciting anyone who consulted his book to read Dixon’s serious defamation which he falsely dignified as a “review”, despite the fact that I had already taken legal advice and had been told that “a prima facie case” of defamation appeared to present itself in the letters.
The only reason why action was not taken was that the smear campaign was so manifold and revolting that I was hounded into having a heart attack and I was medically warned to abandon any more action as the next attack could be fatal.
The defamation had therefore never gone away. It was always there -- and meant that anyone who chose to revive it did so at their own risk.
As for Kenneth, anyone who put the least credence on his embittered evasions, now knowing the truth of the matter, identified their own problems with veracity.
The same diagnosis fitted almost everyone who still believed the distorted insults in Dixon’s three letters, which he had composed in obscurity while he was deceptively said to hold a temporary job in the archives department of Glasgow University, where, by coincidence, Seumas MacNeill (aka Jimmy McNeill) had spent his entire working life.
Now, it turned out, Cannon had also abandoned his pretence of a “review” and admitted Dixon’s offensive contributions were in fact merely “Letters” in The Scotsman and gave their dates, “August 2, 1980; August 14, 1980”, but added: “See also I Grant, Ibid., August 14, 1980”, but suppressed my reply:-
“It is therefore more than possible that when G A Dixon describes The MacCrimmon Legend as a ‘nasty little book’ he may be historically regarded as a nasty little man. As for Dr I Grant, who describes it as ‘a lengthy book’, I fear his final remarks are so repulsive they do not merit a reply.”
Cannon, too, incited anyone who read his book to obtain the newspaper cuttings concerned, which takes a matter of seconds over the Internet, and scan the mish-mash of muck-raking, but he refused to give the dates of my replies, (7 and 14 August, 1980, and 4 September, 1980) which would have at least have purported to give a semblance of balance and the dispassionate truth-seeking which academics are said to aspire to. (Or so I’m told, by academics).
But wait a minute. When the dates of Dixon’s letters are scrutinised, only two, not three, letters are mentioned. Why was his third letter not listed?
In it, Dixon had angrily rattled on that I “plainly longs to be – or at the very least – to be considered to be – the victim of some sinister conspiracy”, stressing the “death threats” which had been mentioned in the preface, and “collusion” and “certain reference libraries” allegedly “requiring investigation”.
All that Dixon omitted was the kitchen sink, but the three unrelated incidents he had cobbled together had unwisely left the impression in the public mind that something unsavoury had been going on.
It was a surprising disclosure and prompted me a week later, in my final letter, to expose the Omerta decision which was most specifically collusion, if not a conspiracy, to conceal the truth by the Triad.
I wrote: “The artistic community of the world was assembled at Edinburgh during this most unhappy correspondence and as most of them read The Scotsman when here, they must be baffled by the acrimony displayed towards a writer who challenges an inhibitory musical legend. I shall therefore quote part of an article which is to be published in North America in October:-
“On July 28 (1980) I was informed that a series of major attacks were to be made on the book, and doubtless on me, although they never manifested themselves.
“On August 1 I was approached by the London office of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for an interview, although I had already made two broadcasts direct to Canada, via Toronto, earlier in the week when I was incidentally linked up at my request with a Mr Malcolm MacCrimmon, of Edmonton, Alberta, with whom I enjoy a friendly correspondence and whose courtesy I commend to other members of the piping world.
“The interviewer from London seemed embarrassed and explained that he could find no-one from the largely self-appointed piping Establishment who would comment publicly on the book, although they were prepared to be vociferous and vindictive in private. The CBC man said: ‘They have decided they would say nothing in public in case it promoted the book in any way. They hoped it would go away.’”
I asked: “How could such an astonishing about-face have occurred – from violent attack to Omerta within three days?
“One reason could be that in the meanwhile I was again interviewed (on STV) and decided for the first time to give the real reason for being forced to write the book concerned.
“I told of how I had been accosted in Queen Street Station, Glasgow, one night by an academic who was sufficiently drunk to be indiscreet, when he told me he had been at an establishment in the city where it had been decided they were sick of all you pipers playing in different styles, and we’re going to make you play in the same style. All of you.
“’The reason is not hard to find. Two different styles of playing the same tune existed: the Cameron style and the MacPherson style. The great problem is that both styles were said to have come down from the MacCrimmons, which is as nonsensical as the legend has been shown to be, and a total embarrassment to people who have gone irrevocably into print extolling the genius of the MacCrimmons as if they had known them personally, and had heard them playing.
“’Therefore a secret meeting appears to have been convened where it was decided to complete the destruction of two traditional styles of playing unique and ancient music and supplant it with a plastic style to prop up a false legend, and incidentally save the faces of certain bagpipe-writers who literally prated about the skills of their idols, whom they could never have assessed in person.
“’Little wonder these people have gone to earth for they have been publicly exposed as being as guilty of cultural genocide as Butcher Cumberland, whose apt and willing pupils the chiefs of Clan MacLeod and Macdonald of Skye have been shown to be.
“’I feel very deeply that an investigation should be set up by the music department of the School of Scottish Studies, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and the Scottish Education Department, now charged with teacher authentic pibroch in schools, to discover where a priceless part of our national heritage has been wilfully destroyed, for what reasons, and what can be done to conserve the separate styles before they are completely obliterated’”.
Or was there another reason?
It is reasonable to suppose that anyone who obtained the cuttings would have expected me to reply to such vituperation, but because the date of Dixon’s final letter was excluded from the index, no-one would have looked for my third letter which blew apart the Society’s collusion in attempting to wipe out the traditional styles and replace them with the distortions of a lunatic.
Who can say? But my final letter in turn provoked the frightened Triad and its followers into its desperate campaign of smear and lies which has now dirtily spurted into the 21st century, still hoping to destroy the my reputation and integrity and my book alike. Thirty years after it was published.
It meant that Cannon, who was responsible for this panoply of blunders, these distortions and bouts of episodic ignorance, was quite prepared to smear, under the guise of academic respectability, me and my work by proxy for as long as his error-stricken book remained unchallenged on a library shelf, anywhere in the world.
Whatever else it was, one grotesque thing is certain. It was the ultimate transgression of my human rights and freedom of speech as an author. The persons concerned will now be called to account.
2. PIOBAIREACHD and its Interpretation
a. ‘This self-contradictory book’
I must confess that when I first read this self-contradictory book I could not make up my mind whether it was intended as another piece of tartan frippery for the tourist trade or was meant to be taken seriously. If so it must have a covert motive. We shall see.
The book contains a partial restatement of the already discredited MacCrimmon “legend” with the authors on such terms of familiarity they might amost have been kissing cousins, although they certainly never met nor heard one. They still assert the family were the finest players, teachers and, of course, composers of pibroch, which they invented, and also ran a piping college on Skye for 300 unbroken years.
Confusion and omissions are the hallmarks of this slim volume. Indeed the omissions are more chilling than the admissions, and when anything inconvenient rears its antagonistic head, why, it’s chopped off. Unfortunately the book has assumed a Hydra-like dimension and for every lopped-off fact, another unfeeling and inconsiderate question sprouts in its place.
And for one co-author to be so touchy and even petulant about the mis-spelling of his name, it is most unfortunate that the persons concerned, respectively secretary and vice-president of the Piobaireachd Society, misnamed the Society’s chief tutor at least 104 times within 122 pages. I assume John Macdonald knew how to write his name correctly.
MacNeill is no better when dealing with the historical side of piping, claiming that pipers were so scarce in the late 1700’s they were paid 30 guineas to join up, while an ordinary recruit was only given “the king’s shilling.” All the more surprising a blunder because of Mr MacNeill’s deep involvement with the annual piping jamboree at Blair Castle, sprung by a whisky company, for the tenth Duke of Atholl had to bribe recruits with 10 guineas and a watch engraved with his regiment’s name to induce them to sign on. “Others cost more.” The king’s shilling, forsooth.
But this is where Mr MacNeill’s bagpipe springs a leak. The duke could not find pipers and instructed his minister to write to Skye, that alleged seedbed of piping, and get some. A Skye minister replied in 1778 (and note the order of importance): “The McArthurs and MacCrimmons are all gone, excepting one old man of the latter, who has something from MacLeod” (i.e. a pensioner) “and no others have succeeded them.”
Now Mr MacNeill’s genealogical table, asserts that Iain Dubh was then 49, in his prime, and taught at Borreraig until 1796. He could hardly be the “old man”. So who was he? And where was Iain Dubh? The unbroken line turns out to be more of a myth than a legend, and worse still, documentary evidence has turned up showing that the “last” MacCrimmon was in fact actually taught by a MacArthur. Mr MacNeill omits this gem.
He also omits to mention that most of the alleged “MacCrimmon” pibrochs were previously published under other names before the MacCrimmon tag was shoved on them in a classic scam which owes more to the methods of Phineas T. Barnum than to historical fact. For example Mr MacNeill claims that the protracted “Lament for Donald Ban” is “the last great MacCrimmon composition…most beautiful tune ever recorded.”
Unhappily it did not surface until around 1820 and, in part is note for note with a lament composed in 1790 by Angus MacArthur, who perhaps suffered from retrospective second sight and actually stole the tune before it was composed.
How does Mr MacNeill treat this spooky facet? He leaves it out, along with the fact the MacLeods and MaCrimmons were going off to “fight” for Butcher Cumberland, for whom they committed acts of terrorism on their own people, finally trying to betray Prince Charles for “the £30,000 of English gold.” Mr MacNeill’s response is: “This part of our piping story is best told quickly.” He then omits it. One sees what he means.
To reinforce his thesis that the MacCrimmons “invented” pibroch, Mr MacNeill is also forced to claim the Irish had nothing “remotely” resembling pibroch, adding that pipes were outlawed in Ireland from 1367, itself an enlightening if inadvertent comment on the antiquity of pibroch, and Mr Mac Neill’s knowledge of his subject.
In our oldest record, the Campbell Canntaireachd (CC), dated 1797, is a pibroch, , “Brian O’Duff’s Lament”, which consists of an urlar or melody, and eight variations. The tune is specifically Irish and is also known in Ireland as “Tumilin O’Counichan”. What Mr MacNeill also ignores is that the tune turns up again in MacLeod of Gesto’s book of canntaireachd, or chanting, which he actually took down in person from the so-called last MacCrimmon and published in 1828. There the pibroch is called “Tumilin O’Counichan” in the index, and on the music page is added: “An Irish Tune.”
Additionally the CC contains a tune called “One of the Irish piobarich”, implying there were more. Mr MacNeill has succeeded in telling us that pibroch was invented in Ireland (pre-1367) centuries before the MacCrimmons are said to have materialised. The Irish scholars will bless him.
Gen. Richardson’s section of the book is no less contradictory and omissive. He claims that pibroch has passed unchanged from the MacCrimmons to a famous piper, Calum Piobaire, who then taught the Society’s chief instructor (whom they misnamed 104 times).
The general is then forced to admit that Macdonald changed his style of playing, a cardinal sin in the transmission of pibroch, which is as unforgiveable as it was well-known, leading to his nickname, “The Bastard Piper.”
Yet the Piob. Society kept giving him prizes for playing their aberrent settings until he was 68; four allocated after he was 60. And the good general quotes MacDonald’s views as if they were Holy Writ, even admitting he said: “What does it matter what we teach them, Piobaireachd is dead anyway.”
“Quite the contrary,” the general splutters, but in the most damning omission of all, does not quote Macdonald’s letters to the author, Seton Gordon, himself a member of the Society’s music committee. “To me,” Macdonald wrote from Tongue Hotel on September 8, 1940, “it seems evident from the results of the past 15 years” – i.e. 1925, when the 1st part of the Society’s 2nd Series was published – “ that the preservation of our ancient and traditional Music, with all its beautiful and Melodious Airs, and sentiment has passed into the wrong hands, and it will take a long time if ever, it can be restored to its original standard.”
How can Gen. Richardson purport to give Macdonald’s views on pibroch without quoting these condemnatory letters? If he is in ignorance of their existence, he seems peculiarly unfitted to write the book. If he deliberately omitted them, he owes us all an explanation.
Read between the lines, the book is not so much the end of an auld sang as an epitaph, a sort of death-knell, for this unique music which has inspired composers as diverse as Beethoven, Benjamin Britten and Aaron Copland. Our lovely national music, our wondrous fire star pageant of sound which reveals our social history better than any book…when played traditionally. Music that can melt your heart, or fire it, or make it grieve. Because of what is inadvertently revealed, the music has now become incomprehensible to the people for whom it was composed. Pibroch deserved a better fate, and so did we.
Robert Reid and the midden-divers
It was in this midden of a book that the Piobaireachd Society chose to vilify Robert Reid, attempting to smear his integrity for all time to account for the alleged difference between his playing and the playing of Sandy Cameron, in an unprecedented piece of automorphism, i.e. finding the symptoms of their own mental condition in their victim.
The book was seen to be the response of the Society and all its associates to the BBC Scotland Radio series, Pibroch, the Tangled Web, and first revealed that Campbell-K, without admitting how, had come into possession of the missing MacDougall Gillies MS book.
MacNeill, from his earliest days in the tenements of Partick, Glasgow, knew all about middens, where stinking domestic refuse was piled into a communal back court behind each block, and used his boyhood vocabulary to claim my MacCrimmon book “gives us uninteresting sidelights on the history of Highland Hoodlums, leaving not a midden unraked, a toilet unflushed or a septic tank unscrubbed.” If MacNeill preferred to revert to his symptomatic language, perhaps I should draw attention to it by returning the compliment.
In chapter two I had inadvertently exposed how his fellow-twisters were trying to make a fast buck (millions of them) out of falsifying the history of the treacherous MacLeods of Dunvegan who, to escape charges of confirmed slavery, had betrayed “Bonnie” Prince Charlie before he had even landed in Scotland to the country’s chief law officer in writing. And that was just for starters.
I had also revealed in The Scotsman newspaper that I knew all about MacNeill’s secret meeting at his College of Piping when it was decided to destroy the ancient styles of playing pibroch by falsifying competition results at a new “contest”. (His rage was so great and uncontrollable he broke the “conspiracy of silence” on the MacCrimmon book, bitterly complaining about the false spellings of his name, so distanced from reality he forgot his assumed name “Seumas MacNeill” was as phoney as his contest results, for pre-war he was just plain Jimmy McNeill, confirmed by his birth certificate).
Teams of canny Glasgow citizens had for years re-cycled the filth from the back-courts and were known as midden-divers, which MacNeill and Richardson had just comparatively done, leading MacNeill to claim the “evidence” of the unwanted Gillies MS proved “that Reid had developed his own style and deviated in many respects from the true MacDougall Gillies teaching” which neither of our midden-divers knew anything about anyway, but here was the way to destroy, they hoped, the integrity of the music clips in the Tangled Web, that depicted the preferable and original way of playing pibroch. But they were simply too unmusical to fathom. Or had their own reasons for trying to destroy.
Anyone who knew MacNeill’s playing, before he died, was aware of what a ghastly pibroch player he was, even down to playing a metronome beside the platform while he competed. To check, all you have to do is play the original BBC vinyl discs made of MacNeill’s and John MacFadyen’s playing. Not a single taorluath sounds the same, and you must remember that for years the College of Piping version was dismissively rejected because of its lack of depth. Perhaps MacNeill had a swift course off Old Nick after he went underground. Who am I to say, after hearing the reconstructed recordings of his ham-fisted rendition of certain well-loved tunes which are now passed off as his?
Despite the facts, Richardson then asserted “Bob Reid was doing precisely what John MacDonald (sic) urged his players to do – ‘Listen to what I tell you, but adopt your own style and stick to it.’” As Macdonald taught his pupils, at Campbell-K’s command, off a photographic copy of Angus MacKay’s MS books, and not what he himself was taught, all I can say is: That will be right, Jimmy.
To personify the midden-diving, Richardson then claimed he had been taught by Reid but had already asserted that he came from Fife, “doncha know”, automatically negating his latest claim. Perhaps he thought all miners came from Fife. The authors then claimed MacDougall Gillies was a ham-fisted player. But MacNeill was too young ever to have heard him, while Richardson had presumably switched off his hearing aid again, unless it was all clogged after he came up for air from his glutinous task.
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