The flute and Irish history

[Terry McGee]

Mr.Gumby mentions a flute by Coyne, and Coyne gets a mention in the New Langwill Index as "flourished Dublin, first half 19th century", with a "flute in private collection" cited. "Identifiable with either the bagpipe and MI maker Maurice Coyne listed 1850 at 149 Thomas St, or the Irish bagpipe maker John Wm. Coyne, listed 1835 to 1840 at 2 Essex Quay." (The inference being I guess that Maurice made Scots pipes, and John Wm made Irish pipes, and we don't know which of them made the flute. Possibly Maurice, as he's also listed as Musical Instruments maker?)

It has long puzzled me that anyone who could make a set of pipes could make a flute (I've done both, so it must be true!) And you'd think there would be a more ready market for the flute than the pipes, of either persuasion. So why wasn't Ireland up to its ankles in locally made flutes? Again, we have to take into account the social situation - people were starving, so they're not going to have much to splash on a flute, no matter how cheaply made.

I hung out for a while with the late Paul Davies (aka Davis) in London in 1974, who had a lively trade buying up old flutes from the rag and bone men servicing the Portabello Road markets, fixing them up and selling them in Ireland. And when I got to Ireland a little time later, I was already hatching plans to make flutes, and had my antennas up for flutes old and new when I went to sessions, and Comhaltas events such as the Fleadhs and Scoil Éigse where I attended flute classes given by Mick Allen. All I saw were old English or German flutes. Nothing new, and nothing locally made old or new. No wonder Paul was doing such good business. A working Rudall and Rose for £100. Here's Paul's card from the time. The explanation on it was to help get it through Australian Customs as an antique if challenged.



So, all of this tells me that O'Neill's account of the flute's popularity is highly romanticised. And that the Irish flute's golden period is either upon us or is yet to come. More players and makers than ever before. Better instruments than ever before. Wider acceptance of the music than ever before. Convince me I'm wrong!

(Just back from a couple of hours playing with our local boxplayer on the waterfront in Batemans Bay. So many smiles, grins, thumbs up, pauses to chat, images taken, etc. And two extremely attractive young ladies dancing. And they thanked us!)

[Mr.Gumby]

Coyne gets a mention in the New Langwill Index as "flourished Dublin, first half 19th century", with a "flute in private collection" cited. "Identifiable with either the bagpipe and MI maker Maurice Coyne listed 1850 at 149 Thomas St, or the Irish bagpipe maker John Wm. Coyne, listed 1835 to 1840 at 2 Essex Quay." (The inference being I guess that Maurice made Scots pipes, and John Wm made Irish pipes, and we don't know which of them made the flute. Possibly Maurice, as he's also listed as Musical Instruments maker?)

Thorough treatment of the Coynes in Sean Donnelly's definitive a century of pipemaking.

Maurice Coyne made both Irish and Scottish pipes I have seen pipes and the flute, which was most likely the one mentioned in Langwill.

[Terry McGee]

And Scottish pipes, if I understand the article correctly. Which would make sense - there would have been a ready market for them in those days.

But again we see that these instruments are not being made for the peasants - costs of around £20 and £30 being quoted for Irish pipes just pre-Famine. And: 'For the sake of comparison, between the 1830s and 1850s a Ruddall and Rose flute would have cost 8-9 guineas; an English concertina, hand-crafted and aimed at the top end of the market, would have cost sixteen guineas; a mass-produced Lachenal, ‘a people’s concertina’, would have retailed for 2-3 guineas."

And you're earning 2s 6d a week (one eighth of a pound) and have to feed and house the family first? And that's in the run-up to the Famine!

[PB+J]

Here's a description of the lands of the Marquess of Conyngham, 1846, which consisted of over 120,000 acres of Donegal and other estates in Clare and Meath. From Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the condition of the people of Ireland

“From one end of his large estate here to the other , nothing is to be found but poverty , misery , wretched cultivation , and infinite subdivision of land. There are no gentry , no middle class , all are poor, wretchedly poor. Every shilling the tenants can raise from their half - cultivated land is paid in rent, whilst the people subsist for the most part on potatoes and water.”

He goes on like this at some length. So do multiple other other commentators. including Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist

"I had heard much of the misery and wretchedness of the Irish people, previous to leaving the United States, and was prepared to witness much on my arrival in Ireland. But I must confess, my experience has convinced me that the half has not been told. I supposed that much that I heard from the American press on this subject was mere exaggeration....The limits of a single letter are insufficient to allow anything like a faithful description of those painful exhibitions of human misery, which meet the eye of a stranger almost at every step. I spent nearly six weeks in Dublin, and the scenes I there witnessed were such as to make me ‘blush, and hang my head to think myself a man.’ I speak truly when I say I dreaded to go out of the house. The streets were almost literally alive with beggars, displaying the greatest wretchedness...

During my stay in Dublin, I took occasion to visit the huts of the poor in its vicinity – and of all places to witness human misery, ignorance, degradation, fifth and wretchedness, an Irish hut is pre-eminent... If I were to describe one, it would appear about as follows: Four mud walls about six feet high, occupying a space of ground about ten feet square, covered or thatched with straw – a mud chimney at one end, reaching about a foot above the roof – without apartments or divisions of any kind – without floor, without windows, and sometimes without a chimney – a piece of pine board laid on the top of a box or an old chest – a pile of straw covered with dirty garments, which it would puzzle any one to determine the original part of any one of them – a picture representing the crucifixion of Christ, pasted on the most conspicuous place on the wall – a few broken dishes stuck up in a corner – an iron pot, or the half of an iron pot, in one corner of the chimney – a little peat in the fireplace, aggravating one occasionally with a glimpse of fire, but sending out very little heat – a man and his wife and five children, and a pig."

Douglass is there in 1847, just as the blight is beginning.

So by the time O'Neill is old enough to build lasting memories, let's say about 6, half the people described in these accounts are dead or have emigrated.


None of these accounts are strictly objective--Douglass., for example, was sypathetic to the irish poor but also mildly anti-Catholic since evangelical protestants were the leaders of abolition in the US, and though he greatly admired O'Connell he was mostly hanging out with evangelical Anglo Irish abolitionists. But there are enough of them telling roughly the same story to make a convincing picture.

Hard to see how a flute, if they came to possess one, would stay in the family home for more than the time it took to find someone to sell it to.

[GreenWood]

PB+J

And who would anyone sell it to ?

Terry

The difficulty is this. How many instruments were made (hence played) in a time period and setting, how much that musical reality was verified by being documented, and how many instruments survived from that particular setting.

All of those vary for different settings and time periods. Surely Ireland had whistles, but there are no (?) 18th century whistles. Of early 19th Dublin made flutes one survived, just one!?

Rural life in Ireland was not much documented, but reference is searchable.

1786 Historical memoirs of the the Irish Bards

"Tabour was always favourite amongst the Irish, flute has ever been its associate"

https://books.google.pt/books?id=wwtYAA ... te&f=false

Map 1777 A music hall is on page 83 (as a lead)

https://books.google.pt/books?id=NP4HAA ... 20&f=false


This is in five minutes search


https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

Set latest date and try different key words, just pick out those seeming of interest from the result (here I tried mixtures of music flute, cork, galway, Ireland).

Or similar on web, quick search

German flute in gentry setting probably 1751 pg2

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25506109?r ... b_contents

18th century Uillean pipes from Ireland

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/501469


However, this is all work for someone else to do, to collate references, inventories, music, extrapolate or compare surviving instrument numbers between and depending on settings etc. etc. to try to draw a clearer picture of how things might have been... or at least to be able to question any competing perspectives.

[Conical bore]

It has long puzzled me that anyone who could make a set of pipes could make a flute (I've done both, so it must be true!) And you'd think there would be a more ready market for the flute than the pipes, of either persuasion. So why wasn't Ireland up to its ankles in locally made flutes? Again, we have to take into account the social situation - people were starving, so they're not going to have much to splash on a flute, no matter how cheaply made.

I'm no historian, but as an interested observer I'm of a mind to think the reality of how many flutes were being played in Ireland in the 1800's and further back is closer to O'Neill's description -- "No musical instrument was in such common use among the Irish peasantry as the flute" -- than the depictions of abject poverty by visiting gentry suggesting nobody could afford them.

The main reason I think it's likely that many flutes were being played, is that we're talking about a time before radio and recorded music. Music over the airwaves to a home radio receiver only dates to around 1920-30. Before that time, people had to make their own music, as they've done for thousands of years before the modern era. When hearing the life stories of well-known Irish musicians, it seems that just about all of them had a Mom who played concertina or a Dad who played fiddle. It sounds more like an unbroken tradition than something that suddenly sprang up in the 20th Century after the Famine.

Also, I think the comment that there was no middle class, only the very wealthy and peasants living in mud huts, might be overblown. Certainly there was massive poverty during this time, but someone had to be the local shopkeeper, the blacksmith, the tinker, the town doctor. Tradesmen who were not "to the manor born" but a bit more well-off than the peasants working the fields, and who could afford musical instruments for their families to play at home.

[PB+J]

I'm no historian, but as an interested observer I'm of a mind to think the reality of how many flutes were being played in Ireland in the 1800's and further back is closer to O'Neill's description -- "No musical instrument was in such common use among the Irish peasantry as the flute" -- than the depictions of abject poverty by visiting gentry suggesting nobody could afford them.

The main reason I think it's likely that many flutes were being played, is that we're talking about a time before radio and recorded music. Music over the airwaves to a home radio receiver only dates to around 1920-30. Before that time, people had to make their own music, as they've done for thousands of years before the modern era. When hearing the life stories of well-known Irish musicians, it seems that just about all of them had a Mom who played concertina or a Dad who played fiddle. It sounds more like an unbroken tradition than something that suddenly sprang up in the 20th Century after the Famine.

Also, I think the comment that there was no middle class, only the very wealthy and peasants living in mud huts, might be overblown. Certainly there was massive poverty during this time, but someone had to be the local shopkeeper, the blacksmith, the tinker, the town doctor. Tradesmen who were not "to the manor born" but a bit more well-off than the peasants working the fields, and who could afford musical instruments for their families to play at home.

That might very well be--Douglas dines with Anglo irish gentry, so they exist. But the quotes I put up are absolutely typical. Here's Gustave De Beaumont, who was a social scientist and genuinely concerned with the causes of poverty:

"Misery, naked and famishing, that misery which is vagrant, idle, and mendicant, covers the entire country; it shows itself everywhere, and at every hour of the day; it is the first thing you see when you land on the Irish coast, and from that moment it ceases not to be present to your view; sometimes under the aspect of the diseased displaying his sores, sometimes under the form of the pauper scarcely covered by his rags; it follows you everywhere, and besieges you incessantly; you hear its groans and cries in the distance; and if the voice does not excite profound pity, it importunes and terrifies you."

I'm not kidding when I say this sort of description is ubiquitous.

Here's Alexis De Toqueville, who is a serious man and no fool. This is from a letter he wrote to his sister, expressing his shock that people lived in one room cabins with a pig: "But when you are not used to it, as I said before," he admitted, "it shocks you. Those who are in a position to sleep with a pig are the well-off in Ireland. When he wallows complacently in the middle of the room, the owner of the house contemplates him with pride, and I entered so completely into this sentiment that, when I want to seek shelter against the rain, I take particular care to choose a house where a pig is found." "When I catch sight only of men," Tocqueville finally observed ironically, concluding his amusing disquisition on the Irish pig, "I go elsewhere.

And of course again the situation in the quotes above is about to be radically altered by the famine. Half the people are going to be gone--it's like Thanos and the snap. O'Neill's near total silence about the famine is odd, but trauma doesn't lend itself to easy expression.His nephew, Phillip O'Neill, grew up believing there was a mass famine grave on his grandfather's land (https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4798759/4795966/5150032) "In my grandfather's land in Derrygrenaugh to the east of Bantry there is a big hole surrounded by a wall 30 (feet) yards in circumference, one yard high, and it is supposed to have been 100 feet deep the first day. But after several hundred people including three priests were buried there it got filled up. It is certain that people were buried there (because) because my grandfather heard his father talking about it."

I think the famine is a much much bigger "disruptor" than accounts of traditional music usually allow for.

[david_h]

... from their half - cultivated land

What does half-cultivated mean there?

Hard to see how a flute, if they came to possess one, would stay in the family home for more than the time it took to find someone to sell it to.

But who to?

I wonder if Thomas Campbell Foster's description quoted by PB+J is a little like the news reports we get from African famines. Yes, it's bad, but not that simple, it's more granular.

I quoted a classification above https://fews.net/IPC (the table) Even with a major crop failure it doesn't (in the 21st century) go from OK to famine everywhere and for everyone at the same time. A family with over-divided or poor quality land and many surviving children may be hungry in the normal times. A family with better land, fewer children at home, maybe a daughter in service in the big house may get through the start of the famine. Far from being 'learned helplessness' (above) it's a case of progressive coping strategies. Staying in bed to conserve energy in the hope of being able to prepare for the next growing season (if you haven't had to sell the spade) is a coping strategy that may look like helplessness to a 'reporter' (in the widest sense).

Also, I think the comment that there was no middle class, only the very wealthy and peasants living in mud huts, might be overblown. Certainly there was massive poverty during this time, but someone had to be the local shopkeeper, the blacksmith, the tinker, the town doctor. Tradesmen who were not "to the manor born" but a bit more well-off than the peasants working the fields, and who could afford musical instruments for their families to play at home.

Yes, my thoughts too and better put.

Punchline: Some people may not need to sell the flute just yet and if they do there may be someone to sell it to.

[GreenWood]

"O'Neill's near total silence about the famine is odd"

In Poor and Getting Poorer? Living Standards in Ireland before the Famine

Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó. Gráda

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2596056

They offer it was "neither a Malthusian horror nor rosy revisionist view". Instead the poorest became poorer but "average income" probably rose. That would probably imply though that where poverty was regional, that whole region became more impoverished.

Poverty and Population in Pre-Famine Ireland A Fernihough

http://eh.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/eha.pdf

Has a couple of maps on that.

Or

"Nevertheless, it should be emphasised that Dublin city and its unions never had to face the scale of the famine horrors, disasters experienced in Connacht and Munster. "RTE


O'Neill grew up in Cork though I think, but just after the famine so no direct memory of the worse of that. As with wars and the like, I expect people just thank their own fortune and get on with life, and he seems like quite a positive character. For a broader setting, moods of resentment and so on are just supported by people, part of eventual independence from UK probably , but in his time he would possibly have thought it humiliating or similar, given Ireland was still under British rule.


david_h

My point was that the flute would still be in Ireland.

[PB+J]

... from their half - cultivated land

What does half-cultivated mean there?

I assume it means that much of the land was either reserved for the landlord's use or was "unimproved" bog.

It's an interesting discussion here and an example of the complexity of reading historical data, I'm not kidding when I say accounts of poverty in Ireland before the famine are ubiquitous--I've just quoted a few. Ireland experiences a rapid rise in population after 1800 which correlates chronologically to the accounts of extensive poverty. And the necessity of subdividing land is an outgrowth of that, so you have smaller and smaller plots, more poverty, and greater reliance on the potato. But it's very possible these accounts are more or less accurate, and we don't want to accept them. If the accounts of poverty are true, it's also true that this was poverty created by land access policies.

I've found multiple examples of landlords trying to pay people to emigrate well before the famine, because they have these tiny marginally rent-paying tenants and they recognize that cattle rearing would pay better. The poor are then termed "surplus" or "redundant" population, but they are only "surplus" because all the food crops go to pay rent. The political economy is structured to produce this outcome, so in that sense it's easy to believe.

it's interesting to be in the midst of researching all this--I'm transcribing photos from the Marquess Conyngham's papers--also to consider how and where musical culture would have survived

[PB+J]

"O'Neill's near total silence about the famine is odd"

O'Neill grew up in Cork though I think, but just after the famine so no direct memory of the worse of that. As with wars and the like, I expect people just thank their own fortune and get on with life, and he seems like quite a positive character. For a broader setting, moods of resentment and so on are just supported by people, part of eventual independence from UK probably , but in his time he would possibly have thought it humiliating or similar, given Ireland was still under British rule.


david_h

My point was that the flute would still be in Ireland.

O'Neill grew up in tralibane, Cork, about three mils east of Bantry. it was possibly the area most hard hit by the famine. Below from my book


The deaths in Ballydehob, ten miles from O’Neill’s home, “average forty to fifty daily; twenty were buried this morning,” wrote one witness in 1847: the people huddle in their mud cabins “so that they may die together with their children and not be seen by passers-by.” Between 1841 and 1851 more than half the people in Ballydehob died or emigrated. Because illustrated newspapers in England, Ireland, and the US reported it widely, the “famished and ghastly skeletons” of the town of Skibbereen, also about ten miles from O’Neill’s home, came to symbolize the famine internationally.

Roughly five mile’s walk from the O’Neills, in Drimoleague, “they died so rapidly and in such numbers that the bodies could not be buried in the ordinary way, but were thrown in mass into pits,” with hundreds “found dead in their own cabins and in the roads and fields.” A police sergeant at Drimoleague reported that the parish “had sunk from nearly 6000 to about 3000 in the course of two years, and this chiefly from death and not emigration.”

In the winter of 1846–47, more than 1,000 rural people, facing starvation and evicted from their homes, “thronged into Bantry,” a port town of roughly 4,000 three miles from the O’Neill house. The town had a few prominent buildings but also many one-room “mud cabins” made of compacted soil. “In the churchyard there yawned three monster graves; in one of which, up to the 1st of April, had been laid 232, in the second, 215, and in the third, 75 bodies; all from the workhouse.” “The mortality rate in the new work-house was appallingly high. Between 1845 and 1851, some 2,896 deaths were recorded there”: that is, more than one a day. By 1851 the country population around Bantry “had declined by 3,937 or 34.2 per cent.”


footnotes for that section:
"Exact numbers are impossible to determine:the figure of roughly a million deaths between 1847 and 1851 appears often, followed by as many emigrations in the same five-year period. Irish Americans have often wanted to claim a higher ranking in the victim Olympics than their present status in the US suggests. For a skeptical account of the famine’s magnitude, one that situates it in a global context, see Liam Kennedy, Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? (Sallins, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2016), chap. 1 For a concise and powerful general account of the demoralization of the famine, the way it deranged empathy, see Mac Suibhne, Subjects Lacking Words? Exact figures on population loss in Ireland are hard to come by, due to relatively poor record keeping. See Kevin Kenny, The American Irish, Studies in Modern History (New York: Routledge, 2014); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 280–344; Ó Gráda, Black 47, chap. 7; and Crowley et al., Atlas.

7. Crowley et al.,Atlas,368;Miller,Emigrants and Exiles,284.
8. SirJohnForbes,Memorandums of a Tour in Ireland (London:Smith,Elder, 1853), 79.
9. Kevin Hourihan,“Town Growth in West Cork:Bantry1600–1960,”Journal of the Cork Historical and Archeological Society 82 (December 1977): 83–97; John East, Glimpses of Ireland in 1847 (Bath, England: Hamilton, Adams, 1847), 38.

The facts seem pretty clear but as always exactly what they mean is hard to determine

[bigsciota]

A couple thoughts...

First off, it's worth visiting what Fintan Vallely's Companion has to say on the matter:

The flute, as played in Irish traditional music, is an import with a relatively short history in this country. Fragments of flutes and whistles dating to the eleventh century have been excavated in Dublin, Cork and Waterford and sycamore fipple flutes have been recorded as being made by children in Antrim. There appears to have been no tradition of transverse flute making or playing in Ireland before the eighteenth century when the flute first began to appear in the hands of wealthy amateurs. During the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, the flute was an immensely popular instrument throughout Europe, and huge numbers of instruments were manufactured on the continent and in London. Although there are indications that it was already being played in traditional music by the late eighteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth that it became more widespread, and only quite late in that century did it become common. The flute was rarely if ever used by the professional players for accompanying dance.

Secondly, it's again worth emphasizing that "flute" in an Irish context, especially prior to the middle of the 20th century, is quite a malleable word as Mr. Gumby points out. There's a reason Seamus Tansey was billed as the "King of the Concert Flute;" there were other instruments that could also have been called a "flute" but wouldn't fit our standard definition today of an up to 8 keyed simple system flute made from wood and with a "six fingers down" note of D. It would be interesting to know how much of a difference someone like O'Neill would have seen in the various instruments grouped together as "flutes," much in the same way that we think of things like classical guitars, steel-string acoustic guitars, electric guitars, half-size/travel guitars, etc., all as essentially simply "guitars."

Thirdly, and related to that point, a flute of some sort is actually one of the easiest instruments to make a working version of. This isn't to say that fine craftsmanship from the likes of Terry et al. isn't appreciated, but a bit of cane with a few holes cut into it and one end stopped up is a 20 minute job with a knife and can be serviceable enough for a couple hours of playing. I wish I could find the account I read of just this sort of thing happening in some older musician's recollection, but I can't seem to remember which book it came from. Maybe someone else here remembers.

Finally, it's my personal belief based on everything that I've read that the "peasant" nature of the music we play is often somewhat overstated, and that the middle class and even upper classes have had more influence than the romantic idea of "poor but happy" serfs gaily playing music inside their mud huts would lead us to believe. Not that they didn't have music, of course, just that they're not entirely to credit (blame?) for what we call "traditional Irish music."

[Steve Bliven]

And also have pity on the OP (remember him) who asked as simple question about Olwell wait times and prices, as alluded to in the Subject line.

Sounds like a whole new thread might be in order for the links between flutes and the socio-economic history of Ireland..

Just sayin'

Steve

[Mr.Gumby]

Finally, it's my personal belief based on everything that I've read that the "peasant" nature of the music we play is often somewhat overstated, and that the middle class and even upper classes have had more influence than the romantic idea of "poor but happy" serfs gaily playing music inside their mud huts would lead us to believe. Not that they didn't have music, of course, just that they're not entirely to credit (blame?) for what we call "traditional Irish music."

While that is not wrong and there have been enthusiasts from the 'higher echelons' of society involved in this music, during most of the earlier parts of the 20th century traditional music was pretty much unseen, not allowed in pubs, the preserve of country people. The traditional musicians that flocked around O'Riada were all intrigued, 'someone like that' would be interested in their music. Around the same time Sean Reid was the County engineer in Clare county council, he was called in for a quiet word with his superiors to let him know he couldn't be involved with the Tulla ceiliband and all that carry on, if he wanted to keep his job. In many circles diddly music was not a socially acceptable thing at all.

[PB+J]

And also have pity on the OP (remember him) who asked as simple question about Olwell wait times and prices, as alluded to in the Subject line.

Sounds like a whole new thread might be in order for the links between flutes and the socio-economic history of Ireland..

Just sayin'

Steve

Well i did give him an answer since I had just take delivery of an Olwell flute a day or so after his post! I'm still getting to know it.