Thought this story might be of interest, our Canadian members will be familiar with it but many others won't be. Bloody outrageous that a private school that charges fees of £25,000 per academic year should have asked for money for these pipes.
Derek
Vancouver Sun, Page B01, 02-Oct-2006: War hero's bagpipes coming home By Stephen Hume
The bagpipes a Chilliwack teenager played to turn the tide in one of the most desperate fights of the First World War are coming home, The Vancouver Sun has learned.
Piper James Cleland Richardson's courage on that bloody day in 1916 earned him the Victoria Cross but his pipes, the most famous in Canadian history, lay unidentified in a dusty school display cabinet in the Scottish highlands for almost three-quarters of a century.
The Canadian Club of Vancouver has purchased them from Ardvreck School in Crieff, Scotland for an undisclosed price.
It plans to present them to Premier Gordon Campbell and Speaker Bill Barisoff as a gift to British Columbians in a November ceremony at the provincial legislature.
Richardson's pipes will be permanently displayed in the legislature's rotunda, confirms Chilliwack MLA and Environment Minister Barry Penner.
The return of the pipes follows years of research by Pipe Major Roger Maguire of the Canadian Scottish Regiment. Maguire matched a rare family tartan used only by pipers from Richardson's unit with a scrap found on the broken pipes.
A delegation led by Patrick Reid and including MLAs Penner and Solicitor-General John Les, Pipe Major Maguire and Dan Richardson of Ottawa, the famous piper's grand-nephew, will travel to Scotland later this week to take official possession.
The bagpipes had been left in safekeeping at Ardvreck by Maj. Edward Yeld Bate, a teacher at the school. He found them in 1917 while serving as a British army chaplain where Piper Richardson was killed.
The ceremony at Ardvreck on Oct. 8 marks the 90th anniversary of the day on which the pipes were lost at Courcelette, France, during the grisly battle of the Somme. Total casualties in that battle numbered more than a million men, of whom 310,486 were killed or missing in action.
Richardson enlisted with B.C.'s 72nd Seaforth Highlanders in August
1914, but served with the 16th Battalion, Canadian Scottish after it was cobbled together from the Seaforths, Victoria's Gordon Highlanders, Winnipeg's Cameron Highlanders and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders from Hamilton.
When Canadian Scottish went to France in 1915, its men still wore the assorted tartans of the regiments with which they had originally enlisted. For Richardson, that meant the Lennox tartan adorned his pipes. It was the tartan of the Scottish family to which the wife of the Seaforths' commanding officer, Lt.-Col. Edward Leckie, belonged.
After 1917, the Canadian Scottish adopted different tartans. So the Lennox tartan on the pipes at Ardvreck was Maguire's key. Only Richardson is known to have piped his battalion to battle at Courcelette. Only Seaforth pipes were decorated with the Lennox tartan.
On Oct. 8, 1916, Richardson's battalion was being slaughtered after an advance had stalled before a maze of barbed wire protecting a German stronghold named Regina Trench.
Most of the officers were dead or wounded. Survivors flattened themselves in depressions to avoid the bullets that snapped overhead like millions of angry hornets.
"The conditions were those of indescribable peril and terror," wrote Lt.-Col. Cyrus Peck, in a memoir. He himself won the Victoria Cross for bravery in 1918.
Just how perilous the Canadian Scottish position was is evident in the battalion's muster rolls. Three days later, when it was withdrawn, the battalion of about 1,000 had suffered 867 casualties and of its commissioned officers, only one lieutenant survived.
At a moment when all seemed lost, the Chilliwack teenager rose like a dirty ghost. He tucked his bagpipes under his elbow and swaggered through a storm of shrapnel and bullets as he played "with the greatest coolness," says the official military citation.
First he played the Ruidhle Thulaichean, a stirring dance tune favoured by highland warriors. Then he played The Devil in the Kitchen, a tune he perhaps chose as ironic comment on the men's desperate predicament.
Peck later called Richardson's piping "One of the great deeds of the war . . . The lad's whole soul was bound up in the glory of piping."
"The effect was instantaneous," says Richardson's Victoria Cross citation. Survivors of the Canadian Scottish rose behind their
19-year-old piper. Observers said they leaned into enemy fire like men in a strong wind. They crossed 700 metres of barbed wire, shellfire and machine gun bullets and swept the enemy from Regina Trench in furious hand-to-hand fighting.
Piper Richardson was later detailed to escort a wounded sergeant-major and some prisoners to the rear. When he realized he'd forgotten his pipes, he insisted on returning for them. He vanished into the maelstrom of shellfire and was never seen again.
Today, the brave Chilliwack teenager is forever a part of France.
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