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For more than a decade, from 1968 to
1982, Barry Ewen worked diligently to help raise the
standard of piping in Nova Scotia. His teaching efforts at St.
Ann’s Gaelic College, with the Antigonish Legion Pipe Band, and
with the Scotia Legion Pipe Band influenced many pipers, some of
whom are among the piping teachers in the province today.
James Barry
Ewen was born in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland on October 29th,
1946 to City of Glasgow Police Constable Charles Ewen and his
wife, Martha (nee MacLean). As a boy, he attended Garscadden
Primary School, Queen Victoria High School, and later David Dale
College of Engineering. He apprenticed as a fitter/machinist and,
after coming to Canada, worked in recruitment, engineering,
pharmaceuticals, teaching, and as a maintenance supervisor.
He now lives in Windsor, Ontario with his wife Becky and their two
children, Austin and Kendra. He is presently employed with Ford of
Canada.
Barry’s
piping career started at age 9 in the Knightswood Juveniles Pipe
Band. He remembers the excitement he felt when one of the older
boys brought his pipes to the chanter lesson and he thought he
might get to look at them up close or even give them a blow. As
often happens with youngsters, however, Barry’s initial interest
was short lived, and he soon stopped attending lessons.
About a year
later, piper Jim Moffat was a visitor to the family’s home and
he happened to see a practice chanter in the corner of the room.
Martha Ewen told him that her son had started and quit, though she
thought he still had an interest in learning to play. Moffat
offered to take him as a pupil and thereafter, every Tuesday
evening, Barry went off to his home for lessons. Before long, he
was playing the pipes. Moffat was a piper with PM Andrew
Stoddart’s New Lanark Pipe Band and when Barry knew the
band’s tunes he joined as well.
Moffat was a
very patient teacher who encouraged and nurtured the young
musician in his playing. He saw, however, that Barry needed to
learn from his own mistakes as well as from the experiences of his
teacher. Barry had a 45 rpm recording of a Canadian piper by the
name of William Gilmour, who was a top player in the 50’s and
60’s. The recording made the drones seem very loud and Barry
concluded that this was the right way to go. A competition was
coming up in Lanarkshire with the famous Robert Hardie judging.
With great enthusiasm, the boy opened up his drone reeds enough to
blast everyone within a mile of him. Arriving at the competition,
PM Stoddart informed him that his drones were terrible and
that he couldn’t possibly play them in the competition. Barry
had to use another boy’s pipes, which were so easy that he
overblew the reed and it squeaked and squealed throughout the
performance. As one might imagine, Bob Hardie’s comments were
not too kind. It was a tough lesson hard learned. After the
competition was over, Barry took his pipes to PM Stoddart’s home
where they were set up correctly and he played all afternoon.
A short time
later, Barry began to go for lessons to Tom Anderson, pipe
major of the Renfrew Pipe Band which had the dubious honour of
having been runner-up more times than any other Grade I band of
the day. PM Anderson was a hard taskmaster, and very strict. He
did not easily tolerate mistakes. There was a lot of pressure on
Barry to perform well for any mistake he made could well knock the
band out of the prize lists. “Nerves got the best of me the
night before every competition,” he remembers, “but on
the day of the event, it always seemed to work out.” When
Anderson left the Renfrew band a few years later, Tom MacPherson
took over and Barry was named pipe sergeant at the age of
nineteen.
After five
years with Renfrew, Barry felt he needed a change and thought it
would be a good career move to join the Edinburgh City Police and
play in their band. PM Iain MacLeod, however, was not interested,
which was one of the biggest disappointments of Barry’s life. As
one door closes, another opens, and it was at this time that Barry
began to go to Duncan Johnstone for piobaireachd and light music
lessons. He started performing with the Invergordon Distillery
Pipe Band as a guest piper but when word came that the band was to
fold he decided to join Muirhead and Sons instead. After
only a few weeks with Bob Hardie’s band, however, Barry heard
that Invergordon had started up again and he went back up north.
While playing
with the Renfrew band, Barry had started going along to some of
the amateur piping competitions. He took his share of
prizes, including the Scottish Solo Amateur Championship in 1963
and again in 1964. Barry was thrilled to be awarded cups engraved
with the names of some of Scotland’s greatest pipers, such as
John D. Burgess, Hugh MacCallum, Bob Hardie, John Wilson, and Iain
MacFadyen, and to see his own name added to the lists. He entered
his first professional competition at the Luss Highland Games at
age 20. He arrived late with only two minutes to warm his pipes up
resulting in a poor performance. John D. Burgess thought
otherwise, however, and commended Barry on his playing. It was the
sound of his chanter that did him in on that occasion.
“You didn’t need that tape on your F,” Burgess told him.
At the Uist and Barra competition, Barry managed to get into the
short leet in the Strathspey and Reel event along with PM Angus
MacDonald, PM Iain Morrison, John D. Burgess, John MacFadyen and
Dugald Ferguson. He didn’t get a prize but thought he had done
quite well for a young piper who had just turned 21.
In April of
1968, Barry left Scotland to become Director of Bagpipe Music at
St. Ann’s Gaelic College on Cape Breton Island. There were a
number of very good local players and he soon shaped them into a
competing unit, the Gaelic College Pipe Band.
The first contest he attended in
Canada was the Antigonish Highland Games. He was surprised to find
that the pipe bands were not graded. Rather, they were grouped
according to age as senior and junior bands. “The Maritime bands
back then didn’t seem to be concerned with setting chanters,”
he recalls. “They were more interested in dress and deportment.
In the solo events, the competitors would sit lined up on benches
waiting their turns. When their names were called, they would
stand up, put the pipes on their shoulders, and begin to play with
little or no warm-up or tuning of the drones. One piper in the
Professional contest marched continuously around the stage
throughout his march, strathspey and reel performance!” The
young Scot was not impressed.
That was the
first of fourteen years attending the Antigonish Highland Games
and over that time Barry watched the standard of performance
improve steadily. Competing regularly throughout the Maritimes and
occasionally in Ontario, he won almost every professional prize
available to him, many of them several times. He was concerned,
however, that so many Maritime players dropped out once they
reached eighteen due to the junior/senior band system. Working
through the Nova Scotia Pipers and Pipe Band Association, and with
support primarily from Antigonish delegates, he helped to
persuade bands to adopt a graded system. It was not easy. One of
his most forceful opponents in this issue, a gentleman
representing an all-girls pipe band from Cape Breton, declared
that girls needed to leave pipe bands at eighteen so they could
meet young men, marry and start families. “Once that sex thing
is over”, the gentleman proclaimed loudly, “They can return to
their piping and play in the senior bands!”
A second area
where Barry was able to influence the NSPPBA was in the formation
of an approved panel of judges, something that had been badly
needed for many years. “In those days,” Barry remembers,
“Pipe bands were given 75 points for piping and 25 for drumming.
At one contest, the piping judge gave full marks to the very first
pipe band that played, effectively shutting out all the others
before he had even heard them play!”
The Gaelic
College Pipe Band enjoyed mounting success which made other bands
rethink their own positions. The Antigonish Legion brought in Bill
Magennis, retired Pipe Major of the 1st Btn. Black Watch of
Canada, who was a charismatic man with a good way with kids and
Barry watched that band improve rapidly. As the years passed, Bill
moved to Ontario (1972) and Barry moved closer to Antigonish. The
Legion band went to Ottawa in June of 1974 and asked Barry to come
along and help set up the new Sinclair chanters which had arrived
the week before the event. It was a very successful weekend, with
the band placing 1st in the Grade II Canadian Interprovincial
Championship and 2nd in the Canadian Open Championship. On the
trip home, the band members asked Barry to become their pipe major
and he agreed.
Under
Barry’s leadership, the Antigonish Legion Pipe Band enjoyed a
continuous string of successes. Competing at the Grade I level in
the Maritimes from 1973 to 1976, the band won annually
Maritime Championship titles and the title of Grade I Champions
Supreme. Competing in Grade II on the national and international
stages, the Antigonish band won the Inter-Continental Championship
in 1975 and the following year placed fifth at the Cowal
Championships, fourth at Edinburgh, and third at the World Pipe
Band Championships in Hawick, Scotland. “I think we deserved
better at the World’s,” Barry says. “We played and sounded
great!” The Antigonish band had been together for ten
years but after the World’s, many of its members left to seek
employment or educational opportunities away from home and the
band split up. It was a great disappointment to Barry who felt
they were just beginning to sound and play at a high level.
In 1978 some
of the prominent players from across the Maritimes urged him to
start a new band and that fall the Atlantic Caledonia Pipe Band
was formed with Barry as its pipe major. It entered competition at
the Grade II level but funding proved to be a major stumbling
block until an offer of sponsorship came from the Scotia Branch of
the Royal Canadian Legion, of Halifax. This stroke of luck led to
a better level of financial security and a change in the name to
the Scotia Legion Pipe Band. The Pipe Sergeant was Neil Dickie, a
native of Scotland. Other pipers included Ann (Robinson) Gray
(Celtic Heritage, ----------), Margaret (MacDonald) Archibald,
Alan Fogarty, Robyn (Sutherland) Whitty, Ian MacKinnon,
Allan Kenny, Dr. George Fraser, John Grant, Doug Boyd, Jerry
Gillis and Scott Williams. The band’s impressive drum corps was
under the leadership of former North American champion Ernie
Rookard of Saint John, NB and included such well-known players as
Neil McKenna, and Mike Steele, with Tom MacIsaac on bass.
The Scotia
Legion Pipe Band’s entry into competition at the Grade I level
took place at the Pugwash games. The morning before the event, the
entire band submitted themselves to hypnotic suggestion at the
hands of fellow bandsman Dr. George Fraser, a psychiatrist
and one of Canada’s foremost authorities on hypnotism. Barry
picks up the story: “Once he put us under, George gave us
post hypnotic suggestions such as ‘You will play better than you
ever played in your life and it will be your most enjoyable
performance ever’, ‘You will be relaxed’, and ‘Barry
will be pleased and at the end of the performance he will thank
you all for doing such a terrific job’. That day the band
did play a terrific performance, the Ontario judges were
impressed, and I went along and thanked everybody for doing such
an excellent job. While driving home, I realized that I had done
exactly what George had suggested, and so had the rest of the
band!”
The Scotia
Legion Pipe Band was very successful at the Grade I level, despite
the many obstacles that constantly presented themselves. Winter
driving conditions, for example, played havoc with attendance at
rehearsals as members had to travel every Sunday from across the
Maritimes to their weekly practice in Truro. Barry became
frustrated, and this sowed the seed which eventually led to his
move to Ontario.
In 1982 Barry
joined the 78th Fraser Highlanders Pipe Band of Toronto. At that
time, their repertoire included the “My Laggan Love” and
“The Mason’s Apron” medleys which won wide acclaim
internationally. “The first day time I was out with the band, we
had to play the Mason’s Apron medley,” Barry reminisced. “We
started off in a crescent shape rather than in regular band
formation with me on the right side, Bill Livingstone to my left,
John Walsh opposite and the drummers in the middle. This
positioning left me in the pipe major’s spot as we burst into
the reel and marched out of the crescent into regular band
formation. My trouble began when we marched forward into the
competition circle. You see, at band practices, we had
always rehearsed the medley standing still and I had never marched
into the circle from this position. Being in the PM’s spot, I
couldn’t see any of the others in the band as they were to my
left and behind me. I started off using one stride for every
two bars while the rest of the band was taking one stride every
bar. Jerry Quigg had a heck of a time marching behind me!”
Barry played with the Frasers
for three seasons but a new job and a move to Windsor meant the distance
was too great to make it to the Toronto rehearsals so he reluctantly left
the band. While in Windsor, he competed in the Toronto Knockout
competition and at the Detroit Branch of the OPPBS competition. For a
brief period, he also worked with the Windsor Police Pipe Band. At the
present time, Barry is not playing with a band and judges infrequently as
his job often requires seven-day weeks and shift work. One of his pastimes
is keeping in touch with pipers around the world via the Internet and on
database he keeps track of his extensive tape collection of almost thirty
years of weekly BBC piping programs. He still teaches several players who
do well in their competitions and he keeps in touch with pipers around the
world via the Internet. Fond memories of his years in Nova Scotia are
frequently rekindled by contact with pipers and drummers who still
remember the tremendous positive impact he made, one that reverberates
throughout the Maritime region to this
day.
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