John Peacock (piper)

John Peacock (piper)

John Peacock (c. 1756 in Morpeth – 1817 in Newcastle) was one of the finest Northumbrian smallpipers of his age, and probably a fiddler also, and the last of the Newcastle Waits. He studied the smallpipes with 'old' William Lamshaw, of Morpeth, and later with Joseph Turnbull, of Alnwick.

His playing was highly regarded in his lifetime: Thomas Bewick, the engraver, who also lived and worked in Newcastle, wrote Some time before the American War broke out, there had been a lack of musical performers upon our streets, and in this interval, I used to engage John Peacock, our inimitable performer, to play on the Northumberland or Small-pipes; and with his old tunes, his lilts, his pauses, and his variations, I was always excessively pleased. William Green, piper to the Duke of Northumberland from 1806, considered him the best small pipes player he ever heard in his life.

He is also closely associated with the first printed collection of music for smallpipes, A Favorite Collection of Tunes with Variations Adapted for the Northumberland Small Pipes, Violin, or Flute, published by William Wright, of Newcastle, in about 1800.

As well as containing 50 tunes for smallpipes, this also contains an engraving, generally thought to have been done in the workshop of Thomas Bewick, showing 2 chanters and their fingering charts; one is a simple keyless chanter with an octave range from G to g, the other is J. Peacock's New Invented Pipe Chanter with the addition of Four Keys, these keys were for the notes low D, E, F sharp, and high a.

Peacock was thus probably the first player of the instrument to play an extended keyed chanter. Such chanters continued to be developed in the first decades of the 19th century, by John Dunn, in association with Peacock, by Robert Reid, and later by others, notably Reid's son James.

Thomas Bewick encouraged Peacock to teach pupils to become masters of this kind of music; one of these pupils was Bewick's own son, Robert Eliot Bewick.