Pipemaking
From about 1911 until 1943, Clough was, both alone and in collaboration with others, particularly Fred Picknell, a prolific maker of Northumbrian pipes. The earliest dateable reference to anybody buying a Clough chanter is from 1911, while Clough generally played a chanter by Picknell, which he used playing for King Edward in 1906. Picknell died in 1943, and Clough's house was bombed in the same year and his lathe stolen - as pieces of pipes he was working on were also stolen, he must still have been an active pipemaker until this time.
While those pipes Clough made on his own have been described as rough in their workmanship, those he made in collaboration with Picknell, a colliery blacksmith, are relatively fine and delicate. In 1933, William Cocks wrote that F. Picknell's pipes and chanters are unmarked, and of very good clean workmanship. As there is no evidence Picknell played the pipes himself, it would make sense for him to collaborate with Clough, considered the best piper of his age.
The piper and pipemaker Andy May, who has studied many of their surviving complete sets and chanters, has written, that they were the most prolific makers of extended-range chanters between James Reid who died in 1874, and Bill Hedworth who began making them in the 1950s. In particular, they extended the range further, down to low A, and in at least one case low G. The latter chanter has the keys for low G, B and A mounted from left to right in a single block, and May believes this is the first chanter made with a range down to low G, and the first use of such a triple key block. Young Tom Clough believed much of the work developing such chanters was done during the General Strike of 1926. Other innovations in the extended Clough/Picknell chanters are that the pairing of keys is different from that of the Reids' chanters, and that the lower holes are sited significantly lower down the chanter than on comparable Reid instruments, improving the intonation for these notes, and making the instrument easier to reed. There is a newspaper photograph of Tom playing on pipes with an extended chanter at. Andy May has placed detailed photographs of two Picknell chanters online at. May believes these two date from the 1930's; although very similar, suggesting that they were from fairly late in the development of such chanters, they differ somewhat in their intonation of the lowest notes.
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