Donnycarney remembers a trad music legend and the workshop that helped save uilleann piping

On Saturday morning, locals of Donnycarney gathered at 9 Belton Park Road to pay tribute to its famed former resident, the renowned uilleann piper, pipe maker, teacher and activist, Leo Rowsome.

A plaque was erected on the front wall of the house where he, his wife Helena, and their four children – Leon, Liam, and twins Helena and Olivia – lived.

“My parents were married in 1934 and those houses were built about that time,” says daughter Helena Rowsome Grimes.

Paddy Belton, who built the houses, was a family friend, she says – which, along with her mother working as a teacher on the northside, influenced her parents move from south of the Liffey.

Leo Rowsome was originally from Harold's Cross.

“A wonderful childhood we had, and the fact that my father had the workshop out the back of the house was just amazing,” Rowsome Grimes says.

That workshop is now the stuff of legend, says Gay McKeon, piper, former student of Rowsome in the 1960s, and CEO of Na Píobairí Uilleann – the society of Irish pipers.

“He was the go-to person for getting pipes made, getting pipes tuned, reeds being made, and he was the main teacher in the country – there were very few around the country teaching at that time,” says McKeon.

When Rowsome, who learned the trade from his own father, died in 1970, there wasn’t another full-time maker of uilleann pipes anywhere in the world, he says.

If not for the fruits of his workshop, over decades, piping might not have endured to this day, McKeon says. “It was precariously close to extinction.”

But early on Saturday, the reel "The Bucks of Oranmore", recorded by Rowsome in the 1950s, poured from Sorcha Ní Scolaí’s uilleann pipes outside the home on Belton Park Road, before a crowd of around 40 people.

Life in old Donnycarney

“I must have been about two, but I remember standing up in the cot and hearing my father sound the reed in the chanter from the workshop,” says Helena Rowsome Grimes.

He worked there from early morning straight through to three o’clock, she says.

Then he would hop on a bus from Collins Avenue into town to teach lessons in the Municipal School of Music on Chatham Row until eight or nine o’clock, she says.

He held that teaching role from 1920 until his death in 1970.

When he got home again each night, he would still make time before his supper to practice and work on compositions, says Rowsome Grimes, who was also a pupil – like all her siblings – of her father.

“He was a great, great father, great fun, but the man, he didn't have enough time. He really didn't,” she says.

Aside from his workshop and teaching duties, Rowsome was also well-known for regularly playing the pipes on the radio for RTÉ and the BBC, she says. As well as his live concert performances.

“One of my fondest memories is, myself and my twin Olivia, we'd wake up on a Monday morning, and there'd be a little lemonade or fizzy orange on the mantelpiece in the bedroom in Belton Park,” she says.

Her father might have been down in Kilkenny, Carlow or further afield playing a concert or radio show and he'd always bring his kids back a treat, she says.

Despite his busy schedule, he somehow also felt very present for his wife and children, she says.

“My mother could see that he was a real gem, you know, that this was really something really important, and I think that my mother was definitely a factor in enabling him to do as much as he did,” she says.

The house was always full of divilment, she says.

Like, one day, local nuns were visiting for tea, as they often did.

The kids, all smartly-dressed, hair combed, had to each perform their party piece and be well-behaved.

One of her brothers tried to discreetly throw a ball to her sister, and accidentally knocked the head clean off a porcelain duck ornament. Thankfully, her mother didn’t cop what had happened, she says.

Rowsome Grimes ran and got some bread, moistened with water – a combo they normally used as a makeshift pencil eraser – and somehow managed to stick the duck's head back on with it while another sibling shielded her from their mother’s view.

Her father, who saw the whole thing unfold, unbeknownst to his wife or the nuns, said nothing but just smiled on, watching his children secretly handle the crisis.

“He was always great, he’d cover up for us if we did anything naughty,” she says.

However, soon thereafter, at one of the regular music sessions in their house, her mother, who had a beautiful soprano voice, got up to sing, “Oh, the Days of the Kerry Dancing”.

“Absolute tragedy! It was the resonance of her voice on that high note, you know, the vibration made the head fall off the duck!” says Rowsome Grimes, laughing.

It’s one of countless happy memories on Belton Park Road, she says.

Mission to save tradition

When Leo Rowsome’s father, William, was being stretchered into the hospice in Harold's Cross where he died in 1925, he turned to Rowsome and asked if he was sure there wasn’t anything else about the pipes he needed to know, Rowsome Grimes says. “That was the most important thing.”

This great responsibility to preserve the art was something her father took seriously all his life, she says.

“He was an activist,” says Gay McKeon, who studied as a child under Rowsome from 1966 until his death in 1970.

“A lot of people don’t realise how important he was in the foundation of Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Éireann along with his brother Tom Rowsome, who had a drapery shop in there in Thomas Street,” he says.

Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Éireann, founded in 1951, remains a non-profit dedicated to promoting and preserving trad music.

Rowsome and Séamus Ennis were also the first two patrons of Na Píobairí Uilleann, founded in 1968.

Decades earlier, in 1936, he had been the driving force in reviving the Dublin Piper’s Club, Cumann na Piobairí Uilleann, which had fizzled out during and after the civil war.

“He was childlike in lots of ways, an amazing teacher,” says McKeon. “He empathised, and it was none of the greatness or whatever, he was just at your level and very humble.”

“I've spoken to people like Liam O’Flynn and Peter Brown and Joe McKenna, who would have been students of his, and they all concurred there was something magical about his abilities when he was teaching,” he says. “And like, I wasn't the best at practicing, but he indulged me.”

Unusually at the time, says McKeon, Rowsome would write out harmonies for tunes so all the students could play together. “There was a great sense of fun.”

His ability to read and write music was quite rare for a traditional musician at the time, he says.

Rowsome would write out tunes in his own handwriting, with all the embellishments and ornamentation, for every single student in his classes, he says. “So, we all learned how to read music.”

Indeed, Rowsome Grimes remembers sitting on the bus home from a lesson in the School of Music on Chatham Row and her father jotting down the notes for a particular piece of music for her on the back of a cigarette package.

“The best part of the lesson was coming home on the bus with him from the school, and the chat. I just loved it,” she says.

Among his endeavours to promote uilleann piping, her father also became a recording artist, releasing albums for His Master’s Voice (HMV), Decca and Columbia, and was the first signing to Claddagh Records.

His 1959 LP King of the Pipers is considered a seminal traditional Irish music recording.

Rowsome also appeared in motion pictures over the years, playing his instrument.

Like Norah O’Neale (1934) and Broth of a Boy (1959).

And while he was a man of great humour and wit, he was also very serious when it came to how Irish culture was depicted on the world stage, says Rowsome Grimes.

She remembers once when he was making a film with a German company in some part of rural Ireland, and had to make a stand.

“He was sitting, playing in this cottage, you know, an Irish cottage,” she says.

“Next thing in come a whole lot of pigs, they were trying to put pigs into the kitchen, so they were trying to make it Irish,” she says.

Rowsome politely walked off the set, and said he wasn’t going to be part of a backwards depiction of Irish people and culture, she says. “Don’t get me wrong, he loved pigs! But he couldn’t stand that.”

Rowsome Grimes is in the later stages of writing her father’s biography, she says. Even after all this time, she still feels her father’s loss immensely, she says.

She remembers him happily playing the pipes at her wedding in Our Lady of Consolation Church in Donnycarney. “It was a great, jolly day.”

Sadly, just six weeks later, at the age of 67, Rowsome died suddenly of a heart attack. “That was the worst day of my life.”

“He worked too hard, he really did,” she says. “I only wish I grew up to help him, because I was only 24 when I left home, and he died six weeks later.”

“You know, I'm so privileged to be his daughter,” Rowsome Grimes says.

Every February, ⁠Na Píobairí Uilleann host a Leo Rowsome Commemorative Event, but beyond that one day, it’s in the playing of his music and the uilleann pipes where Rowsome’s memory truly lives on, says McKeon.

“The biggest tribute that people can do is play his music and his instruments,” he says.

The plaque on 9 Belton Park Road reads: “Leo Rowsome 1903 – 1970. Uileann piper, manufacturer and teacher lived on Belton Park Road.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.