Irish Pipers' Club Meet in Boston to initiate new members and to plan visit to New York Pipers Club

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On November 7, 1915, the Boston Pipers Club met in Seaver Hall in the Paine Memorial Building on Appleton Street in the South End to initiate seven new members into the Club, according to a story in the Boston Globe the following day.

The Club also discussed a trip to New York to participate in the 10th anniversary of that city's Pipers Club. According to the story, the Pipers Club would leave Boston on the midnight train on November 25, with piper William Hanafin leading the delegation.

The Boston Pipers Club was initiated in 1910 and held its first concert at Wells Memorial Hall on January 11, featuring William Hanafin and his brother Michael on fiddle. In the audience were uilleann pipers Patsy Touhey and Sergeant James Early from Chicago.

Courtesy of Burns Library, Boston College

William F. Hanafin (1875-1924) and his brother Michael C. Hanafin (1880-1970) were born in Callinfercy, County Kerry, Ireland according to the Burns Library at Boston College, which holds the Hanafin Family Papers in its Irish Music Archives. The Hanafin brothers immigrated to Boston, Massachusetts in the late 19th century, where they became celebrated performers within Irish traditional music circles. 

Boston was rich in Uilleann pipers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In his 1913 book, Irish Minstrels and Musicians, Francis O'Neill recounts several pipers of note with Boston ties, starting with Ned "The Dandy Piper" White, who lived in Roxbury in the mid-19th century, made pipes, performed and ran a dance hall during the Civil War period. He also mentions Patsy Touhey, whose family emigrated from Galway to South Boston in 1868; William and Michael Hanafin; Eddie "Kid" Joyce, born in Boston in 1861 and the son of Galway piper James Joyce; and John Murphy, born in Boston in 1865 and the son of Bartley Murphy, a gifted piper who taught his son to play the pipes as well as Touhey and Joyce.

Read more about uilleann and Scottish pipers living in the Boston Area in the 1950s .

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