Medicine Hat Stampede Parade 2024.--PHOTO COURTESY Joan Kennedy
Two separate comic strips in a recent edition of the News poked fun at the bagpipes and as a piper, my “friends” were quick to send me copies. However, Hagar the Horrible suggested to a lord of the castle that he should fiddle while his castle burned, no doubt a reference to Emperor Nero and Rome.
Neither reference is historically accurate since Hagar the Viking lived a thousand years ago and Nero two thousand, long before the violin was invented. In fact, Nero bagpiped while Rome burned!
As a musical genre, the pipes have been a part of Medicine Hat’s musical scene for over a century. Donny White, retired curator of the Medicine Hat Museum, has a letter from his grand-mother in which she described doing the sword dance at the old NWMP barracks at Police Point in the late 1880s, presumably dancing to the pipes.
There was a pipe band in Medicine Hat as early as 1909, called the “Medicine Hat Kiltie Band” with George Garden as Pipe Major. George’s brother Alex screened recruits for the band over in Scotland. The “Medicine Hat Pipe Band” was formally established in Medicine Hat in 1912.
Alex Hosie, a piper from Forfar, Scotland, soon became the Pipe Major. He came to Medicine Hat in 1912 “on request of the Medicine Hat Kiltie Band, which he and a group of other men from their native land were asked to join.” The tartan at this time was Hunting Stewart, possibly in honour of Henry Stewart, president of the Band Society.
During the Great War, band members joined various regiments in Canada and back home. Hosie joined the Lethbridge Highlanders as Pipe Major and served overseas with various battalions. After the war, the band was reconstituted, again with Hosie as Pipe Major, and now wearing the MacGregor tartan.
Alex Hosie worked as custodian at Elm Street School where chanter and pipe classes were held, and he lived next to the school. He kept his gear in the boiler room and the band would march up and down in the basement.
The Medicine Hat branch of the Royal Canadian Legion sponsored the band after the First World War. In the 50s, the band practices were held in the old Legion building, a former NWMP building moved over from Police Point.
About 1959, Hosie retired after 47 years as Pipe Major and Bill Cowan took over the position. Cowan began piping as a young man in Fife, Scotland, and played in competitive pipe bands before emigrating to Canada in 1957.
The South Alberta Pipe Band was founded in 1966 after a dispute with the Legion over travel expenses. The MacDuff tartan was adopted and is still used today. When Cowan retired from the band in 1978, Fred Standing and Ron Shannon alternated in the role of Pipe Major before the position was taken over by Eric Kean in 1981.
Kean was born and raised in Edinburgh (but was not a piper there) and came to Medicine Hat in 1975. Eric lived close to Ron Shannon and heard him play, which inspired him to take up the pipes and join the band.
In 2004, the band re-registered as a society, this time as the South Alberta Pipes and Drums Society, which recognized the important role of the drums in the band.
The band plays throughout southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and northern Montana under the direction of Pipe Major Kean, continuing a musical tradition that dates back to Roman times, although we don’t burn down cities these days!
Malcolm Sissons is vice-president of the Historical Society of Medicine Hat & District.
