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^[1] 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, probably in 1801. The book had an engraved title page in the style of Thomas Bewick, and probably from his workshop, and the 1801 date is suggested by entries in the account books of Bewick for work done for Wright, between February and June 1801;^[2] in any case, Wright gave the address of his shop as High Bridge, so the date of publication definitely preceded the move of the business from High Bridge to Pilgrim Street, which he announced in April and May 1803.^[3]

As well as containing 50 tunes for smallpipes, the book also contains an engraving, also thought to have been done in Bewick's workshop, 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, and slightly later by Robert Reid, and subsequently by others, including 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.