This year’s Annual gathering was held in the Royal Scottish Pipers’ Society Rooms in Edinburgh

The LBPS was grateful to once again be able to welcome members to the RSPS rooms in Rose Street in the centre of Edinburgh; with it’s own bar and lounge as well as the upstairs meeting room it is a congenial venue for this event. This year proceedings began with a playing session for as many as would. The second part of the morning featured a talk by Neil Clark on the piping traditions and music from the Isle of Man; we hope to have a full transcription of his talk in our next issue. The morning session was concluded with a viewing of the video that Ian Mackay has produced from the recordings he made of the 2018 competition. The video is now available on the LBPS website and at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAQkRYy4ayk Neil also led a playing session of the music from his talk as the first session of the afternoon, in the absence of Judy Barker who was to have performed some of her songs, but was unavoidably unable to be there. We then welcomed Jeannie Campbell to give a talk on the stories of pipers in the Great War of 1914-18, a thoroughly suitable topic, since the gathering was held on November 10th, the day before the centenary of the armistice signing. Jeannie will be well-known to many, having been the society treasurer for the first thirty years of its history, as well as a long-serving curator of the musuem at the former College of Piping in Glasgow (now part of the National Piping Centre). Jeannie, incidentally, was the first ever performer in an LBPS competition, in 1984. She will perhaps be best known to members outside Scotland as the author of two editions of Highland Bagpipe Makers. A full transcription of her talk is included in this issue. The music included in Jeannie’s talk had been made available before the event and pipers joined the final session of the day to play these tunes together.