Douglas Wilkinson RIP

Uilleann Pipes
1

Former pipemaker Douglas Wilkinson has died. He was an active maker during the second half of the 1970’s working in partnership with Glen McCarthy in the East end of London. They met whilst at the London College of Furniture when on a Musical Instrument Making course and made pipes mainly for Hobgoblin Music in the UK, Waltons in Eire and Lark in the Morning, USA. The partnership split up around 1980 with Doug going to engineering and then computing. Glen McCarthy continued pipemaking for a short while.

When I last spoke to him (October last year) he was hoping to get back into making pipes but it was not to be.

2

Sorry to hear this. I had my first full set from Wilkinson and McCarthy in 1978, collecting it from them at McCarthy’s house in Ilford and bringing it back to my student digs on the bus wrapped in cardboard! I got a replacement reed from Doug the following year after the partnership had split. He was then living in / near Chigwell and was not happy about the split of the business as he thought he had come out of it badly. He was still doing some pipe making and showed me a copy of an Egan chanter he was working on.

Ian