lunchtime and still raining outside so here goes with another starter question
Waht happened to the pipemakers Wilkinson & McCarthy, Bruce DuVe, Kwisthout ?
Also Joe McKenna seemed to be starting tomake pipes (Old LP sleeve)
Plenty of lists of old makers but none of more modern makers even ones still active gining periods of when they wer making other than the advertising lists on NPU etc. Could be useful to have start (and where appropriate end) dates and how they stamped their instruments for future identification
Bruce duVe went into alternative medicine, Hubert Kwisthout was involved with Friends of the Earth and at some point went into trading in tropical woods from sustainable forests. A friend on mine is friendly with Hubert and had some repair jobs done by him some years ago. Joe McKenna was making pipes for years but doesn’t seem to have had a great output, I have seen some sets by him. I remember one piper mentioning he knocked on the door in Thomas st one afternoon enquiring about a practice set. Joe said ‘Call back in the morning, I’ll do one this evening’ And he did, it was ready for collection the next morning.
Benjamin Cashore mentions Kwisthout in his book Governing Through Markets: Forest Certification and the Emergence of Non-State Authority
Hubert Kwisthout made bagpipes. He practiced his craft for over twenty years and, through hard work and perseverance, established a reputation for creating exquisite instruments capable of producing beautiful music. For Kwisthout, his bagpipes were much more than a product for sale-they represented to his customers an extension of himself and his art. It was for these reasons that Hubert Kwisthout became increasingly concerned about a moral dilemma that he could not rationalize away. Kwisthout relied on tropical hardwood imports to produce the wood components of his bagpipes, and during the 1980s, evidence accumulated indicating that the wood was coming from tropical forests that were being degraded by poor forest management practices or destroyed by conversion to other uses. The beauty he was creating with his bagpipes was contributing to the destruction of tropical forests and the endangerment of a wide range of species and habitats. The response by citizens and environmental groups in Europe and North America concerned about tropical forest destruction at this time was to promote boycotts of tropical timber. These efforts treated wood products from the tropics, regardless of the source, as contributing toward deforestation and species loss. This approach bothered Kwisthout, who, dependent on tropical wood for his bagpipes, felt there had to be a way to buy wood from companies and landowners who practiced sustainable forest management. But how could this happen? Illegal logging, poor governmental institutions, and widespread corruption in many developing countries meant that relying on government might not produce the desired results.
There had to be another way. Kwisthout’s first solution was to form a trading company in the United Kingdom whose purpose was to purchase timber from environmentally sound sources. Kwisthout quickly learned, however, that those claiming to sell sustainable timber had no way of verifying that the sources were actually sustainable. Another idea came to Kwisthout. Why not have environmental groups and other social interests devise a set of rules governing sustainable forest management, independently certify companies who practice these standards, and thus enable consumers to purchase wood products from companies who pass the certification process?
It was a relatively simple solution that would have enormous and complex impacts. While Kwisthout had no way of knowing it at the time, his support of this kernel of an idea would trigger a series of events that would present global and domestic environmental governance with one of the most innovative and startling institutional designs of the past 50 years: forest certification. The advent of forest certification systems ushered in a new breed of sustainable development institutions outside of traditional governmental processes that would offer fundamentally different ways of creating policy and implementing policy choices. And as we reveal in this book, something else happened that Kwisthout could never have envisioned. Thus far, the regions in the world where certification has been the most debated, supported, and institutionalized are not the tropics but rather the countries of the North, where well-organized environmental, social, and business interests, caught in longstanding struggles over temperate and boreal forest resource use, have sought to define and shape forest certification efforts.