Bessie Watson: Child Suffragette and Piping Pioneer
This week, I wanted to take a look at one of Edinburgh’s amazing women: Elizabeth “Bessie” Watson. She was a women’s suffrage activist from the age of just nine, and a pioneering bagpiper at a time when very few women played the pipes. Her legacy can still be felt today, so how did a wee girl from Edinburgh go on to make such an impact?
Looking up the Vennel from the Grassmarket. Image my own
Bessie was born in 1900 in the Vennel, a steep street that runs between Lauriston Place and the Grassmarket. These days, it’s one of the most photographed spots in the city thanks to its gorgeous views of Edinburgh Castle – and on a sunny day it’s usually busy with people queueing up to buy ice cream from Mary’s Milk Bar at the bottom! Although the Grassmarket is now a picturesque and expensive spot, popular with holiday let landlords for its proximity to the town centre and magnificent castle views, back when Bessie was born this area was largely residential and working class.
It was a diverse area for its day in Scotland. By the early 1900s, when Bessie lived here, it was home to so many Italian immigrants that it became known as Little Italy. People from Italy represented one of the first major waves of immigration into Scotland, and selling ice cream and other food was a common occupation for the recently arrived new Scots – to this day, you’ll still find plenty of Scottish chippies and ice cream shops with Italian names all over the country. (We should also thank them for one of my favourite items of Scottish-Italian fusion cuisine, the deep-fried pizza, although I’m not sure Italy would want to thank us!) Playing music was another common career option, and so Bessie grew up in an area of Edinburgh that was vibrantly alive with the sounds of instruments, the smells of street food, and the bustle of the Grassmarket’s pubs and markets.
However, Bessie also grew up in an era when fear of disease was ever present, especially in crowded urban areas. In 1900, it was still common for children and adults to die from illnesses that we can now easily treat with antibiotics and vaccinate against, like tuberculosis. It was fear of TB, an infection which attacks the lungs and had killed Bessie’s aunt Margaret, that motivated Bessie’s parents to get her started playing the bagpipes when she was about seven or eight. It was believed that the mighty amount of breath needed for piping would help to strengthen wee Bessie’s lungs and keep her healthy.
Bessie Watson with her pipes, aged 9. Image via Wikimedia Commons
In 1909, when Bessie was nine, her mother Agnes saw an advert in the paper for a pageant organised by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Edinburgh. It was to celebrate “what women have done and can and will do” at a time when women had very few legal rights, and no voting rights whatsoever. It was still nearly a decade before the first women gained the right to vote in Britain, and almost twenty years before full suffrage, and the idea of the pageant was to portray the achievements of women throughout history. Agnes signed herself and Bessie up as WSPU members and pageant participants, and Bessie played her pipes from a float travelling down Princes Street in front of huge crowds. A few weeks later, Bessie would even be given a brooch as a gift by Christabel Pankhurst, icon of the women’s suffrage movement, at a meeting held in the King’s Theatre.
The 1909 pageant that Bessie piped in, moving down Princes Street. Image public domain via Wikimedia Commons
At first, Bessie was mostly interested in the fun of all the pageantry, and the opportunity to play her pipes in such an exciting environment. But she soon became a committed suffrage activist and remained involved in the movement – she even wore hair ribbons in the colours of the suffrage campaign (white, purple and green) to school! She used her pipes as a form of political expression: she played on the platforms at Waverley Station as trains left to carry women’s rights campaigners to Holloway Prison in London, and she would often go after school to stand outside Calton Jail in Edinburgh and pipe for the women incarcerated inside. However you feel about bagpipe music (and I know it doesn’t inspire universal joy!), the pipes are an instrument with a strident and defiant sound that carries for miles on the breeze. A young girl playing the pipes in such a visibly political way made a powerful statement.
The modern offices of the ministers and civil servants of the Scottish Government now stand on the site of the old Calton Jail. In 2019, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon acknowledged the debt that women in twenty-first century Scotland owe to our predecessors like Bessie. Unveiling a memorial plaque in the Vennel, she said, “I go into work in the morning to the place where Bessie would have played and knowing that I go in there now as the first woman to be First Minister of Scotland”. The very idea of a woman holding the highest political office in the land would have been almost unimaginable to the women who were locked up in jails across the country for demanding the rights that we now consider obviously just, so there’s something beautiful about the idea that Nicola Sturgeon and the other women who run Scotland are, quite literally, walking in their footsteps.
Bessie continued to be recognised as a significant force for change in Scottish piping, as well as politics. At 14, she became the first female member of the Highland Pipers’ Society, winning several awards, and later founded the Broughton School Pipe Band (and led it for 27 years). She studied French at the University of Edinburgh before becoming a teacher of music and modern languages, working at schools throughout the city. Music and piping remained a constant in Bessie’s life – she was still playing the pipes in her late eighties!
After living through a century of remarkable change for women, Bessie died in 1992. She left artefacts from her piping career, including her pipes and practice chanter, to the College of Piping in Glasgow. Although professional piping remains a male-dominated sphere, more and more girls are now starting to learn the pipes at school and carry on the legacy of women like Bessie. In 2019, Glasgow’s international Celtic Connections festival even featured a show called A Celebration of Women in Piping, performed by some of the world’s leading women pipers. I hope Bessie would be proud to see that the progress she helped to begin continues, over a century after she played her pipes in the WSPU pageant.
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