Tin whistle, penny whistle

A cylindrical metal whistle with six finger holes was found together with pottery dating from the 14th and 15th centuries underneath the floor of a medieval house excavated in North Berwick, Scotland, in 1907. It is referred to as the “Tusculum whistle” and is now part of the collections of the National Museum of Scotland. Here is a photograph of it from the museum’s online catalog.

And here is one of its current display.

It is made of brass or bronze and bears a striking resemblance to the musical instrument now variously marketed as a tin whistle, penny whistle, or flageolet. The only difference of obvious musical significance is that the uppermost finger hole in the current design is closer to the midpoint between the lateral window and lower end. This is intended to provide a usable range of about two octaves. On the face of it, even if the older instrument was played in both registers, it would not have produced an in-tune scale with comparable ease.

The London Customs Accounts record “1 gros wistles stanni,” on 4 August 1457. This a hybrid English/Latin description translating to “one gross whistles of tin.” A record dated 17 October 1519 is for “4 gros tyne whistilles.” A lot of noteworthy size for “40 gros tyn wistelles” is dated 4 June 1537, and a further one from 8 August 1537 is for “19 gros tyn whistelles.” These numbers indicate that such instruments were marketed in significant quantities by the mid-1500s and sold a century earlier. (The full customs records can be retrieved via the search facility in the cited source. Francis Knights collates and discusses all references to musical instruments here.)

The cited transactions don’t tell us what a tin whistle was but it can safely be posited that it was in the same lineage as the Tusculum whistle. By the mid-16th century its more elaborate cousin, the recorder, was well established. It might therefore be reasonable to see the tin whistle as a low-cost alternative to it. If so, this would plausibly explain the synonymous “penny whistle.” This term appears in a German legal text from 1680, written primarily in Latin, but shifts to the vernacular in the relevant passage.

I do not want to exclude the sometimes ridiculous but not untrained songs that are usually performed in the streets at night with odious music commonly called a serenade with penny whistles and jew’s harps [ein Ständtgen mit Pfennigpfeifen und Brumeisen]. Even the more skilled jesters always strike a single chord and the great dissonance of all the instruments creates various troubles for those who hear it.

The first use of the term “penny whistle” attested in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1730, in the play Bays’s Opera by Gabriel Odingsells.

Musicians with Halters about their Necks — Their Instruments strung behind, penny Whistles, Trumpets, and so forth, in their Hands.

It appears in a similar context in the review of a performance at the Covent Garden Theatre, in the 22 September 1809 issue of the London newspaper The Morning Chronicle. An announced increase in ticket prices triggered an organized wave of disruption throughout the event.

A pause of some minutes ensued, and then the cat calls, bugle horns, and posthorns began discord afresh. … This was succeeded by the usual concord of sweet sounds proceeding from penny whistles, squeaking trumpets, watchmen’s rattles, horns, catcalls, &c. &c.

A letter to the editor in the 9 September 1810 issue of The Examiner complains about the noise caused by street criers.

… persuade them, if instrument they must have, to change the hoarse window-shaking and nerve worrying mail-horn, for the light and softer cadence of a penny whistle.

The 15 June 1818 issue of The Huntingdon, Bedford, Cambridge and Peterborough Gazette and Midland County General Advertiser, notes the following about the visit of a contentious politician.

… he entered the town amid the braying of trumpets, the beating of drums, and the shrill piping of fifes and penny whistles …

Compilations of Irish and Scottish traditional music began to name the closely related, if not identical, “flageolet” shortly after the initial printed evidence of its English form. This was derived from a French form of the so-named instrument (discussed in the preceding post), in turn developed during the 16th century from what is likely to have been the tin whistle as it appears in the customs documents. The first such collection I know of was published in the midst of the preceding references, ca. 1800.

The musical niche it ascribed to the flageolet is now occupied by the tin/penny whistle. However, the flageolet both traces it roots back to the tin whistle and would later contribute at least one significant design detail to the multi-labeled upshot. This may suggest a contextual distinction in the application of the respective names, similar to the one between fiddle and violin.

The first use of the material-based name attested in the OED is from the novel Brother Jonathan by John Neal, published in 1825. It includes an observation about a poet’s reading voice.

He uses big words; and reads the superb language of Job, with his little voice, very much as if he were sounding a charge, with a tin whistle; or a twopenny trumpet.

The penny whistle is firmly connected with rural Irish musical practice in a report about an election campaign in Tipperary, in the 14 August 1837 issue of the Dublin newspaper The Freeman’s Journal. The occasional appearance of a penny whistle may suggest that it had been accepted by these musicians more recently than the other instruments.

They are pouring in from all quarters of the country on cars and other vehicles, each containing a rustic musician, who ‘welted away’ on an old fiddle, a flute, and sometimes a penny whistle, amid the most tremendous cheering.

What appears to be a reference to a Robert Clarke tin whistle is found in the 13 July 1839 issue of The Manchester Guardian. It is a metaphor for an inexpensive object in a discussion of governmental procurement.

These advantages … have cost the leypayers of Manchester…£480. 14s. 9d.: which, we take it, is paying rather dear for Mr. Clarke’s whistle.

The Clarke Tinwhistle Company remains in operation and advertises the year of its founding as 1843, claiming that to be when Robert Clarke invented the instrument. But if the article in The Manchester Guardian is correctly read to designate his work, he would have commenced production far enough earlier to have an established reputation before the end of the 1830s.

The 19th-century manifestation of the tin whistle is discussed in an interview with the street musician Whistling Billy, conducted by Henry Mayhew at an unspecified time in the 1840s. It was published in 1851 in the third volume of a massive compilation covering many street professions, titled London Labour and the London Poor. The interviewee is uncertain about his birthdate because he doesn’t feel as old as the twenty-two years he calculates from having left home a decade earlier at the age of twelve. He bought his first “penny whistle” three years thereafter and also refers to it as a “whistle,” “tin whistle,” and “penny tin whistle.”

Whistles weren’t so common then, they weren’t out a quarter so much as now. Swinden had the making of them then, but he wasn’t the first maker of them. Clarke is the largest manufactory of them now, and he followed Swinden.

This unequivocally contradicts the assertion that the instrument was invented by Clarke, who would have gained the dominant position he had at the time of the interview during the seven years preceding it. Given the 1851 publication date, the latest conceivable time for the interview would have been 1850. This could plausibly set the outset of Clarke’s factory production to 1843, with his innovation being a method for making tin whistles from sheet metal.

However, the extent and intricacy of Mayhew’s compilation does not reasonably permit the interview to have been conducted at the last possible moment. It is therefore likely that Clarke began making whistles a number of years before 1843. Since he was born in 1816, if the 1839 reference was indeed to him, he would have taken up the craft by the time he turned 20 and gained rapid success. The 1861 UK census lists his profession as “Tin Flute Maker,” also indicated for some of his family members.

Whistling Billy doesn’t say who made the whistle he was using but Mayhew notes an intriguing detail about its design and the sound it produced.

He then inserted the wooden tongue of the whistle into his nostril, and blowing down it, began a hornpipe, which, although not so shrill as when he played it with the mouth, was still loud enough to be heard all over the house.

This comparative description of the whistle’s loud shrill voice suggests a smaller instrument. This is consistent with reports of Clarke’s first model being in high G (the smallest size in current mass production). More significantly, Mayhew raises a question about what a whistle’s “wooden tongue” might have been. The wooden block that delimits its duct is not a prominent visible attribute nor can it be characterized as a tongue. That would, however, be an appropriate designation for the flat bit at the upper end of a flageolet. It is also seen on metal instruments into the 20th century, as this one in the 1904 Sears-Roebuck catalog.

The triple label Whistling Billy used for the instrument appears elsewhere and no less a figure than Charles Babbage complains about being disturbed by a “shrill … penny tin whistle,” in his autobiography from 1864. A photograph of the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) playing an English flageolet provides the banner image for this post (taken from a posthumous biography). Another photo shows him playing a cylindrical tin whistle, albeit in a staged ensemble with people who don’t all know how to hold their prop instruments (included with the other photo in a recently compiled album).

Stevenson’s affection for the instrument is reflected in a letter describing plans for giving the title The Penny Whistle to what ultimately appeared as The Child’s Garden of Verses. He adds to the long list of comparisons between it and a fife.

     Nor you, O Penny Whistler, grudge
        That I your instrument debase:
     By worse performers still we judge,
        And give that fife a second place!

One of the better performers, whom we’ve already met, is discussed in the 14 July 1860 issue of The Lancaster Gazette and went on to become the mascot of The Clarke Tinwhistle Company.

Whistling Billy, but he is now dead and gone poor man, attended all the [wool] clippings in the neighbourhood with his penny tin whistle, and before the dance began in the room where they had dined, he was delighting the company with different popular airs on his whistle. He could do anything with his whistle though it was often dry [i.e. in jest]; he could put it up one nostril and whistle as well with it there as if it were in his mouth.