Cornelius Stanton

Cornelius Stanton was a Northumbrian piper.

Birth records show that he was born in Gateshead in 1799. In 1841, he was recorded in the census as living in Newcastle, in Cumberland Row, Westgate Road. He was still living there in 1851, but subsequently moved to Tynemouth after his father's death in 1853. He died there in 1866.

He is a figure of some importance in the history of the instrument's repertoire. In 1858, William Kell, of the Ancient Melodies Committee set up by the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries, noted that Stanton owned one of only four surviving copies of the printed tunebook of John Peacock, published in about 1800 . He had a significant collection of music manuscripts, some of which are now bound in the Fenwick manuscript; others belonged to the late Lance Robson, who distributed transcripts through the Northumbrian Musical Heritage Society. Together, these two groups of papers give a picture of an able and enthusiastic amateur piper in the mid-19th century. As well as local pieces, including variation sets from Peacock's collection and popular Tyneside songs, he played many Scots and Irish tunes, as well as popular songs and dance tunes of the day. Some nursery rhymes are included, perhaps for the benefit of a young pupil. One variation set on "Sir John Fenwick's the Flower amang them", needing a keyed chanter, corresponds to that found in the Rook manuscript, and may derive from the Reid family, who lived nearby in North Shields. Scans of two of the Stanton pages in the Fenwick manuscript are at , and ; these are for unkeyed and keyed chanter respectively. These tunes are in relatively simple versions, suitable for someone learning the instrument, suggesting that Fenwick studied the instrument with Stanton. Two of Stanton's tunes in Fenwick, "Little wot ye wha's coming" and "Blackett of Wylam" were explicitly attributed by him to Peacock, although they are not in Peacock's printed tunebook. These tunes appear in the manuscripts of Peacock's pupil Robert Bewick, so the attribution is very credible. In 1881, John Stokoe, one of the editors of the Northumbrian Minstrelsy, referred to some of Stanton's manuscripts, then in the possession of the piper T. Errington Thompson, of Sewing Shields. He described Stanton as 'an amateur performer on the smallpipes, and an ardent lover of their music'. In the Minstrelsy, and in this article, Stokoe printed the tune "Follow her over the Border", taken from these manuscripts.

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