I found this on Facebook last week and found it very interesting!
Bessie Watson was born in 1900 in Edinburgh’s Old Town. At the age of seven, her parents encouraged her to take up the pipes in order to strengthen her lungs as a precaution against tuberculosis. Her first set of pipes were a specially made half-sized set, made by Robertson of Grove Street, as she was too small to have the lung capacity to to inflate a full-sized bag properly. By the age of nine, she was playing the pipes at Suffragette demonstrations, and in the famous march through Edinburgh in October 1909, she played while riding a parade float next to a woman dressed as the Countess of Buchan (a heroine of the medieval Wars of Independence). She also used to stand outside the grim prison on Calton Hill, playing to comfort those Suffragettes who had been imprisoned for their political activism.
She died in 1992.