Frances (MacLeod) McClure was born in 1943 to George E. and Mamie (Ferguson) MacLeod of Sydney. She began her training with the Gaelic College Sydney Girls’ Pipe Band in 1951 at age 8. Her first teacher was Roddie Nicholson, followed by Danny MacIntyre.

In 1953, under the sponsorship of the local Lion’s Clubs, the band travelled to Chicago to take part in the Lions’ Club International Parade, placing second out of seventy-two bands. The Cape Breton musicians appeared on the MacNeil’s Breakfast Show on television, which they experienced for the very first time, as TV had not yet come to Cape Breton. Shortly after returning to Sydney, Frances and another young piper, Heather MacKenzie were playing outside Frances’ home when two ladies came up to them and told them they had seen the girls on television in Chicago. To ten and eleven year olds, that was pretty special!

In 1954, Frances entered the piping competitions at the Gaelic Mod, placing first in the 10 and Under class. She was also becoming an accomplished Highland dancer, and had the World Champion, James L. MacKenzie as her summer instructor for many years.

Crossing the Causeway in August of 1955 was another very special event for the young pipers at the Gaelic College. They even went to the site and practiced there among the trucks and machines as the Causeway was being built. "Today," Frances acknowledges, "we would not have been allowed to do that, not without using hard hats at least!"

Rev. A.W.R. MacKenzie made a great effort to have a hundred band members ready to take part in the Crossing, but they didn’t quite make it. "We were a few short," remembers Frances, "but what an exciting day! There were more than forty thousand people there - a sea of people stretching from one end of the Causeway to the other. The scene was captured on a post card showing us marching behind our banner which read, ‘The MacDonald 100 Jr. Pipe Band’. That card was around for many years afterwards."

Also in 1955, Frances first experienced the teaching of Seumas MacNeill with whom she would study for more than a decade of summer schools. Seumas was taken with his young pupil’s ability, and mentioned her in an article in the Piping Times, of which he was the Editor. Kenneth MacLean came with him, and she received instruction from Tommy Pearston when he would replace Seumas at the Gaelic College. Later in life, she studied with Bob Worrall in Burlington from 1986 to 1991, and attended summer schools at St. Ann’s with him in 1987 and 1998.

Frances McClure with Sheumas MacNeill

In 1956, Frances travelled to Fayetteville, North Carolina with the pipe band. This was a very exciting time for the young musicians, especially their stay at Fort Bragg where they had armed guards, and were awakened in a military fashion daily. They experienced many firsts in Fayetteville including their first time on roller skates, and their first time in a segregated theatre, with a separate regular house-sized door for black people and a large theatre-sized door for the whites. Never having encountered such overt racial prejudice before, this made quite an impression on Frances, and was something that she never forgot. The band performed at Flora MacDonald College in Red Springs, NC, where two sons of the famous protector of Bonnie Prince Charlie are buried.

Frances continued to develop as a piper and continued to have success as a competitor. In 1957, for example, she placed second in the Girls 12-16 March and third in the Girls 12-16 March, Strathspey, and Reel at the Gaelic Mod. In addition to being an excellent piper, and an accomplished piobaireachd player, Frances succeeded in winning the 13-15 Class Championship in Highland dancing at the 1959 Gaelic Mod. In 1960, she was awarded the Farnham Gold Medal for top summer school student at the Gaelic College.

From 1956 to 1965, Frances was an assistant instructor at the Gaelic College both in St. Ann’s and in the Sydney Winter School. Along with other senior girls in the band, she would take the summer school students after they had their lessons with either Seumas MacNeill or Tommy Pearston and do follow-up lessons with them. She also taught at the Venetian Gardens in Sydney where the Gaelic College’s Winter School held its rehearsals. On Saturdays, she would teach in Glace Bay, New Waterford and North Sydney, and she also taught private lessons in her own home in Sydney. Later on, while teaching school in Dartmouth, she taught a very young Alan Kenny, who went on to become a prominent piper and piping teacher in Nova Scotia and later in British Columbia.

She also taught Donald F. Lindsay who, among his many other professional piping-related activities, now runs the Invermark School of Piping in the north eastern United States, a school which is modelled after his experiences at the Gaelic College. When Frances went to the United States to participate in the Nicol-Brown Invitational Competition in the 1980s, Donald was the Master of Ceremonies for the event, and introduced her as the teacher at the Gaelic College who had once told him he couldn’t make a Double D! Frances was probably about thirteen years old at the time of the lesson in question, long before her formal teacher training taught her never to say that someone "can’t" do something.

In 1963, Frances was named to the Board of Directors of the Gaelic College, a position she held until about 1976. She assisted Rev. A.W.R. MacKenzie in running the Craft Centre from 1964-66. "One of the aspects of being at the Gaelic College for so many summers was the kinship and friendships which developed over the years," Frances recalls. "There was a bond that still runs deep. We learned to respect each other, to co-operate, work hard, and to appreciate the efforts of all those who were working for the preservation of our rich heritage. A.W.R. taught us this, to co-operate, to work together in harmony, but he also taught us discipline which, I am sure, is the reason so many of us went into education, nursing, or some other disciplined career."

Frances first travelled to Scotland in 1964 with Sharon Robertson and her family. The girls were surprised to find that there were no age groupings for competitions, but rather levels, and that there was no category for them at the Luss Highland Games. In fact, the people at the entrance gate mistakenly directed them towards the dancing platforms! The professional pipers were most kind and generous, however, and, amongst themselves, they set up a ‘special event’ and allowed them to compete, though the girls were not aware of this at the time.

During that same visit to Scotland, the girls spent six days at the College of Piping Summer School at Dunvegan, on the Isle of Skye. John MacFadyen was one of the instructors, her first meeting with John, but not her last. The girls had a lot of fun because there were so many students from many other countries, all bound together with the common bond of their interest in piping.

Frances returned to Scotland again in 1966 and taught Primary 3 at an elementary school in Glasgow. For several months she travelled across to Edinburgh each week to assist in teaching piping classes sponsored by the College of Piping. She enjoyed it immensely, especially having the opportunity to listen to some of the finest pipers in the world who were performing regularly at the Highlanders’ Institute on Saturday evenings.

One evening, Kenneth MacLean and Tommy Pearston invited a group of pipers to come to the College of Piping to meet Frances MacLeod from Cape Breton, and to play a few tunes together. Frances and the name’s male counterpart, Francis, sound the same, so it was perhaps a bit of a shock to the Scots to find that the piper from Cape Breton was a female when they had been expecting a male. After a few awkward moments, and a bit of very good quality piping, however, Frances won them over and it was, in the end, a joyous occasion.

In 1962, Frances had begun working as a schoolteacher at Colby School, Sydney. She continued to teach piping and to teach and work at the Gaelic College during the summers. In 1965, she travelled with the band once more to North Carolina, this time as one of the instructors. For several years in the early 1970s, Frances assisted James L. MacKenzie in teaching Highland dancing at the 1000 Islands Summer School held in Brockville, Ontario. In the 1980s she attended summer school in Timmons, Ontario where she successfully completed the examinations for the Teacher’s Certificate from the Institute of Piping, in Scotland. Her on-site examiners were Jimmy MacIntosh and Seumas MacNeill, while the written portion was presented to John MacLellan for final grading. At that time, Frances was an active member of the Western Branch of the Pipers’ and Pipe Band’s Society of Ontario, for several years helping to co-organize the very successful Cambridge Clinic for pipers and drummers.

As often happens, she put her piping aside for a while after moving to Ontario, but in the mid 1980s she returned to her study of the music with Bob Worrall in Burlington. In 1987, Frances, now Mrs. Wayne MacClure, placed first in the Senior Amateur Piobaireachd at the Antigonish Highland Games, first in the Grade 1 Piobaireachd at Chatham, third in the Grade 1 Piobaireachd at Maxville, first in The Grade 1 Piobaireachd in Montreal, and took a second place in Fergus. In 1988, she won the Piobaireachd event at the Gaelic College.

In 1998, Frances retired after thirty-six years of teaching school. She moved back to Cape Breton with her husband, Wayne MacClure, building a home in St. Ann’s, just up the road from the Gaelic College. There they welcome guests to their home, which is listed under the name of the Luckenbooth Bed and Breakfast. Just what is a Luckenbooth? You may have to spend a night at the B & B to find out. Frances likes to crochet and play piobaireachd. She now plays a set of eighty-year-old silver and ivory Henderson pipes, purchased in Scotland in 1985. She uses a Naill chanter, and is presently using both cane and synthetic drone reeds. She is continuing her study of the music, and attended the Gaelic College in 1998 with Bob Worrall and Ed Neigh. Anxious to keep learning more about Scotland’s greatest musical gift to the world, she frequently attends workshops sponsored by the Piobaireachd Society of Antigonish.