If they couldn’t see him, they could hear him.

Because Stu Willoughby would regularly pull his L.G.Lawrie’s from the closet and belt out ‘Amazing Grace’ or ‘Scotland the Brave’.

Stirring stuff.

“It was brilliant!” says Stu’s wife, Val.

“He would march up and down the hallway playing his bagpipes.”

And everyone on Tirinui Crest Rd, along Cherrywood Ridge, would stop and listen to the wailing, haunting, mournful sound that’s called men to battle, that’s buried men, that’s blessed marriages and is jigged to.

As Robbie Burns wrote: “Something stirs within me, when I hear the bagpipes”.

“Just beautiful,” says Val.

The skirl of Stu’s pipes would fill the house and flood the neighbourhood.

Something definitely stirred.

Then last November, when the piper had sadly played his last tune, Stu’s bagpipes were by his casket at an Elms Chapel celebration of life.

Stu was gone.

But there was a requiem left in the pipes.

“I was there in my kilt, my band uniform,” says Lance Torrington.

“And I picked up Stu’s pipes and played ‘My Home’.

It’s a dirge, a mournful piece, and tells us that regardless of where a true Scot dies, his spirit always goes home.

Spiritual journey 

Stu Willoughby – hard case, piper, fisherman, cricketer, marathoner, accountant and family man. Photo: supplied.

So Stu Willoughby was piped on his spiritual journey with his very own bagpipes.

“I could sense him lying there thinking: ‘Great!’” says Val.

“Exactly what he wanted.”

Val wept. Everyone wept. And a piper’s job was done.

“It’s done when there isn’t a dry eye in the church,” says Lance.

The story could have ended there, right after the hearse did a lap of the Domain, where Stu had spent summers playing cricket, before disappearing off to ‘yon bonny’ shores.

But those bagpipes have their own story.

“They’re rare because they’re more than 100 years old and in superb condition,” says Stu’s daughter Jan Willoughby.

The drones are ebony – jet black hardwood with ivory ferrules – from the days when elephant tusks were legally harvested.

And the chanter is fringed with fussy silver engraving.

“Beautiful, and precious,” says Jan. 

“They have historic and sentimental significance to a proud family and this city.”

The L.G.Lawrie’s have been dubbed the ‘Stewart Pipes’, for Stewart Bruce ‘Stu’ Willoughby.

And the suggestion is to have them displayed as a living, working exhibit, maybe in the new Tauranga museum.

With a Memorandum of Understanding they’d be released for playing on special occasions – like Anzac Day.

Hard case raconteur 

The story now goes sharply back-in-time to Renfrew St in Glasgow – hub of the Scottish bagpipe industry, and Stu’s Dad – Stanley ‘Mick’ Willoughby, a 1928 All Black, a hard-nosed ‘loosie’.

The ‘Stewart Pipes’ were Mick’s doing.

He couldn’t muster a note on a chanter, but he was fiercely proud of his tartan blood.

So about 75 years ago, Mick called on favourite Aunt Annabella Stewart in Scotland to acquire a set of pipes, a token of his heritage, from Renfrew St. Favourite aunt would also give her name to Stewart Bruce Willoughby – who would grow into a hard case raconteur and jokester, a marathoner, triathlete, fisherman and cricketer, chartered accountant and family man who loved a beer.

“You name it, he gave it a go,” says Val.

Family friend Dr Alistair Reese described Stu as a “busy man” with a “beautiful mind” who never stopped being curious and learning.

Was it the curiosity or his DNA that led him to become a teenage pipe major in a college highland pipe band?

Either way it was then inevitable Mick’s pipes would become Stu’s pipes.

L.G.Lawrie’s are said to have “the most brilliant sound – bold and bassy” – although it might take the sensitivities of a piper to appreciate it. 

The refurbishment 

The bagpipes fell silent for decades – a man simply got too busy.

And it wasn’t until Jan Willoughby was touched by a lone piper called Lance Torrington playing ‘Skye Boat Song’ as the sun rose on the Pāpāmoa Anzac Day service last year that she thought to have the ‘Stewart Pipes’ resurrected.

“I refurbished them,” says Lance, a pipe major with the City of Tauranga Pipe Band.

It’s specialist work because the tone and integrity of the bagpipes can be compromised, if the dimensions of the drones, the diameter of the bores, are changed.

Then one special day last June, Stu got to hear the reconditioned Stewart pipes one last time.

Lance marched through Stu’s Bethlehem Views resthome playing ‘Skye Boat Song’.

Something stirred that day too. “The place just stopped,” recalls Val. They still talk about it.

A few months later Stu sat in front of the TV wearing an All Black cap for what he believed would be a ”bloody marvellous game”,  the Rugby World Cup final.

“Everyone wanted the All Blacks to win for this son of an All Black,” says Jan.

The ‘Stewart Pipes’ lay alongside Stu’s casket. Photo: Supplied.

Enduring salute 

But the vicissitudes of sports conspired.

“Stu was massively disappointed.”

It was portentous.

Because a couple of weeks later the piper ‘Stu’ would pass away surrounded by family.

And the L.G. Lawrie’s are back in safe keeping. For now.

They are not the Stradivarius of bagpipes, according to Lance.

“They are good mid-range bagpipes. And the best person to look after them is a piper. They don’t belong to anyone. They deserve to be played.”

As a haunting, wailing and enduring salute to a true Tauranga character.