Piper Matthew McCafferty reflects on the tuition and inspiration he received from founding member Grant Walker

I first started receiving tuition from Grant in the winter of 2009 after a fortuitous encounter between him and my dad in the Bathgate branch of Gregg’s Bakery. I was needing a bit of extra help in making the leap from the Novice Juvenile to Juvenile grade within the Boghall setup and Grant graciously offered to come down to my house on a Sunday evening to provide his considerable expertise in achieving this end.

Although Grant professed to rarely giving private tuition, he was clearly a natural teacher. He regularly demonstrated that heady mixture of humour, sangfroid, and bonhomie that is the mark of any great instructor. (As an aside, Grant also taught me what two of those three adjectives mean - his vocabulary is almost as impressive as his prodigious piping). A true mark of the man is that he steadfastly refused any payment for these lessons; the ‘Boghall way’ - as he would put it - is not to seek to profit from the musical advancement of local youths.

I know that many of the guys playing in the band, past and present, owe a debt of gratitude to Grant for getting them up to speed, to the level required to compete at the top end of Grade One. I will always picture Grant standing at the ‘back corner’ of the band circle, omnipresent, as season after season a new crop of juvenile players who were making the jump to the adult band were safely ensconced to his immediate right. Grant was irrefutably instrumental in my own experience of that leap. He has always insisted latterly that ‘he never taught me anything that I didn’t already have’. With all due respect to him, that is complete nonsense. I am certain that without his musical direction, I would not have ‘made the grade’. But far more importantly than that, thanks to his interminable supply of stories, anecdotes, and band tales, I was completely infatuated with the idea of playing with the Grade One band. Many of our ‘hour long lessons’ turned into nigh on 3 hours sitting round my mum and dad’s kitchen table, invariably listening to Grant ‘holding court’ about some obscure Highland Games the band played at in 1983. It remains one of my proudest achievements and one of my fondest memories to have played my first Grade One contest with the band at the British Championships in Bathgate in 2014, ‘safely ensconced’ next to Grant in the circle.

Matthew "safely ensconced" next to Grant Walker

Although I would balk at telling him this in person, all I really wanted to be in my formative teenage years was like Grant. His wit, wisdom, insight into the ebb and flow of life, and most of all his undying love for and dedication to Peoples Ford Boghall and Bathgate Caledonia Pipe Band were, and are, utterly infectious. I know that I am just one of the many people who have benefited from his love of our band, but I consider myself extremely lucky to have been tutored by Grant Walker. I am not only indebted to Grant for my proficiency as a piper; I am indebted to him for the sense of loyalty and community values he instilled in me as a young man. As Grant would say, no man is bigger than the band and the band will surely continue to survive and to thrive without Grant in the pipe corps. But it will certainly not be the same without the man who, for so many years, has epitomised precisely what it means to be a piper in Peoples Ford Boghall and Bathgate Caledonia Pipe Band.