Down under, up and over: the Victoria Police World’s win 20 years later

The lead-up

In 1998, they managed to keep their sights affixed firmly on the biggest prize in pipe bands.

“The band was really going well that year,” says Ian Lyons, a piper in the band at the time and currently a longtime member of Field Marshal Montgomery. “We were well prepared for the Pre-World’s Masterblasters concert and we had come off the back of great performances in 1997, where we were pipped into a second place tie by the tiniest of margins, losing out and coming third on ensemble preference. I think it might have been a quarter or half a point between first and third.”

Indeed, the prep work that recordings and concerts provided set up the band for Scotland, despite not having actually competed at all since the 1997 World’s.

“I remember thinking that the only contest we had played at since the World’s in 1997 was at Perth [Scotland] the weekend before we got to that line in Glasgow,” says Andrew Fuller, a piper in the ranks. “We had not competed anywhere in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, in all that time. So, we’d effectively gone a whole year without competing before that big day in 1998.”

That the band was not competition-hardened that year, essentially coming to Scotland without going through the process of getting the nerves out with a season of contests, flew in the face of tradition. Not only did they come 11,000 miles, they stepped off the plane cold. But they changed history by proving it could be done.

That said, to try that today and expect to win the World’s is probably crazy, particularly considering the $125,000 minimum investment that an Antipodean band needs to make simply to get to and stay in Glasgow for a week.

“It is a little known fact that the band only ever practiced two nights per week,” Fuller adds, “for maybe 90 minutes, tops. Even just before flying up there, that was the routine. Obviously daily practices were the norm while in Scotland, but it is no mean feat to achieve that with no competition for 12 months in the lead-up. Try to imagine a band even having a hope of doing that these days.”

Despite the lack of competing, the Victoria Police prepared using performances and recordings and the intense commitment that those pursuits require. Since the early-1990s, the band had steadily built a creative repertoire, releasing several popular CDs that showcased the original compositions of members such as Mark Saul and Murray Blair.

“The band had been playing well and was ready to try and catch the big one the next year,” Pipe-Sergeant Brian Niven says. “[We] had been booked for the Pre-World’s concert in Motherwell and at the same time released the Masterblasters album, so the previous six months were taken up with World’s practice and learning new tunes for the concert. On the lead up to the World’s, the band performed the concert in various formats twice in our home state of Victoria, once in Melbourne and one in Bendigo, a regional city in the middle of Victoria. This definitely helped to produce a professional performance at Motherwell, culminating with the now famous ‘Hellbound Train’ written by Mark Saul. So a large amount of playing and performing put the band in good stead for the upcoming visit to Scotland.”

“The band practiced very hard, both at home and when we arrived in Scotland,” Lyons adds. “The Grade 1 arena that year was down by the river on Glasgow Green and the tune-up procedure for us was regimented, like clockwork. Nat always ran things to precision and we knew, to the minute, rain, hail or shine, what was required. Our MSR was solid and we came out of that very pleased. The tune-up for the Medley was intense. Because the bands were a lot smaller then, that meant the circle was smaller and the large crowds were 10 deep around the band. You could feel the heat. We played a brilliant Medley and I think ended up with four firsts.”