He continued to write poetry throughout his life, often looking back to Binsey, Jericho, Port Meadow and Wolvercote, the Oxford childhood haunts that he shared with Christine, his beloved wife and constant companion for fifty-five years. They had been two years apart at the same primary school, met at the local Youth Club and went on their first date to the annual Saint Giles Fair aged sixteen and fourteen. She was the mother of their seven children, the inspiration for some truly beautiful poems and always the centre of what he liked to call "the chaotic Pearson household", which was also home to a succession of magnificent Neapolitan Mastiffs.

When they left Oxford for Canada, Stewart flew on ahead; Christine followed a couple of months later with two small children and a third on the way, sailing from Tilbury in a Polish cargo boat which somehow managed to hit a small iceberg before arriving safely in Montreal.

Stewart initially lost touch with nearly all his old school and college friends but his memories of them were vivid and affectionate. He spoke, for example, of his admiration for Abingdon's talented musicians such as Stephen Denny, Graham Hallett and Tim Tozer and recalled Tim ending one morning-chapel service with "a full volume breakneck version of Widor's Toccata which caused a stunned and startled (Headmaster) JMC to look up in alarm to see who on earth was trying to loosen the roof tiles".

Later he began to re-connect through the internet and eventually I had the great pleasure of seeing him each summer when he and Christine came to visit her father in Oxford. We would go to Binsey and Jericho, where he lit candles in the churches in memory of his own parents, and were able one year to spend an afternoon with Roger Limerick, so fondly remembered recently by Chip Johnson. The prolific poet and the prolific song-writer had already started to exchange compositions and this meeting, their first for fifty years, renewed a special friendship that had begun in the strangest of ways when PE teacher Ron Coleman pitted them against each other in a boxing match in the school gym.

The only child of a Geordie mother and Scottish father, Stewart strove constantly to honour and live up to their down to earth attitudes and social values. His business acumen and his enterprising spirit were combined with great generosity and sensitivity and the exceptional empathy that he showed from the very beginning. At school he was frequently drawn to the lonelier boys who he sensed needed emotional or practical support. At Oxford he and his fellow Geographers fashioned a period of genuine happiness for their seriously depressed and troubled tutor. His business specialised in the financing of affordable non-profit social housing and nursing and retirement homes. It is a rich blessing to have been befriended by this always humorous, deeply compassionate and profoundly thoughtful man.