Ted Walker

Edward Joseph (Ted) Walker (28 November 1934 - 19 March 2004) was a prize-winning English poet, short storywriter, travel writer, TV and radio dramatist and broadcaster.

Early Life

Walker was born in Lancing, West Sussex, the son of a carpenter from Worcestershire who had found work in the south-coast construction industry. He was educated at Steyning Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages. Walker's earlier poems and later autobiographical work, in particular ´The High Path demonstrate that his childhood seems to have been unusually happy and totally remembered.

In fact, there was tragedy too. Both of his paternal uncles, who lived in shared accommodation together with Walker's parents, grandparents and aunt, were killed in the War; George in North Africa and Jack on Shoreham beach.

At the age of 15 he met his future wife, Lorna Benfell, and almost immediately after his graduation they were married. At first they lived and worked in west London as teachers, she in Tottenham and he in Southall. They had four children.

It was at school that Walker and John Cotton, a like-minded colleague, founded a poetry magazine they called Priapus, an attractive if amateur production, copies of which are now very rare. Walker published some work in the early numbers, the beginning of his poetic career.

Poetry

In 1963 Walker obtained a teaching post in Bognor Regis and from there moved to Chichester High School. He had also started to write poetry regularly and of a quality that made it welcome in journals such as The Listener, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Magazine are examples. It drew the attention of William Plomer, then poetry editor at Jonathan Cape and a powerful figure in the poetry world. Walker had also submitted poems to The New Yorker, where Howard Moss made his work welcome.

Other key influences on his literary development included the Welsh poet Leslie Norris, and the critic Robert Gittings.

Walker's first book of verse, Fox on a Barn Door focus on the Sussex countryside and coast. The titles of a good third of the poems - such as "Breakwaters", "The Skate Fishers" and "On the Sea Wall" are about the shoreline of Lancing and Shoreham. The South Downs were likewise a fertile influence.

Walker's early poetry won many prizes, among them the Cholmondeley Poetry Prize and the David Higham Memorial Prize.

Journalism & Broadcasting

In the 1970s Walker was a contributor to his local newspaper, The Chichester Observer, where his regular column on West Sussex villages fascinated (and often enraged) the county set. He also began broadcasting with BBC local radio and TV. Then, in 1979, he worked on a TV dramatisation with BBC Briston producer Colin Rose. It was the start of a highly productive relationship. Their output included Big Jim And The Figaro Club (1981) and A Family Man (1983). Big Jim, a series of comedy films set during the postwar building boom, extolled the comradeship which, for Ted, epitomised working-class life "in them far-off days of the Figaro Club before the world turned lax and sour". A Family Man dealt with several generations of father/son relationships, drawing deeply on Ted's own family history.

Walker also wrote plays for Shaun McLaughlin in BBC radio drama and adapted Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1995) for an animated version with a voice cast including Alan Bennett, Rik Mayall, Michael Palin and Michael Gambon.

Later Life

For most of his working life Walker earned a living as a teacher at The New England College, an American liberal arts academy that had a British campus in Tortington, near Arundel in West Sussex. In 1978 he retired from his Professorship, giving him more time to focus on writing and his other great passion, travel. He was a frequent visitor to Spain, and in 1989 he published an account of his experiences and impressions of the country, In Spain.

In 1987 Lorna Walker died after a long battle against cancer. A year later Walker married their close friend, Audrey Hicks.

Walker's later life was marred by a series of family disputes with his mother Winifred and brother George. In 1997 Ted and Audrey Walker moved to Spain, at the village of Alcalali near Valencia, where he died in 2004.

Literary Work

Poetry

Fox on a Barn Door (1965)

The Solitaries' (1969)

The Night Bathers (1970)

Gloves to the Hangman (1973)

Burning the Ivy (1978)

Hands at a Live Fire (1987)

Mangoes on the Moon (1999)

Short Stories

You've Never Heard Me Sing

He Danced with a Chair

Autobiography

The High Path

The Last of England

Children's Books

The Lion's Cavalcade (with Alan Aldridge)

Granddad's Seagulls

Travel

In Spain

Television & Radio

The Gaffer

The Family Man

Big Jim & the Figaro Club

The Wind in the Willows