Goodbye to Murray
TRIBUTE The story of a life-long biker
‘I don’t think Sheene would have lost any sleep racing me’
Murray Walker, who died last Saturday aged 97, was a household name because of Formula One, but his first love was motorcycles. And what a life in bikes he had. He raced at Brands Hatch when it was a grasstrack, he saw the first 70mph lap at the TT (and the first 80, 90, 100 and 130), he won a gold medal in the 1949 International Six Days Trial, he commentated on Mike Hailwood’s first ever race, he was mates with Barry Sheene, Arthur Lampkin, John Surtees… the list is endless. It’s like he lived four lives, not one. The foundations for this lifelong passion for motorcycles were laid early. His father Graham was a Norton works rider who won a TT, an Ulster GP and dozens of other international road races. Murray went to his first TT in 1925, aged two, and spent his childhood mixing with GP stars. Despite, or perhaps because of, this upbringing, Murray didn’t fully appreciate just how good his dad was on a bike until later in life. Speaking to MCN’s sister title Classic Bike in 2019, he said: “When I came out of the army [Murray was a tank commander in WW2] I thought ‘now I’ll show the old man how a motorcycle really ought to be ridden,’ and go racing. I soon realised that I was never going to be as good as him. If I had carried on racing, I think I would have been a good club rider, but no more. I don’t think Barry Sheene would have lost any sleep over having me on the grid.” Murray then threw himself into trials riding, eventually winning a gold medal in the 1949 International Six Days Trial and getting a first class award in the Scottish Six Days. But again, he realised he was surrounded by more talented riders and decided to commentate on trials at weekends instead, getting a part-time role at the BBC. During the week he held down an increasingly high-powered advertising job where he was responsible for dozens of famous tag lines such as ‘Opal Fruits, made to make your mouth water’, though not ‘A Mars a day helps you work rest and play’ – that was written by someone who worked for him.
From trials, Murray moved to scrambles commentary for the BBC, fitting in road racing commentaries at circuits around the UK. Then, at the end of the weekend, he and his wife Elizabeth would drive back to London ready for work on Monday. And the journeys weren’t wasted: “During one winter I wrote my book with Mike Hailwood [The Art of Motorcycle Racing] in a Triumph Herald with my wife driving.
“Of course in those days there wasn’t anywhere you could eat so my wife had a gas cooker in the footwell, and she used to feed me hot stew when it was my turn at the wheel.”
From 1949 Murray was also working at the TT as the number two commentator to his father, taking over the lead role when Graham died in 1962. It’s clear Murray loved their working relationship: “It was brilliant because I think we were telepathic in a way – I knew when he was going to stop and he knew when I wanted to say something. It worked very well indeed. There was no father-son hierarchy – we were more like brothers at that time in our lives.”
One fortunate side-effect of all this work and his advertising career was the money: he had enough to spend on motorcycles. “I came out of the army in 1947 and bought myself an ex-War Department G3 Matchless with telescopic forks all in khaki,” he said. “Later I got a 500cc 4-cylinder Honda and I thought that was absolutely the bee’s knees. Then I got a Triumph Tiger 100 with a spring hub. That was terrific too. After that, I sold the Honda and got an R90S BMW – the one with the gold paint job. I fell in love with that and bought an R100RS too, the one with the big silver fairing. The two BMWs lived in a heated garage – the car lived outside.”
Even during his F1 years and during his retirement afterwards, Murray still kept in touch with motorcycling, reading MCN every week and travelling to his beloved TT races whenever possible. He was always charming and entertaining company – exactly as you’d imagine if you’ve heard his commentaries – but never more so than when talking about the TT. The mixture of encyclopaedic knowledge and childlike enthusiasm was utterly endearing.
“I’m not knocking Formula One, far from it,” he said, “but they’re cocooned in a carbon fibre cell with every modern safety device you can think of – and rightly so. And the motorcycle blokes? Sitting on top of a 200mph projectile was nothing to protect them except a blow-up jacket. The Peter Hickmans of this world, the John McGuinnesses, they are my ultimate heroes.” Everyone at MCN would like to extend their sympathies to Murray’s family and friends. Murray Walker, 1923 to 2021: a passionate motorcyclist and a genuinely lovely bloke.
‘I came out of the army and bought an ex-War Department G3 Matchless’