Conservative Bill served us with pride
Long-serving MP dies aged 88
Bill Walker, the Scottish Conservative MP for Perth and East Perthshire – later Tayside North – from 1979 until 1997 died recently.
Born William Connell Walker in a tenement on Blackness Road, Dundee, on February 20, 1929, Bill was the third of eight children.
After minimal schooling at Blackness and Logie schools, he started work at 14 as a message boy at GL Wilson’s department store in Commercial Street, Dundee, to help family finances after his father was made redundant.
At 15 he joined the Air Training Corps as a cadet, flying gliders at Scone, and went solo at 16, just as the war ended. He joined the RAF at 18 for two years, before moving to the RAF’s Volunteer Reserve where he was retained virtually until the end of his life.
Flying, and teaching youngsters to fly, remained throughout his life a dominant passion. He taught more than 1000 cadets to fly a glider and some climbed the ranks to become air marshals.
On leaving the RAF he worked on Dundee Corporation buses, then joined Malcolm’s, Dundee house furnishers, as a trainee. By the mid1950s, he had risen to be general manager.
He remained closely involved with the RAF Reserve and Air Cadets, and one year took a group from 1232 Dundee ATC Squadron to the RAF Experimental Station near Nottingham.
Some were invited to a nurses’ ball and it was there he met a trainee nurse, Mavis Lambert - though his request for a dance was turned down.
Back in Nottingham a year later, he went to the city’s main dance hall and by chance met the same nurse. After a long distance romance, they were married on March 31, 1956.
They lived initially in a Dundee flat provided by Malcolm’s, while Bill also worked as a glider flying instructor every weekend at No 5 Gliding School, based at RAF Edzell – though it moved in the late 1950s to RNS Condor at Arbroath.
He was then approached to be a senior instructor at the new No 2 Gliding Centre based at Kirton-onLindsey in Lincolnshire.
Their eldest daughter, Clova, was born at nearby Caistor Hospital in 1963.
Not long after, Bill decided that he wanted to become an MP and joined the Conservative candidates’ list, but needed more income to finance the path to parliament.
In 1968, the Association of Retail Furnishers recruited him to set up a training department.
He was then head-hunted by the Birmingham family-run furnishing company Lee Longlands as a director.
The firm had a good reputation and turnover but was then running at a loss. Within a year, Bill turned it into profit and, through a shrewd approach to a local newspaper and TV station, started appearing twice a week on TV.
Bill became known as ‘One-take Walker’ for memorising his script.
The family moved to Birmingham and their youngest daughter, Justine, was born there.
At one point he submitted a paper noting the Conservative Party’s shortcomings in Scotland and suggesting ways to improve matters.
Invited back to present prizes at his old school, Logie in Dundee, he was offered a senior position in Conservative Central Office.
Bill replied that he would rather become an MP, and was chosen to contest Dundee East, held by the then SNP leader Gordon Wilson.
He stood unsuccessfully in the second 1974 election, and was asked to apply for the candidature in Perth and East Perthshire, later Tayside North.
There was massive competition – 44 other applicants – but Bill was chosen and, in the 1979 election, won the seat from the SNP.
His victory was all the more remarkable as he had badly damaged his back and crushing seven vertebrae in a gliding accident and fought the entire campaign in a wheelchair, before spending several months wearing a metal brace.
One of his abiding early memories of Margaret Thatcher was that, at the Commons swearing-in ceremony for the new MPs, she had heard of
Bill Walker represented part of Perthshire at Westminster for almost 20 years his accident and told him: “Go now and get well — your first duty is to your family.”
Being a staunch believer in private enterprise and personal initiative made him a natural Thatcher supporter. He was also a convinced and unwavering Euro-sceptic.
He retained his seat, despite boundary changes, in 1983, 1987 and 1992 and only lost it to the SNP’s John Swinney in 1997.
Throughout his Commons years he chose to remain a backbencher, though he managed to get five Private Member’s Bills passed.
These included the Term and Quarter Days Act, which regularised farm leasing arrangements, and the Scotch Whisky Act which, with later additions, greatly helped the industry achieve its thriving position today.
And in co-operation with Dundee Labour MP Ernie Ross, he helped to save the closure-threatened Dundee Dental Hospital.
He held various directorships and chairmanships in the private sector, was deputy chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party from 2000-02 and was made an OBE in 1998.
He held three senior posts linked to the Air Cadets and gliding and listed gliding, youth work and the RAF Volunteer Reserve, where he was a group captain, under “recreations” in Who’s Who.
Bill Walker leaves a widow, Mavis; three daughters Clova, Fiona and Justine and six grandchildren.