Cult figure Walker was Middle England’s 007
Oliver Brown pays tribute to legendary commentator
His gift was that he could immortalise a picture with his mangled words
He wore it lightly, but there were moments when the vast sweep of Murray Walker’s life left even his admirers in awe. One evening at a restaurant in Wanne, a hilltop village near the Spa-francorchamps circuit where he had watched countless Belgian Grands Prix, he described to assembled journalists how, in 1945, he had driven a tank along the local roads during the Battle of the Bulge.
Most of those present knew this corner of the Ardennes forest solely through the noise of Formula One engines, but Walker remembered a time when it had been ablaze with shot and shell.
As the chequered flag falls on his 97 extraordinary laps, it is apt to recall the richness of personal experience that framed his madcap commentaries. Or to put it in terms of a famous Murray-ism: “That’s history. I say history, because it happened in the past.”
In the piranha club of the F1 paddock, Walker’s own past exalted his reputation. For here was a man whose career spanned champions from Juan Manuel Fangio to Lewis Hamilton. He had witnessed daredevil Tazio Nuvolari, the Flying Mantuan, in the flesh in the 1930s, and was still around to watch a British driver win a seventh world title in the 2020s. In a sport that placed a premium on longevity, Walker saw it all.
For a generation, his will always be the voice that launched a thousand malapropisms. Whether it was declaring that “the young Ralf Schumacher has been upstaged by teenager Jenson Button, who is 20”, or mistaking a Ferrari’s rear safety light for a fire, Walker could immortalise a picture with his mangled words. It was this eccentric gift that made him a priceless asset. In 2002, he joined David Letterman on America’s foremost chat show, a major coup in a country that knew little about F1 and even less about him. But within seconds he had bridged the cultural divide with his witticisms, not least the classic that the “car in front is absolutely unique, except for the one behind that is identical”.
He embraced his casting as the nation’s dotty grandfather of motor racing. His greatest hits were printed on T-shirts and coffee mugs. He gave self-deprecating lectures to the after-dinner crowd and on cruise ships.
Long after his retirement, at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, a boat would dock in Yas Marina calling itself the “HMS Murray Walker”. He was as cherished a feature of the race-day tapestry as the closing bars to Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain, the former F1 theme music that he chose as his first track on Desert Island Discs.
And yet Walker did not simply emerge fully formed as the gaffe-prone soundtrack to Sunday afternoons. He was 54 by the time the BBC gave him lead microphone duties on F1, the
In the piranha club of the F1 paddock, his own past exalted his reputation
fulfilment of a lifelong quest in which he combined his broadcasting with a full-time advertising career. No wonder he liked to describe himself as a “Middle England 007”. He broadcast on hill climbs, rallies, the Commonwealth weightlifting championships, even a TT race that featured the first father-son commentary duo in BBC history. Graham Walker was a font of the richest wisdom for his son, as a leading motorcycle racer who had weaned him on the addictive thrill of speed, taking the 15-year-old Murray to Donington in 1938. The race, won by Nuvolari, had been rescheduled after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.
When conflict engulfed the Continent, the Walkers’ family ties were sundered, only to be emotionally restored in a reunion so improbable it almost beggared belief. Murray, who had been commissioned into the Royal Scots Greys in 1941, under a pompous squadron leader disappointed to find that his name was not Murray-hyphen-walker, was driving a Sherman tank through the shattered Walloon countryside as the Ardennes counteroffensive took hold. Not long before the Allies crossed the Rhine in March 1945, and as Walker and his men toiled to clear the approaches, he headed back to the replenishment depot. There he noticed four men in military uniform, one of whom looked like his father.
As he edged closer, a remarkable truth was revealed: the man was indeed Graham, who had used his contacts as a magazine editor to be accredited as a special correspondent, just so that he could find out where Murray’s regiment was and check on the welfare of his son. “I was very fond of my father, and he was very fond of me,” he told Radio Four’s Kirsty Young in 2014, his voice cracking. “Hopefully, he was very keen to see me again.”
Walker’s reflections on his wartime ordeals, and the ways they had shaped him, could be complex. At one level, he found them exhilarating, once admitting over a Motorsport lunch: “War brought misery, pain, deprivation and tragedy, but – it’s a terrible thing to say – it also brought excitement.” After all, as a small child, he had burst into tears when not given a bath submarine for his birthday. But the intensity of fighting in which he was involved, helping to liberate Bremen and Lubeck before ending the war on the Baltic coast, left its mark. As he put it later: “I had gone into the Army as a boy, and I came out a man.”
It is this back story, quite apart from his onair miscues, that cements Walker’s place in folklore. For he could wax lyrical about a breadth of living that reached far beyond the F1 bubble. Long before he forged his BBC partnership with James Hunt, he was an advertising executive, developing slogans that would stand the test of time. He coined the line: “Opal Fruits – made to make your mouth water.”
For all that he built a reputation for speaking, as Clive James had it, “like a man whose trousers were on fire”, Walker cared profoundly about language and its rhythms. Decades spent scripting commercials gave him an appreciation for the art of making every word count. Listen back to his F1 commentaries and you can hear, amid all the hysteria, the care with which he enunciated every syllable. He had a particular fondness for adverbs. Hamilton was “gigantically talented”, just as the cars he drove were “gigantically quick”. And so, as we bid farewell to a figure who achieved cult sporting status after his incarnations as a tank commander and advertising guru, there could be no more fitting tribute than to describe his life as one gigantically lived.