William Charles Walker
Mayor of Oxford 1952/3
William Charles Walker (1882–1966) was born at Wolverhampton on 30 July 1882. His parents were also born at Wolverhampton: his father Charles Walker in 1853, and his mother Mary in 1852.
At the time of the 1901 census he was an 18-year-old builder’s clerk living with his parents at 316 Hordern Road, Wolverhampton. Two of his younger brothers were also in the house: Bernard (13), who was a telegraph messenger, and Rowland (9).
Walker left school at 14 and went to work in the office of a local building firm, attending evening classes in building construction.
In 1903, when he was 21, Walker was sent to a job at Salisbury Plain. The living quarters there, however, could not accommodate wives, so he came to Oxford to work for the building and civil engineers Benfield & Loxley, and was married in August 1904 in the Wolverhampton Registration District to Clara Gertrude Loveday Pike (born in Ibstock, Leicestershire in c.1883)
Walker and his wife settled in a rented house at 80 Fairacres Road, and by the time of the 1911 census had moved to 161 Divinity Road. They had just one child:
- Violet Gertrude Loveday Walker (born at 161 Divinity Road in February 1912 and baptised at All Saints Church, Highfield on 10 March 1912).
In the baptismal register Walker is described as a builder’s labourer. He soon came up in the world, however, and in 1922 he built 46 Hill Top Road for himself in the style of a Georgian manor.
Walker was to stay with Benfield & Loxley for the rest of his life, becoming first a partner, then one of the first three directors, and then joint governing director.
Just after the First World War Walker became a friend of William Morris, who commissioned him to buy “a lot of land at Cowley” for his new car factory. Walker cycled out to Cowley with his co-director on a Sunday morning and got an option on the land. Benfield & Loxley also built the car works, and Morris said to Walker, “No other firm shall lay a single brick at Cowley as long as I have anything to do with it.”
Benfield & Loxley was also involved in the building of Headington School and the Churchill Hospital, and also the main new university buildings around this time: the Radcliffe Science Library, the New Bodleian Library, and Nuffield College.
Walker was awarded the OBE for his work during the Second World War.
He was first elected to the City Council in 1946 as a Conservative member for the North Ward. He was elected Sheriff of Oxford for 1950/1, and in 1952 was elected an Alderman and also Mayor of Oxford (for 1952/3).
Walker resigned from the Council in 1958, and died in August 1966, at the age of 84, at his home at 46 Hill Top Road.
Walker’s daughter Violet Gertrude became Mrs Avery.
See also:
- W.C. Walker, Some Reminiscences of an Oxford Builder (privately printed autobiography, 1960)
- Oxford Times, 12 August 1966, p. 28e–f
- 1901 Census: Wolverhampton (St Andrew), 2677/91