David Walker: Norfolk’s Master Batsman
Martin Chandler |Published: 2025
Pages: 141
Author: Dawson, Andy
Publisher: ACS
Rating: 4 stars
Despite a lifelong obsession with the game of cricket and its literature there is, inevitably, still a great deal I don’t know about the game and those who play it. No doubt that is the reason why I particularly enjoy biographies, those accounts that fill in the gaps of the stories that I already know in part.
What is rare however is that I pick up a book like this, the biography of a man proclaimed in his time as being the best batsman in England, yet his name is one that I do not recognise. And his time was the 1930s, a decade I thought I knew all about.
However if I have, and I suspect I must have, seen the name of David Walker occasionally it has certainly never registered with me. Yet ‘Plum’ Warner wanted him to be selected for England, and Bill Edrich once expressed the view that, with the possible exception of Donald Bradman, he was the best batsman in the world.
Had the book been published by anyone other than the ACS, or on 1 April rather than 1 May, I might have thought this was all just a hoax and indeed that thought did still briefly cross my mind, until I was reassured by a quick look at Cricketarchive that this was indeed a non-fiction book.
Walker does have a First Class record. Between 1933 and 1935 he played 34 times for Oxford University, but despite a number of offers he never played for a county side. After graduating there were just a couple of appearances for MCC and a single one at the Folkestone festival in 1938 when he played for a scratch side put together by Warner against a powerful side styled as England Past and Present.
Considering that his First Class career, such as it was, was over by the time he was 22 Walker’s record is a decent one, but no more. What is much more impressive is his record for Norfolk in the Minor Counties Championship, and all of the many descriptions that author Andy Dawson has found in contemporary reports make it clear that at school, university and for club and county in Norfolk he was indeed a very fine batsman.
The potential issue was that, armed with what I knew from Cricketarchive that Walker died on active service in the RAF in 1942 at the age of 28, I did initially fear that all I might get to do would be to follow Walker’s career via the paraphrasing of contemporary reports of his cricketing prowess held together with the glue of information gleaned from other written sources and publicly available documents.
Such books are not without some merit, but tend not to be the most exciting reads. So on the basis that forewarned is forearmed with titles where I suspect that may be what I am faced with, I have taken to reading a book’s acknowledgements before I start. On doing so I was immediately reassured.
It turns out that David Walker: Norfolk’s Master Batsman has had an extremely long gestation period. It is a project that Andy Dawson began in 1998 having been inspired to do so by a conversation with a former Norfolk teammate of Walker. From there he also spoke to as many as fourteen other people who knew Walker well, and also a niece and an impressive array of other archivists and experts.
And although Dawson blames his own sheer laziness for the time it has taken for the book to appear I suspect that that delay has only served to improve the quality of his narrative. Walker’s story is not one that would a Hollywood blockbuster make. But his was an interesting life, redolent of a different time and social structure and vividly brought to life by a writer for whom this was obviously a labour of love. What I believe is Dawson’d first book is certainly recommended.
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