Murray Walker: Unless I’m Very Much Mistaken

Murray Walker: Unless I’m Very Much Mistaken
Murray Walker

The voice of motor racing and much loved public figure – and the man responsible for introducing millions of viewers to the previously inaccessible world of Formula 1 – tells the story of his incident-packed life, with a brand new chapter on his globetrotting adventures since retirement.Murray Walker is a national treasure. When the man who made famous the catch phrase 'Unless I'm very much mistaken… I AM very much mistaken!!!' announced that he was retiring as ITV's Grand Prix commentator, the media reacted as if the sport itself was losing one of its biggest stars.His reputation for mistakes was the making of Walker. He was the fan who happened to be given the keys to the commentary box – and never wanted to give them back. His high-octane delivery kept viewers on the edge of their seats, while his passion for talking about the sport he loved was matched by an all-encompassing knowledge gained through hours of painstaking research before every race.In his book he writes about his childhood and the influence that his father, British motorcycle champion Graham Walker, had on his career. Failing to match his father's achievements on the track after active service in World War II, he made a successful career for himself in advertising which catapulted him to the top of his profession.An offer from the BBC to take over the commentary seat for their F1 broadcasts was too good to turn down, and it wasn't long before the infamous 'Murrayisms' enlivened a sport which until then had been shrouded in a cloak of unfathomable technical jargon and mind-numbing statistics.He also talks about the biggest changes in the sport over the last 50 years, in particular the safety issues which came to the fore after the tragic death of Ayrton Senna, which he witnessed first hand. His partnership with James Hunt behind the microphone is the subject of some hilarious anecdotes, while his views on drivers past and present such as Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart, Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher make for fascinating reading.

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Murray Walker

UNLESS I’M VERY MUCH MISTAKEN

Contents

Cover (#u4d33ce0d-ba18-5c94-81a1-2d2ab8fad024)

Title Page (#ud6dc9cba-2fdd-59b4-bc48-a8015759bdb7)

Introduction (#u4360858a-a75f-5b3c-a1af-daf3821ef732)

1 A Proud Brummie (#u1a51323c-b3bd-5b0e-b3e7-2f350262e2ef)

2 Tanks it is Then (#uac94e5bb-a90f-5783-9792-478156a8c7c3)

3 A is for Advertising (#u3e7e8b58-2889-5fc3-8de7-5f1ff5461add)

4 Starting at Masius (#u808101f7-cdfc-53d1-91b0-6f58be62efc2)

5 Goodbye Mars, Hello Wheels (#u6bf9a9f9-cd77-511b-a892-eb5e97f8dc12)

6 My Second Life (#litres_trial_promo)

7 The Rough Stuff (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Hell on Wheels (#litres_trial_promo)

9 You Name It, I Did It (#litres_trial_promo)

10 A View from the Commentary Box (#litres_trial_promo)

11 My Wonderful World of Formula 1 (#litres_trial_promo)

12 This is My Life (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Every One a Winner (#litres_trial_promo)

14 I Am Very Much Mistaken (#litres_trial_promo)

15 Out With a Bang (#litres_trial_promo)

16 A Full-Time Passion (#litres_trial_promo)

Plates (#litres_trial_promo)

Career Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Photographic credits (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ulink_7a263690-c2e1-5dbe-8d7e-081f9cb65012)

Like everyone, I left my mother’s womb without a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life yet here I am, nearly 80 years on, starting to write about it. Why? Who cares?

Years ago I gave myself the answer when I was gossiping at a motor-racing gathering with some great characters that included Rob Walker, friend, mentor and sponsor of the great Stirling Moss. Rob, one of nature’s gentlemen, was a member of the Johnnie Walker whisky family and didn’t exactly have to worry where his next pay cheque was coming from. I asked him when he was going to write his life story. He seemed amazed. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, Murray. It’s one thing reminiscing with a bunch of chaps like this but I’d just dry up if I tried to put it all on paper.’

‘Rob,’ I said, ‘if you don’t do it and go to your grave with everything you’ve said and done still in your head, you’ll be committing a crime against motor racing. You must do it.’

So I believe I have memories and stories to tell that might interest and entertain those many people who haven’t had the good fortune to be where I have been. But how Rob felt is how I feel right now, staring glumly at my laptop. So much done and so much to say, but where to start and how to go about it? All sorts of things motivate me to try though, one of which is gratitude. I’ve been both lucky and privileged, having had a fabulous life full of richness, variety and satisfaction, with hardly any setbacks. From as far back as I can remember I’ve enjoyed almost every second of it, basically because I like people and there are usually plenty of them around whose company and friendship I can share.

Normally I’m not much of a chap for looking back; to me the present and future matter more than the past. Life is about making things happen – planning, organizing and getting it done – and I like it most when anticipation turns to realization. But I must be getting old (well I am old, though I certainly don’t feel it) because I now want to remind myself about who I’ve known, where I’ve been, what I’ve seen and what I’ve achieved. So I’m writing this book primarily for my own satisfaction, not for the money!

Many years ago in my youth I spent a long time trying to persuade a particular girl whom I was very fond of to marry me, but she finally refused because she said I was too interested in security. We went our different ways, but to this day I have an unashamed horror of being insecure – having a mortgage I can’t keep up with, not being able to pay the bills, wondering what would happen if I wasn’t earning, or whether the pension would be enough. I’ve a theory that there are two sorts of people in life: those who work for someone else for a salary and, hopefully, the greater security that goes with it, and others who work for themselves, take risks and can potentially do better, though not necessarily. Well, I’m one of the former. I can think of few really big ‘risk’ decisions I’ve made in terms of my career development, and luckily for me those I’ve had to make all paid off. I’ve largely reacted to situations rather than initiated them, but things seem to have worked out pretty well. I’d love to be a bright spark who ducks and dives and comes out ahead – someone like Bernie Ecclestone, whom I greatly admire – but I’d hate to be the one who ducks and dives and falls flat on his face. Better to be at ease with yourself than try to be something you are not.

‘He’s obsessed. If it hasn’t got an engine he’s not interested,’ says my long-suffering wife, Elizabeth. This is not entirely true, but I confess that the groaning bookshelves in my study do not include the works of Shakespeare, selections from Chaucer or too many volumes of poetry. Talking of Elizabeth, incidentally, you are not going to hear too much about her in this book. It’s not that I do not love her dearly or respect and admire her, because I do all of those things by the bucketful, it’s just that Elizabeth’s attitude is ‘He’s public, I’m private’. We met at a London party when I was 34 and although it took me far too long to get around to the subject of marriage I really was smitten at first sight. She is a tower of strength and has an infinitely better brain than me, but whereas I love the limelight and positively revel in it, her idea of purgatory is to have her photograph taken or to appear in public. She wouldn’t welcome me banging on about her qualities here either, so I’m not going to do so. It’s a marriage of opposites I suppose, but just like it says in the old song: ‘We’ve been together now for 40 years [and more] and it don’t seem a day too much. There ain’t a lady living in the land as I’d swap for me dear old Dutch.’ I wouldn’t have been able to do what I have done without her and she’s the one for me.

I have to confess that I’m a workaholic. I’m absolutely useless at relaxing. I get irritated, bored and restless. For about 20 years Elizabeth and I didn’t have a normal holiday because I spent all the time either at my job or doing broadcasts. I really enjoyed both my work and what was then my hobby – commentating. Saving for security mattered more to both of us than spending now and maybe suffering later, but neither of us regrets it for we certainly haven’t been deprived. It’s different now, because we go on cruises to magnificent places and, in my last commentary year, we had a fabulous trip to Australia, Thailand and Malaysia with, hopefully, more to come.

‘For God’s sake, don’t ever retire,’ Elizabeth used to say. ‘What on earth are you going to do with yourself?’ Throughout my life I’ve had to be doing something all the time, whether it’s writing, researching my next race, going to it, beavering round while I’m there, talking about it, or travelling home eagerly to await the next one. And that’s still the case now that I’ve retired from full-time commentating. I always reckoned that writing this book was going to take me a good 12 months, after which something else would turn up. It always does.

I’ve managed to go from one thing to the next with little difficulty and have always made the best of my lot rather than dreaming up impossible goals. From my beginnings in Birmingham, with the wonderful influence of my parents (had my Dad not been obsessed with motor cycles I may not have had half the life I have); my childhood, passing through several schools; my time in the army, in both war and peacetime, from which I returned far more of a man than before; and jobs with Dunlop – at the time one of Britain’s greatest companies – and two major advertising agencies with whom I became satisfyingly successful; not to mention all my wonderful experiences in motor sport: through it all I have never been unhappy with the way things have turned out, whatever the change of direction. It’s all been worthwhile, enjoyable and good experience for the rest of my life.

What about the broadcasting though? I thought you were never going to ask. It’s difficult to know where to begin because it has been going on for so long now. In fact, it could be a question of heredity. I often wonder whether I would have been so passionately interested in motor sport had I not been born and brought up with it, whether I would have attempted to race motor cycles had my father not been so successful, or whether I would ever have picked up a microphone had he not been as brilliant and gifted a speaker, writer and commentator. It’s impossible to tell, but it looks as though I am a chip off the old block and that’s very much all right by me; I cannot think of anyone I’d more aspire to be like than my father. After a long and distinguished racing career – of which more later – he became editor of the failing magazine Motor Cycling. He turned it round by sheer ability, hard work and personality, matched the sales of the previously dominant competitor, Motor Cycle, and also became a much-loved broadcaster.

It must be in the genes: all his siblings were ‘arty’ in some way. My Uncle Eric was Professor of South African history at Cambridge and Cape Town Universities, my Aunt Elsie was a gifted painter and all the rest were good communicators. In 1935 when Dad had given up racing, the BBC asked him to do their radio commentaries (there was no television back then) for the Isle of Man TT, the Ulster Grand Prix and other motor cycle events. He took to it like a duck to water. In sport there are people who compete at the top level and people who can talk about it entertainingly, but there aren’t many who can do both supremely well. In my day James Hunt could and, more recently, Martin Brundle can, but my father was unique. He made you feel as though you were there, with an infectious enthusiasm overlaid by total knowledge of his subject, and he was the BBC’s top man on the sport for 31 years.

Those that can, do; those that can’t, talk about it, so maybe that’s why I ended up where I did. I was reasonably good at trials riding on my 500T Norton – I won a Gold Medal in the 1949 International Six Days Trial at Llandrindod Wells and various other awards – but it was at racing that I wanted to excel. I’ve always believed that if you want to do anything enough you will succeed, so I couldn’t have wanted to race that badly because in 1949 I decided that I was far more likely to get somewhere in business than by trying to set the world’s racetracks alight. I retired at the peak of my inconsiderable form after I’d won a 250cc heat at Brands Hatch. Thereafter I confined my lack of two-wheeled talent to weekend commuting between Dunlop in Birmingham and my home in Enfield, on my Triumph Tiger 100.

At heart I think I’m a bit of a ham, for I’ve always enjoyed public speaking and was therefore delighted when I got my first chance at broadcasting – albeit on a public address system. The Midland Automobile Club asked me if I’d like to do the PA commentary on a combined car and bike meeting at their world-famous Shelsley Walsh hill-climb in Worcestershire. My father had been due to commentate for the BBC but had to drop out at the last moment, and was being replaced by the man who had been booked to do the PA. The Club asked my father, who’d caused the situation, to recommend someone to take his place.

‘Why not try the boy?’ he said. ‘I think he’ll be all right. Even if he isn’t it won’t be a disaster because he’ll only be talking to the spectators and they’ll be able to see what’s going on anyway.’

I suppose it was nepotism, but I wasn’t going to say no. You have to grasp your opportunities where they are offered in this world. And never mind the spectators: as far as I was concerned I was talking to one man at Shelsley – Jim Pestridge, the BBC producer. There was no way he was going to miss me for my voice was blasting out of a battery of loudspeakers right by his side. Now, the way you do a PA commentary and the way you do a radio commentary are quite different. With the former there’s no need to talk non-stop as your role is more to give information and announcements than to commentate on the action, which the punters could see for themselves. The hell with that! I thought. For Jim’s ears I submitted the poor devils on the hill to a non-stop barrage of facts, figures, hysteria and opinion. (Not much has changed!) And it worked. The next week Geoffrey Peck, one of the BBC’s senior sport producers, invited me to an audition to commentate at an imminent Goodwood car meeting. And I got the job.

One thing led to another. ‘We’d like you to do the second position, Stowe Corner, at Silverstone at the 1949 British Grand Prix,’ said Geoffrey after my successful Goodwood stint. Yes! I was on my way for what was to be a half-century-plus career doing what I wanted to do, travelling the world, going to wonderful places, working with stimulating people, satisfying my ego and, moreover, being paid for it!