Murray Walker: Unless I’m Very Much Mistaken

It was non-stop. On Friday evening I would leave the office in St James’s Square, meet Elizabeth and our boxer dog, Sheba, and head off in the car to wherever that weekend’s scramble was taking place. Usually they were somewhere in the Midlands or the North and in those days there was no M1 motorway, so it was a long slog up the A5 and onwards to arrive at a hotel late at night and then be on parade at the track first thing on Saturday. If it was ITV’s World of Sport, with Dickie Davis hosting the programme from London, all the races were repeated for the regional network the next day at the same track with the same riders on the same bikes, then it was home again, starting at about 5pm if we were lucky. Trying to get a good meal late on a Sunday afternoon was a major challenge but eventually we were saved by the advent of the Chinese restaurant, one of which was always open and always good. Then it was another long drive and into the office on Monday morning.

I was a glutton for work and in the winter of 1963 wrote most of my book The Art of Motor-Cycle Racing, which I co-authored with the great Mike Hailwood, by the light of a flexible reading lamp in the passenger seat of our Austin A40 with Elizabeth at the wheel. Our record was 13 consecutive weeks doing alternate broadcasts for ITV and the BBC in the appalling snowbound winter of 1963, which was when my appendix suddenly packed up. I was climbing down from the commentary box after a scramble meeting near Stratford on Avon when I collapsed in extreme pain. I’d been seeing a specialist so Elizabeth rushed me home and got him over to look at me. Half an hour later I was in an ambulance on my way to King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in London’s Marylebone Road and the next morning I woke up in a mini-ward with a General and an army chaplain.

The agency continued to expand, with already great accounts joined by the Co-op, Nationwide, Ever Ready, the Government’s Central Office of Information (for whom we did the memorable ‘Don’t ask a man to drink and drive’ and ‘Clunk, click – every trip’ campaigns), W H Smith, Danish Butter and Bacon, Crown Paints, Daily Express, Brooke Bond, Ski Yoghurt, Golden Wonder Crisps, Hoover, McDonald’s and many others. But in 1968 a second major automotive company contacted the agency – my old employer Dunlop.

We got the business with a fairly conventional approach but once we had made ourselves acceptable to the Dunlop management we proposed a humorous, truly innovative and memorable campaign based on a whimsical and endearing made-up animal – the Groundhog. (Only much later when I was in Canada for the Grand Prix at Montreal did I find that there is actually an animal there that they call the ground-hog.) Our make-believe, animated cartoon Groundhog had a stumpy body, big eyes, floppy ears and wheels instead of legs and was a natural for television. It was a massive success in terms of public awareness, the commercials were brilliant but there was a problem. The Groundhog tyre was a crossply and they were rapidly becoming yesterday’s product as the far superior radial, pioneered by Michelin, increasingly penetrated the market. Radials gave motorists what they really wanted – much higher mileage as well as superior performance. So we had great advertising for the wrong product. After a messy attempt to make it all things to all motorists, poor little Groundhog died and so did our attempt to keep Dunlop on the map, for it too was starting down the long road to oblivion.