Desert Island Discs - Richard Walker

[Grinner]

It's on page 203 of the bio, which came from an audio cassette of a biographical nature, recorded in his last years.

Well Grinner was the nick name my dad gave me, and all his friends called me by it. He also named the knot after me, so that probably does make me the Grinner as you have suggested.

Indeed, there may be more to the choice of St. Christopher, but I can't shed any light on that at the moment really. I'll have to see if I can find out when his mother moved to 'Scudamore' in Letchworth, which is a few hundred metres away from the school. That could have had some bearing on the selection.

[Stathamender]

Grinner is Richard Walker's son.

Which is why I asked.

[Nobby]

I always thought the guests on DID seemed to feel a pressure to be 'interesting and different'...to choose songs that would make people take notice perhaps...at least to choose something that hadn't been chosen before. Over the years that I listened to the programme when I was young I always felt folk weren't necessarily choosing their real favourites.....

Marlene Dietrich does seem an odd choice....she talks more than sings the song. But do remember she was a staunch anti-Nazi, having emigrated to the USA in 1939, and she as much as anyone else in the fifties and sixties might ask where and all the flowers had gone?...the 'flowers' in Seeger's song, written in 1955 just after the Korean war, being the young men who went to war.

People of Walkers generation didn't talk about the war...you might think they were unaffected...it was just the British way. But they were affected. Maybe it didn't come out for a few decades but I was surprised at how many older people liked the protest songs of the sixties which we thought of as 'our' music. Why wouldn't they? ...they'd actually lived through a war.

So RW was listening to Nessun Dorma 16 years before the rest of us! And he match fished for a year.......