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

What a frustrating setback. It is difficult to convey to today’s generation, who are lucky not to have experienced it, how totally involved, intense and patriotically passionate everyone in Britain was about the war. Germany, and everything to do with it, was then regarded as the personification of evil. It is easy now, divorced from the bitter loathing and hatred that war inevitably generates, to accept that the vast majority of its people were (and are) the same as us but there was naturally little appreciation and no tolerance then of the fact that the ordinary Germans had been taken over by an obsessive megalomaniac and the fanatical political machine he had created. Hitler and his minions were doing unspeakably terrible things in the name of the Third Reich and were aiming for world domination. With the enemy literally at the door, Britain had its back to the wall and was fighting for its very survival. There was a gigantic amount to be done and I desperately wanted to be a part of it. I still had a bit of a wait ahead of me though.

‘Fill in the time,’ they had said. But how? It clearly wasn’t going to be long before I was in battledress but, as I have so often been, I was lucky.

At that time the Dunlop Rubber Company, then one of Britain’s greatest companies, awarded 12 scholarships a year to what they regarded as worthy recipients and I was fortunate to win one of them. Sadly, Dunlop now exists only as a brand name, having been fragmented and taken over by other companies including the Japanese Sumitomo organization whose country it did so much to defeat in the war. But back then Dunlop, with its proud boast ‘As British as the Flag’, was a force in the world of industry with many thousands of employees all over the world. It owned vast rubber plantations and produced, distributed and sold tyres, footwear, clothing, sports goods, cotton and industrial products and Dunlopillo latex foam cushioning.

Its scholarship students were based at its famous Fort Dunlop headquarters (part of which still exists beside the M6 in Birmingham) and had tuition and fieldwork on all of its activities as well as instruction from top people on every aspect of what makes a business tick, from production and distribution to marketing, law and accountancy. It was an invaluable grounding. I had a whale of a time, living in digs at 58 Holly Lane, Erdington with the Bellamy family, spreading my wings and discovering, amongst other things and to my surprise and delight, that girls had all sorts of charms I hadn’t experienced at Highgate.

But then came the call via a telegram. ‘We’re ready for you now, Murray. Report to the 30th Primary Training Wing at Bovington, Dorset on 1 October 1942’. I went there as a boy and rather more than four years later was demobbed at Hull as a man.

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