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!
For the next 13 years, in addition to my developing advertising career, I would be my Dad’s number two as the only long-term father-and-son sports commentary team the BBC has ever had. That was entirely to do with motor bikes but, as the years rolled by, I would also cover, for both BBC and ITV, anything to do with motor sport: motor-cycle trials, scrambles and races of every type and class, truck racing, power boats, touring car racing, sports cars, rallycross, Formula Ford, Formula 3, Formula 3000, Formula 5000 and, of course, the pinnacle of them all, Formula 1.
It was here that I developed a reputation of being an enormously excitable chap who used colourful phrases but didn’t always get things right in his enthusiasm to communicate what he was seeing. Inevitably people remember my amusing ‘mistakes’ more than the factual comment, but importantly they found them endearing – and that didn’t do me any harm! Not so for others though, given my entirely justified reputation for the ‘Murray Walker Kiss of Death’. I would confidently predict something was going to happen and, dramatically, it wouldn’t. At the 1986 Australian Grand Prix Keke Rosberg came up to me and asked if he could have a word – a highly unusual move for an F1 driver.
‘This is my last race, Murray. I’m retiring after it.’
‘I know that, Keke, I’ve been talking about it for ages.’
‘Well, this being my last race I’m particularly anxious to do well in it.’
‘Of course you are, good luck to you my friend.’
‘Murray, if I am doing well, for Christ’s sake don’t say anything about it!’
He was leading the race, I said he was going to win his last event, and he got a puncture and retired.
Similarly,