George Walker, who died on March 22 aged 81, was a former boxer whose meteoric business career in the 1980s ended in arrest and bankruptcy.
George Walker the entrepreneur Photo: REX
Of all the fallen tycoons of his era, Walker was perhaps the most charismatic. He had bold ideas, and backed them heavily with borrowed money – a strategy which the press acclaimed as “visionary” when times were good, but which provoked the relentless hostility of his bankers when the economic tide turned against him.
Walker had energy, immense charm, and a flair for personal publicity. The unpolished diction of his East End upbringing, the battered boxer’s physiognomy and the image of a man who had fought his way to respectability after an early life of crime, all contributed to his romantic image.
In negotiations he could be rough and physically intimidating, but even the toughest of the financiers with whom he battled later confessed to liking him. He encountered snobbery from the business establishment during his early rise, but by the mid-Eighties he was courted from every corner of the City.
At its zenith, George’s company — Brent Walker — was valued on the stock market at more than a quarter of a billion pounds, and Walker’s own fortune was thought to be at least £50 million. His group’s assets covered a spectrum of popular leisure, including the Trocadero and Lyceum developments in London, the Le Touquet casino and Brighton Marina, which Walker declared would be “an English Venice”. There were hotels and holiday villages in Europe and Tunisia, and a marina in southern Spain called Puerto Sherry.
In 1988 Walker paid £240 million for two breweries, Camerons and Tolly Cobbold, and a chain of 1,200 pubs. In the following year he persuaded his financiers to back him one more time, for a further £685 million, to buy the William Hill and Mecca chains of bookmakers. It was, potentially, his greatest deal but, with hindsight, it was a deal too far.
By late 1990, as property values slumped and interest rates remained cripplingly high, the collapse of Brent Walker – with debts of £1.4 billion – seemed imminent. To keep the company from receivership, Walker personally raised a £100 million bond issue, in which his family invested some £30 million of their remaining assets.
He was determined to stay at the helm of Brent Walker, which he had always run very much as a personal fiefdom. But the company’s financial condition continued to deteriorate and the banks turned firmly against him. Six months later they succeeded in ousting him as chief executive, in a sensational and acrimonious late-night board meeting. Walker was formally escorted from his own premises at 4.30 in the morning.
After Walker’s departure, the new management of the company called in the Serious Fraud Office to trawl for malfeasance. In January 1993 Walker was arrested, with two others, on six charges of theft and false accounting dating back to 1985. He vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and after a lengthy trial was cleared of all charges.
Meanwhile, his personal finances were also in ruins. He attempted to keep his head above water by volunteering to pay off a proportion of his £180 million debts whenever he could, but the banks attacked the arrangement and made him bankrupt. The bankruptcy judge accused Walker of a “cavalier attitude” towards his creditors.
It was not in Walker’s nature, as a boxer or as a man, to throw in the towel. He pursued every channel of litigation and publicity to declare his innocence and to damn the banks’ vindictiveness. At the same time, he and his wife attempted to rebuild their wealth by selling cheap cigarettes and scent in bulk to Russia.
He also opened plush betting shops in Moscow, to which he had horse and greyhound racing transmitted by satellite from British tracks. Walker – who had already survived two heart attacks and stomach cancer – found new stamina for arduous dealings among the new capitalist barons of the Eastern bloc.
George Walker’s most endearing characteristic was his devotion to his wife, Jean, with whom he had fallen in love when she was 16. From their beginnings in the East End garage trade, the couple worked closely in all George’s endeavours, and Jean was for many years the purchasing director of Brent Walker. Adversaries who had felt the brute force of Walker’s negotiating style noted with surprise how he mellowed in her company. He would often hold her hand in public.
George Alfred Walker was born in Stepney on April 14 1929, the son of a drayman at Watneys brewery. He was educated at the Jubilee School, Bedford, Essex, but left at 14 to become a carpenter’s apprentice in an aircraft factory.
In 1945 he moved on to become a fish salesman in Billingsgate market, until he was called for National Service. It was in the RAF that he developed his boxing talent. He punched hard with both hands, and could withstand ferocious punishment from opponents. He became British amateur light heavyweight champion in 1951 before turning professional (dubbed “the Stepney Steamroller”) and reaching seventh place in the world rankings. He won 11 of his 14 professional fights, eight of them by knockout.
The defeat which effectively ended Walker’s career in the ring, by the Welshman Dennis Powell, was one of the bloodiest bouts contemporary commentators had ever seen. Powell went down seven times and came close to surrender; but in the ninth round Walker sustained a terrible eye injury, leaving him with permanent double vision on his right side. He also suffered a ruptured spleen and broken hands, and for a week afterwards was unable to stand.
Walker sometimes referred to the next phase of his career as his “other life”; it did not become public knowledge until 25 years later. He became a minder for an East End gangster, Billy Hill, whose 1988 autobiography, Boss of Britain’s Underworld, gave away Walker’s secret, describing him as “a hefty lad ... ready for anything”. Hill’s gang was involved in a farcical attempt to return a deposed Sultan to Tangiers (it ended in a dockside brawl) and in extensive cigarette smuggling around the Mediterranean.
The association with Hill ended when Walker was caught stealing £1,754-worth of nylon stockings in London’s Victoria Docks – according to legend, it took a van-load of constables to subdue him. The Old Bailey judge, observing that Walker had been paid only £3 for the job, called him a “gullible fool” as he sentenced him to two and a half years.
On emerging from Wormwood Scrubs, Walker found work as a runner for a professional gambler and garage owner in Plaistow, Georgie Hatton. In 1957 Walker married Hatton’s daughter, Jean – whom he had first met on a Saturday night at the Kursaal ballroom in Southend, which he later came to own. The young couple became partners in Hatton’s motor business – Walker adopted “Punch Petrol” as his brand-name – and expanded into taxis and haulage. For the first five years of their marriage, the Walkers lived in tiny quarters above their garage in West Ham.
George’s gift for publicity first showed itself in his management of the boxing career of his younger brother Billy (“The Blond Bomber”), who became British amateur heavyweight champion in 1962. Although Billy never won a professional title, his good looks contributed to a brilliant marketing success, with sponsorship deals as well as hefty fight purses netting the brothers some £250,000 over eight years. George, meanwhile, had also gone into the nightclub business, launching London’s first discotheque, Dolly’s in Jermyn Street.
The brothers ventured their winnings in a chain of restaurants called Billy’s Baked Potato – offering three-course lunches for 2s 9d – and a growing portfolio of property and entertainment venues. But Billy lacked George’s relentless appetite for entrepreneurial risk, and in the late 1960s he retired quietly to Jersey.
George Walker’s next major move built the foundation of a more ambitious empire. In 1974 he reversed his company, G&W Walker, into the stockmarket-listed Hackney & Hendon Greyhounds Co to form Brent Walker – and went on to develop the Hendon dog-track site as the Brent Cross shopping centre, one of the first and most successful of its kind. The sale of his stake in Brent Cross in 1979 netted a profit of £3.7 million.
But Walker’s business career was never without its ups and downs, and in 1982 — after a series of troubled property deals, including an Egyptian hotel contract, had temporarily wiped out the group’s profits — he bought out the public shareholders in Brent Walker. In 1985, however, he came back to the stockmarket, armed with a vision of a much enlarged international leisure conglomerate. His infectious confidence suited the mood of the Eighties boom years. Investors and bankers backed him again and again in his final, and ultimately catastrophic, buying spree.
One of Walker’s most colourful sidelines was his interest in cinema. At the Cannes film festival in 1977, he sat next to Joan Collins at lunch and cemented a deal which resulted in two money-spinning, if tasteless, vehicles for her charms, The Stud and The Bitch. His next project, by contrast, recorded 12 Gilbert and Sullivan works for television and video – Walker had been an opera fan since his boxing days.
Headlined as the “great white hope” of the British film industry, Walker went on to rescue the ailing Goldcrest production company and to save Elstree studios from the bulldozer. Ironically, several of the charges later brought against him by the fraud squad related to film transactions.
Walker had a taste for the finer things in life. In his heyday he owned a penthouse overlooking St James’s Palace, properties in the Alps and on the Riviera, and a splendiferous yacht. He dressed elegantly and loved fine wine – acquiring a first-growth claret vineyard, Chateau Rausan-Segla in Medoc, to which he had hoped eventually to retire. Almost all his personal assets were forfeited in bankruptcy, but he managed to hold on to the ancient rectory in Essex which was the family’s real home.
George and Jean Walker had two daughters and a son. In 1989 their elder daughter, Sarah, married the polo-playing 4th Marquess of Milford Haven, a cousin of the Queen; the marriage was dissolved in 1996, and she is now the partner of Michael Spencer, former Treasurer of the Conservative Party.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituaries/8407450/George-Walker.html
He was determined to stay at the helm of Brent Walker, which he had always run very much as a personal fiefdom. But the company’s financial condition continued to deteriorate and the banks turned firmly against him. Six months later they succeeded in ousting him as chief executive, in a sensational and acrimonious late-night board meeting. Walker was formally escorted from his own premises at 4.30 in the morning.
After Walker’s departure, the new management of the company called in the Serious Fraud Office to trawl for malfeasance. In January 1993 Walker was arrested, with two others, on six charges of theft and false accounting dating back to 1985. He vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and after a lengthy trial was cleared of all charges.
Meanwhile, his personal finances were also in ruins. He attempted to keep his head above water by volunteering to pay off a proportion of his £180 million debts whenever he could, but the banks attacked the arrangement and made him bankrupt. The bankruptcy judge accused Walker of a “cavalier attitude” towards his creditors.
It was not in Walker’s nature, as a boxer or as a man, to throw in the towel. He pursued every channel of litigation and publicity to declare his innocence and to damn the banks’ vindictiveness. At the same time, he and his wife attempted to rebuild their wealth by selling cheap cigarettes and scent in bulk to Russia.
He also opened plush betting shops in Moscow, to which he had horse and greyhound racing transmitted by satellite from British tracks. Walker – who had already survived two heart attacks and stomach cancer – found new stamina for arduous dealings among the new capitalist barons of the Eastern bloc.
George Walker’s most endearing characteristic was his devotion to his wife, Jean, with whom he had fallen in love when she was 16. From their beginnings in the East End garage trade, the couple worked closely in all George’s endeavours, and Jean was for many years the purchasing director of Brent Walker. Adversaries who had felt the brute force of Walker’s negotiating style noted with surprise how he mellowed in her company. He would often hold her hand in public.
George Alfred Walker was born in Stepney on April 14 1929, the son of a drayman at Watneys brewery. He was educated at the Jubilee School, Bedford, Essex, but left at 14 to become a carpenter’s apprentice in an aircraft factory.
In 1945 he moved on to become a fish salesman in Billingsgate market, until he was called for National Service. It was in the RAF that he developed his boxing talent. He punched hard with both hands, and could withstand ferocious punishment from opponents. He became British amateur light heavyweight champion in 1951 before turning professional (dubbed “the Stepney Steamroller”) and reaching seventh place in the world rankings. He won 11 of his 14 professional fights, eight of them by knockout.
The defeat which effectively ended Walker’s career in the ring, by the Welshman Dennis Powell, was one of the bloodiest bouts contemporary commentators had ever seen. Powell went down seven times and came close to surrender; but in the ninth round Walker sustained a terrible eye injury, leaving him with permanent double vision on his right side. He also suffered a ruptured spleen and broken hands, and for a week afterwards was unable to stand.
Walker sometimes referred to the next phase of his career as his “other life”; it did not become public knowledge until 25 years later. He became a minder for an East End gangster, Billy Hill, whose 1988 autobiography, Boss of Britain’s Underworld, gave away Walker’s secret, describing him as “a hefty lad ... ready for anything”. Hill’s gang was involved in a farcical attempt to return a deposed Sultan to Tangiers (it ended in a dockside brawl) and in extensive cigarette smuggling around the Mediterranean.
The association with Hill ended when Walker was caught stealing £1,754-worth of nylon stockings in London’s Victoria Docks – according to legend, it took a van-load of constables to subdue him. The Old Bailey judge, observing that Walker had been paid only £3 for the job, called him a “gullible fool” as he sentenced him to two and a half years.
On emerging from Wormwood Scrubs, Walker found work as a runner for a professional gambler and garage owner in Plaistow, Georgie Hatton. In 1957 Walker married Hatton’s daughter, Jean – whom he had first met on a Saturday night at the Kursaal ballroom in Southend, which he later came to own. The young couple became partners in Hatton’s motor business – Walker adopted “Punch Petrol” as his brand-name – and expanded into taxis and haulage. For the first five years of their marriage, the Walkers lived in tiny quarters above their garage in West Ham.
George’s gift for publicity first showed itself in his management of the boxing career of his younger brother Billy (“The Blond Bomber”), who became British amateur heavyweight champion in 1962. Although Billy never won a professional title, his good looks contributed to a brilliant marketing success, with sponsorship deals as well as hefty fight purses netting the brothers some £250,000 over eight years. George, meanwhile, had also gone into the nightclub business, launching London’s first discotheque, Dolly’s in Jermyn Street.
The brothers ventured their winnings in a chain of restaurants called Billy’s Baked Potato – offering three-course lunches for 2s 9d – and a growing portfolio of property and entertainment venues. But Billy lacked George’s relentless appetite for entrepreneurial risk, and in the late 1960s he retired quietly to Jersey.
George Walker’s next major move built the foundation of a more ambitious empire. In 1974 he reversed his company, G&W Walker, into the stockmarket-listed Hackney & Hendon Greyhounds Co to form Brent Walker – and went on to develop the Hendon dog-track site as the Brent Cross shopping centre, one of the first and most successful of its kind. The sale of his stake in Brent Cross in 1979 netted a profit of £3.7 million.
But Walker’s business career was never without its ups and downs, and in 1982 — after a series of troubled property deals, including an Egyptian hotel contract, had temporarily wiped out the group’s profits — he bought out the public shareholders in Brent Walker. In 1985, however, he came back to the stockmarket, armed with a vision of a much enlarged international leisure conglomerate. His infectious confidence suited the mood of the Eighties boom years. Investors and bankers backed him again and again in his final, and ultimately catastrophic, buying spree.
One of Walker’s most colourful sidelines was his interest in cinema. At the Cannes film festival in 1977, he sat next to Joan Collins at lunch and cemented a deal which resulted in two money-spinning, if tasteless, vehicles for her charms, The Stud and The Bitch. His next project, by contrast, recorded 12 Gilbert and Sullivan works for television and video – Walker had been an opera fan since his boxing days.
Headlined as the “great white hope” of the British film industry, Walker went on to rescue the ailing Goldcrest production company and to save Elstree studios from the bulldozer. Ironically, several of the charges later brought against him by the fraud squad related to film transactions.
Walker had a taste for the finer things in life. In his heyday he owned a penthouse overlooking St James’s Palace, properties in the Alps and on the Riviera, and a splendiferous yacht. He dressed elegantly and loved fine wine – acquiring a first-growth claret vineyard, Chateau Rausan-Segla in Medoc, to which he had hoped eventually to retire. Almost all his personal assets were forfeited in bankruptcy, but he managed to hold on to the ancient rectory in Essex which was the family’s real home.
George and Jean Walker had two daughters and a son. In 1989 their elder daughter, Sarah, married the polo-playing 4th Marquess of Milford Haven, a cousin of the Queen; the marriage was dissolved in 1996, and she is now the partner of Michael Spencer, former Treasurer of the Conservative Party.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituaries/8407450/George-Walker.html
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