There were several WCCs. One was founded around 1832/33 in 20, Bedford-street, Covent-garden, and it was led by John Henry Huttman, famous for his leaflets. Here the matches between La Bourdonnais and McDonnell were played. It was closed at the end of 1835 or early in 1836.

In 1837, another WCC was located in the Cigar Divan, nos. 1 & 2 Fountain Court, and 101, Strand. Here <William Greenwood Walker> was Hon. Secretary. This club expired around September 1837.

In November 1837 a new club with the same name was founded in Spring Gardens, where Staunton was club secretary.

In 1837, another WCC was located in the Cigar Divan, nos. 1 & 2 Fountain Court, and 101, Strand. Here <William Greenwood Walker> was Hon. Secretary. This club expired around September 1837.>

<Bell's Life> of November 27th 1836, p.2, in its answers to correspondents section, has: <We are not informed positively as to the regulations which are intended to be enforced at the Westminster Chess Club as to the admission of visitors; and our Correspondent had better apply to the Club's indefatigable Secretary, at the rooms where the meetings are held, No. 101, Strand.>

<Chess is being played only occasionally, and it is George Walker who suggests to Huttmann to establish a chess club on the premises, „in the first floor rooms". Huttmann agrees, probably around 1832 [..], and <George Walker> can be considered to be the Westminster Chess Club's first secretary.>

and

<It follows from the newspaper clippings shown by Tony Gillam in CSQ6, that <Huttmann> has to be considered the de facto manager of the Westminster Chess Club between September 1834 and February 1835.>

and

<It is safe to assume that in late 1835 or early 1836 Huttmann's coffee house was closed down, and with it the first Westminster Chess Club.>

and

<A second Westminster Chess Club arises from the ashes of its predecessor, and <William Greenwood Walker>, a bachelor and „indigo broker" becomes its secretary.>

Strange that <thomastonk> did not get around to mentioning that Walker never edited a chess column in the <Lancet>. This error too was propagated by the first edition of the <Oxford Companion to Chess>, as discussed in Harding's <British Chess Literature to 1914>. He surmises that the mistake can be traced back to Walker's own obituary in the <ILN> in 1879, where Duffy claimed, <In the same year, he originated the popular "Chess column" of our time by contributing an article to the <Lancet>, which was published in the issue of that periodical on Oct. 19, 1823.> Harding argues Hooper & Whyld would have recognised something was amiss if they'd double-checked the issue in question, which turns out to be a translation of a French article that dates back to 1719.

Just by matching records on the Family Search website, I think he married twice, the second time at the age of 66 to a woman aged ~29.

Although Walker only had one child, who predeceased him, she herself had six children and so there might be a lot descendants living today.

Could've been worse - him, 46, her, 9.

Just after I made my last post I searched the records to see what happened to Walker's second wife, Matilda, after he died in 1879.

It turned that she remarried the following year, when she was 39, to a 21 year old! So the difference in ages of her two husbands was 56 years.

Here's the brief section on Walker that Townsend included in his chapter on members of the London CC, culled from records of the club (see <Historical Notes on Some Chess Players>).

<George Walker himself was proposed, 7 May 1830, by "W. Jones", seconded by "W. Yates", and duly elected. His address first appeared in the book as "3, Newman St. Oxford St.", being the same address as was earlier used by the Emigrant Office while Jacob Sarratt was employed there by John Parkinson. Later Walker's address was updated in the book to "25 Charles St., Middlesex Hospital", and then again to "17 Soho Square"; later still, when he was re-elected on 1 December 1836, his address appeared as "3, Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square.">

Charles St. was later incorporated into Mortimer St. Cavendish Square was home, of course, to the St. George's CC, of which Walker was a prime mover in the 1830-40s.

The British Chess News has an online synopsis

https://britishchessnews.com/2020/0...

It's largely cribbed from the Oxford Companion(?).

H.J.R. Murray has an extensive writeup for the BCM (1906) here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=x...

BCM v26 (May 1906) p189-194

<Does anyone have any information about George Walker's personal life?>

Generally, I like to start my research on chess figures by searching the contemporaneous literature for their obituary - though you probably are after more of his genealogy than his impact on chess. Still here's a sample:

https://books.google.com/books?id=v...

CPC v3 N30 (June 1879) p121

Still, in one obit I found a reference to a biographical writeup by Walker himself:

https://books.google.com/books?id=B...

WPP v1 (Dec 1876) p140

A pen drawing portrait of him is found a few pages earlier.

<Ancestry> has a collection of London <Stock Exchange Membership Applications, 1802-1924>. Apparently members had to go through the formality of annual re-election, allowing Walker's home address to be tracked almost every year from 1847 to 1879:

1 Devonshire Place, Haverstock Hill, 1847; 4 Royal Crescent, Notting Hill, 1848-1852; 14 Norland Place, Notting Hill, 1853-55; 12 Ladbroke Villas, Notting Hill, 1856-1866; 40 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, 1867-69; 40 Albion Rd, Stoke Newington, 1870-1879.

Comparing maps of 1860 to 1890, the answer is almost certainly yes.

<
<<Re: Remembering George Walker (13-iii-1803 23-iv-1879)

Post by Tim Harding » Sat Apr 23, 2022 12:32 pm>

John Townsend wrote: ↑Sat Apr 23, 2022 11:28 am

I have just looked on familysearch.org and found two baptism entries for George Walker, the son of George Walker and Ann, both on 17 April 1803.

The first, apparently the register for St. Marylebone, gives date of birth as 20 March 1803.

The second, which I take to be the Bishop's Transcript for the above, gives date of birth as 21 March 1803.>

What is the source for 13 March 1803 (the date of birth given in the title of this thread)? 20 March 1803 is the date usually stated for Walker's birth so thanks to John for providing evidence backing that up; I too would like to see what was your source for the alternative date.

Furthermore, I find it very disappointing that your under-researched article repeats (by quoting the Oxford Companion article without any correction) the common mistaken attribution to Walker of the early chess column in The Lancet.

I debunked that in my doctoral thesis and the detailed proof was repeated on pages 23-24 of my book British Chess Literature to 1914, in which I traced the source of the error back to a mistake in Walker's Illustrated London News obituary, presumably contributed by Duffy. Hooper and Whyld probably got it from there.

Such propagation of error needs to be stamped out every time it appears.

Among other points, you might quote from the December 1876 Westminster Papers portrait of Walker, which included a brief memoir by Walker himself. Neither the WP editors nor Walker himself made any mention of The Lancet which Walker never claimed to have written. Maybe Duffy misunderstood something Walker once told him. The true author of the Lancet column was the founder-editor of that medical paper, Thomas Wakley, as stated in his biography by S. Squire Sprigge who knew his subject personally.

Your article, as it stands, does further damage by linking to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article on Walker, brief as it is (at least it doesn't mention The Lancet) contains a different error where it says:

<"Walker used his column in Bell's Life in London to propagate organizing the international London 1851 chess tournament, the first international chess tournament.">

This is the opposite of the truth,
On the contrary, the London Chess Club (of which Walker was a member) was so miffed at Staunton rejecting its proposal to be involved in the organisation that it ran its own rival event. (Dr Adrian Harvey has written in detail about this row.)

Walker went so far as to use his column to attack Staunton's tournament as the <"mock national tournament">; see especially Bell's Life in London, 19 October 1851.

Tim Harding
Historian and FIDE Arbiter>

https://www.chess.com/blog/batgirl/...

Let's assume that Harding knew this, and was in turn, asking Murray what his source was.

After all, Murray isn't an issuing authority, and the ECF is quite good at obtaining birth certificates, baptism records, etc.