Billy Walker (boxer) - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

William Walker is the son of William James Walker, a brewery worker, drayman at Watneys brewery, and wife (Limehouse, April/June 1925) Ellen Louisa Page (Southwark, October/December 1903 - ?). He is the youngest of four brothers.

During World War II, his father served in the Royal Air Force and the boys lived with their mother in Bedfordshire, and later in Ilford, Essex. He left school at 16 and started working in the printing business. Later a friend introduced him to a more highly paid job as a porter in London’s historic Billingsgate Fish Market. He was also a bouncer and part-time DJ at the Ilford Palais dance hall which was managed by Jimmy Savile at the time. He joined a West Ham boxing club to keep fit, and was eventually persuaded to spar with other members and found that he had the talent to box competitively.

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