This is the obit for Walter that appeared in the Folk Music Journal of the EFDSS in 1996, written by Jim Carroll and Pat MacKenzie. I hope none of the parties minds it being reproduced here:

Walter Pardon, who died on 9 June 1996 at the age of eighty-tnvo, was widely known as a singer for just fifteen years. The last of the East Anglian singers and one of the best traditional singers ever recorded in England, Walter leaves a void which almost certainly will not now be filled.

Bom into a family of agricultural workers in Knapton, North Norfolk, Walter was apprenticed a carpenter at the age of fourteen, a trade which he followed until retirement at sixty-five. Many of his family were singers: parents, aunts, uncles, and, in particular, his mother's brother, Billy Gee, who lived with Walter and his parents in their small, family cottage and who was to prove his greatest influence.

Much singing by family and friends took place at Harvest Suppers and Christmas parties, but it was not until many years later, when Walter was living alone, that he was finally persuaded by a relative, Roger Dixon, to put some songs on tape. These were passed by Peter Bellamy to record producer, Bill Leader and, in 1975, his first L.P. was launched.

Visits to folk clubs and festivals followed, as did three further L.P. records, a cassette of a live performance at Torquay Folk Club, and a documentary film by American John Cohen, as well as radio interviews and a television appearance. In 1976 he was invited by Bert Lloyd to join the group of folk performers at the American Bicentennial Celebrations and in 1983 he was awarded a Gold Badge by the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

All this, of course, is well documented and the consistently good reviews of recordings and appearances reveal the high esteem in which he was held. Walter's very large repertoire ranged through classic ballads, love songs, songs of the sea, music-hall songs, bawdy songs, songs popular in his youth (learned via a wind-up gramophone) and early Agricultural Union songs.

Walter's generosity with his material was outstanding, as was his appreciation of its worth, and his understanding of the different genres of song and their provenance gave the lie to the all-too-popular myth of the 'simple countryman' unable to distinguish between them. Walter's quiet integrity, strong musical sense (he played melodeon and a little on the fiddle), love for and complete involvement with his material, all contributed to the overall mastery of his craft that made him unique as a singer.

He was entirely professional in his approach to performance; he had great respect for the songs and always gave of his best. When, at the age of seventy-five, he felt that it was getting harder (and therefore more tiring) for him to reach that high standard, he decided to stop singing in public. And Walter was always a man of decision. It was yes or no - no um-ing and ah-ing!

His prodigious memory was not confined to songs; he could relate incidents that occurred throughout his life and information and events related by his elders as if they had happened yesterday. He could keep his listeners entranced for hours with stories of local people, old Norfolk sayings and dialect words, and even the names of all the old fields in the area (long gone, of course).

Walter read avidly, Thomas Hardy being an especial favourite. After receiving a copy of Hardy's complete poems from John Amis following a BBC World Service interview, he put a tune to and sang to us 'The Tramp Woman's Tragedy'. Although he managed to complete from texts some half-known songs in later years, this seems to be the only time he learned a new one. We know that he was writing out song texts back in 1948, but the fact that very few of his large body of songs were heard until he was about sixty years old is quite astounding.

Walter's natural ease of manner, modesty, sense of humour and thoughtful conversation made him a wonderful companion. He will be greatly missed, for these qualities and as a fine exponent of traditional singing style. He leaves a legacy of song that has entertained and enriched us over the last two decades and we can only be grateful that he allowed so much of it to be recorded.

Walter always regretted that he had never met Harry Cox or Sam Larner, particularly Sam. What a grand old sing-song must be going on right now!

And this is Roy Palmer's entry for Walter in the DNB (which doesn't yet have entries for some of the other acts championed on this thread):

Pardon, Walter William (1914–1996), carpenter and folk-singer, was born on 4 March 1914 at Hall Lane, Knapton, Norfolk, the only child of Thomas Pardon (1877–1957), farmworker, and his wife, Emily, née Gee (1874–1953). He was educated at the local elementary school. After an apprenticeship, begun at the age of fourteen, in the neighbouring village of Paston, he became a carpenter, and was so employed (even during his four years' army service in the Second World War) until his retirement at the age of sixty-five. He lived in Knapton throughout his life, except during his army service.

Pardon's life would have been unremarkable but for his emergence in 1975 as an outstanding traditional singer with the issue of a solo unaccompanied long-playing record, A Proper Sort. This came about after a cousin, Roger Dixon, persuaded him to record some of his songs on a tape and then forwarded it to a young revival folk-singer, Peter Bellamy. From Bellamy it went to Bill Leader, then running a small record company specializing in traditional song, who immediately recognized the quality of Pardon's singing and the interest of his repertory.

Pardon's style and songs came from various members of his family, and especially from his uncle, Billy Gee (b. 1867), who had in turn learned a good deal from his father, Pardon's maternal grandfather, Thomas Gee (b. 1827). Billy Gee sang in public houses, but family singing became gradually restricted to occasions such as church and harvest suppers and Christmas parties. When these ended, so did the singing. In Pardon's view, people of his generation turned away from traditional songs: 'They didn't want anything to do with them. Thought they were old-fashioned. They wanted modern things, didn't like the old-fashioned ways' (Yates, disc notes, 3). He set out to keep them alive in his memory by playing through the tunes on a melodeon during his solitary Saturday nights, seated on the stairs of his house, so that the sound did not travel too far. When his repertory came to be fully recorded, some 180 items emerged: traditional ballads, music-hall compositions, Victorian tear-jerkers, bawdy pieces, broadside romances, and songs of the sea and countryside, the latter including anthems from the agricultural workers' union struggles of the early twentieth century: as a boy, Pardon heard the campaigner (later MP) George Edwards speak from the back of a farm wagon.

Such riches led to further LPs, Our Side of the Baulk (1977), A Country Life (1982), and Bright Golden Store (1983). Some of Pardon's songs were transcribed, and printed in anthologies; he appeared in folk clubs and at folk festivals. In 1976 he performed in America with other British singers for the bicentennial celebrations, and in 1983 he received the English Folk Dance and Song Society's coveted gold badge.

As a singer Pardon was quiet, even slightly introspective. He would begin a song in a gentle, thoughtful way, and draw in listeners, almost as if by enchantment. He allied sure musical instinct with excellent diction and first-class memory. A quiet, modest, and intelligent man, he read avidly—Dickens and Hardy for preference. When at the age of seventy-five he decided that his powers were on the wane, he gave up singing in public. He died at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, Norwich, on 9 June 1996, and was buried in St Nicholas's churchyard at Swafield, Norfolk, on 17 June. He was unmarried.

Interest in Pardon's singing continued after his death. In 2000 further recordings were issued in the form of a double and a single CD, respectively entitled Put a Bit of Powder on it, Father and A World without Horses. These confirmed A. L. Lloyd's earlier assessment of Pardon's qualities as 'a fine feeling for the sense of the words, a deep musicality, and that delicate balance of style between the solid traditional and the personal fanciful that is the mark of the true folk singer'. For Lloyd, he was 'the pick of the bunch' (Lloyd, 'Walter Pardon').