Gabe,
Walter first heard his songs at family parties at Christmas, just prior to WW2. He lived at home with his parents and his Uncles, one of whom, Billy Gee, being the main singer of the family.
Some time in the thirties he began to take an interest in what he always referred to as 'folk songs' - he said other family members of his age "Were not interested in them and went for the modern stuff", and he was afraid of them dying out so, after he returned from the army in 1946 he began to write them in a notebook - he never came across any of them in print (with the possible exception of 'Bonny Bunch of Roses').
Billy was dead by this time and he relied on his mother and an aunt to fill in the gaps in his memory; he got his mother to sing the tunes and he memorised these by playing them on his melodeon.
In the mid seventies his nephew, Roger Dixon, introduced him to Peter Bellamy, and Bill Leader recorded him for two albums. Following this he was asked to a number of folk clubs (the Orchard Gardens was actually set up by Cliff Godbolt and others around the fact that Walter lived a few miles away).
Walter decided to fill in the gaps in the songs he only partially knew to sing them at the clubs; Cliff and others gave him texts and books when he asked for help, but the idea came solely from Walter himself.
He asked us to find him the words of Dark Arches, and he discovered 'Parson And The Clerk' in Peter Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain on our shelves while he was staying with us in London - again, he asked us to copy the text for him - no persuasion from us. One of the last songs he remembered and gave us was 'The Steam Arm', which he recalled for us one night when we were visiting him, but he decided he wasn't quite satisfied with one of the verses, so he went off and found a substitute. Walter was not just a song carrier (rememberer of songs), but a sensitive and creative singer.
He was proud of his family's songs, but not because they were 'accurate', but rather because he believed them to be good songs.
If you met him you would have known him to be a Thomas Hardy fan - he even put a tune to Hardy's Trampwoman's Tragedy and sang it for us.
We were friends with Walter for around 20 years and we sat in his cottage and recorded him singing and talking many times over that period. Most of this information is on those recordings (now housed in The National Sound Archive at The British Library).
Jim Carroll