The object ... is to give to every boy who comes here a sound liberal education. By education I mean no mere cramming of facts and theories - no mere teaching of accomplishments. ... By 'liberal' I mean such a training as will develop a boy's powers to the greatest extent of which they are capable, and which will make him able, when he has left school, to master readily and thoroughly any kind of learning or business which he may wish.

My dear High Master,

As Walker is now leaving school for the University, this is the last time that it will be my duty to report to you on his progress and on the quality of his work. Throughout the time that he has spent with me his work has been so uniformly good, and he has been as persistent and untiring in his devotion to it, that I can scarcely speak too highly of him.

It is a matter for special regret that his illness during the examination should have taken from him his last and best opportunity at school of displaying fully his mathematical knowledge and power.

I have never parted from any of my boys with more respect and confidence that I now do for him and I hope that his health will allow his career at the University to be a harmonious continuation of his career at St Paul's.

I am very faithfully yours, C Pendlebury.

In all this I fully concur and find it hard to drive from my thoughts the sad intelligence of his serious illness.

Fred W Walker

I owe my earliest introduction to dynamics - at St Paul's School to Mr Pendlebury ..., and at Trinity College, Cambridge, to Professor Forsyth ... The interest that they implanted has survived for half a century; and the applications to sport that I propose to describe are the immediate outcome of that interest.

During the academic year 1889-90 he studied more advanced branches of applied mathematics under G H Darwin, J J Thomson and J Larmor, and finished his career as a student by heading the list in part II of the Mathematical Tripos. In 1891 both Walker and Dyson were elected Fellows of Trinity.

In the 'Electrical World' May, 1887 or the 'Electrical Engineer' (New York), June, 1887, "Novel Phenomena of Alternating Currents," may he seen an account of some experiments by Professor Elihu Thomson on the mechanical force between conductors in which alternating currents are circulating.

In the case of a ring of metal in the presence of an electromagnet, in the coils of which an alternating current is passing, a force of repulsion is experienced by the ring, and this may be accounted for in the words of Professor Thomson as follows:- "It may be stated as certainly true that were the induced currents in the closed conductor unaffected by any self-induction, the only phenomena exhibited would be alternate equal attractions and repulsions, because currents would be induced in opposite directions to that of the primary current when the latter current was I changing from zero to maximum positive or negative current, so producing repulsion; and would be induced in the same direction when changing from maximum positive or negative to zero, so producing attractions."

This work was a good example of the kind of research which a well-trained mathematician of that time might be expected to carry out. It reveals very considerable mathematical power but does not draw attention to any new physical facts or principles. It expressed in quantitative form ideas which Elihu Thomson had put forward qualitatively. The paper was communicated by J J Thomson who may well have suggested it, for in conversation Walker often commented on the difficulty that applied mathematicians experienced in those days in Cambridge in finding something to work on, owing to the fact that their training did not involve any laboratory work.

The phenomena of aberration depend upon the relations of the ether and matter and must therefore be intimately associated with many other facts of nature. In the following essay an attempt is made to construct a theory of the electromagnetic field which shall be consistent with the modern interpretation of chemical, optical and magnetic phenomena in terms of electrically charged particles. That a particular case of such a theory would explain aberration was proved by H A Lorentz in the year 1892.

The situation in India after the famines of 1877 and 1899 was desperate. Millions had died as a result of droughts that were caused by the failure of the monsoons. There was an urgent need to try to better understand the monsoon and the seasonal rains associated with this event. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the forecasts were often completely incorrect, partly as a result of a lack of rigorous meteorological or statistical basis but also because of a change in the climate system that Eliot had documented in his 1904 paper. The scientific merit of any kind of weather forecasting was still a subject of great debate in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, and the idea of the long-range forecasting of monsoons was thought by many to be an unachievable task. Scientific attempts to forecast the monsoon rains had started approximately twenty-five years before Walker's arrival in India, with official forecasts being issued beginning in 1886.

A cursory examination of the seasonal variations of any country will show that some of the departures from average conditions are directly related to other abnormal features, and the method by which the effects are produced is often fairly well known, as is the case when diminution of pressure is due to rise in temperature. Other departures, however, are connected with abnormal features in distant parts of the earth, and difficulties are experienced in ascertaining not only the nature of the results due to any variation, but also the chain of causes and effects by which the results are produced; as examples of the latter may be quoted the favourable influence upon the Indian monsoon rainfall of the conditions which produce high temperature in the interior of Australia or high pressure in the Argentine Republic. Before attempting therefore to investigate the phenomena on physical lines it appears desirable to ascertain by purely empirical methods the character of as many relationships as possible in the hope of being able to pick out rom the results so obtained a number of which the physical explanation is clear. If we can in this way find the intermediate links in the chain of causes we may replace an intricate problem by a number of simpler ones.

One of the subjects to which he turned his own and his pupils' attention was the cellular structure of an unstable fluid. In striking laboratory experiments they obtained a variety of cellular forms - polygons, transverse and longitudinal vortices - by varying the rate of shear in the fluid, and they were able to show that this physical process explained the mode of formation of a wide variety of cloud forms.

... under the auspices of the Meteorological Committee of the Air Ministry and contributed research papers on long-range forecasting, symmetry points, correlation coefficients between various upper air data, and the relation between European weather and Artic ice.

Walker was a man of wide interests, a highly proficient skater and climber in his younger days, always very fond of music, happy to spend a day out of doors sketching in water colour, ever eminently reasonable, liberal minded and very friendly. In all his posts he demonstrated his great intellectual capacity and served with distinction, deservedly reaping many honours during his long life.