Sculptor. Born in Solihull, West Midlands, the son of a garage owner, he entered Birmingham College of Art in 1946. He did his military service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and then went on to teach, principally at Stourbridge (1957–60) and at Guildford (1966–68) schools of art. He lost his job at Guildford after participating in demonstrations and sit-ins, and, although briefly reinstated, lost it again when Guildford was merged with Farnham College of Art. In the early 1960s Walters was involved in an annual sculpture project sponsored by the Yugoslavian government, in which an international cast of sculptors created works for a sculpture park, charging only for their expenses. Walters’s first important public work in Britain, Barrier, for Nine Elms Public Library, London, unveiled in 1964, is a semi-abstract work representing the ‘struggle for knowledge and enlightenment’. (Following the building’s demolition, Barrier was relocated in 2012 to Oasis Green Space, Thessaly Road, Battersea.) His later work became increasingly political. In 1974 he created an anti-fascist sculpture, entitled The Wheel, for the sculpture park at Kostanjevica na Krki in Slovenia. The year 1985 saw three works by Walters erected in London: a statue of the anti-imperialist labour politician and CND campaigner, Fenner Brockway, in Red Lion Square, the Memorial to the International Brigade, in Jubilee Gardens, on the South Bank, and the colossal bust of Nelson Mandela, outside the Royal Festival Hall. Walters’s growing reputation as a lively portraitist brought him many further commissions for statues and busts of left-wing politicians and union leaders. His statue of Harold Wilson was unveiled by Tony Blair in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 1999. At the time of his death, Walters was working on statues of Nelson Mandela for Parliament Square, and of Sylvia Pankhurst for College Green. Although the former was erected in 2007, permission for the latter was not ultimately granted, on the grounds of the site’s proximity to the House of Lords, an institution Pankhurst fervently detested. At the time of writing, the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee are awaiting final confirmation from Islington Council of their second choice, Clerkenwell Green.
Sources include: Email from Philippa Clark, Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee, 14 January 2025
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. xx, xxi, 74–78, 82–85, 308–09; Guardian, 18 August 2006 (obituary); Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee website; The Times, 8 August 2006, p. [48] (obituary); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xlii, 213–15, 272, 273, 384.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, January 2025