Bob Danvers-Walker

Cyril Frederick "Bob" Danvers-Walker (11 October 190617 May 1990) was a British radio and newsreel announcer best known as the voice of Pathé News cinema newsreels during the Second World War and for many years afterward.

His voice was described as "clear, fruity and rich, with just the suggestion of raffishness". Kenneth Branagh has stated that he was consciously imitating Danvers-Walker's "perky tone" in a spoof "newsreel" segment in his 2000 film Love's Labour's Lost.

Biography

Born in Belmont near Cheam, Surrey, Danvers-Walker was the son of William Charles Danvers-Walker, an Australian, who married in 1901 Lilian Danvers, daughter of Frederic Charles Danvers. He used the surname Walker to the 1950s. He spent much of his childhood in Tasmania and began his radio career in Melbourne, in 1925, moving on briefly to 2FC in Sydney, in 1932, before returning to the United Kingdom the same year.

From 1932 to 1939, Walker worked as a presenter for the International Broadcasting Company (IBC) network of commercial radio stations broadcasting in English to Britain from the continent. and Danvers-Walker was heard regularly over its airwaves until the station was closed down at the start of the Second World War in 1939.

Danvers-Walker wanted to join the BBC as soon as the war started, but was prevented by a BBC rule against employing anyone who had worked on commercial radio. This rule was quietly dropped in 1943, and from then on he was deployed on a variety of morale-boosting wartime BBC radio shows, including Round and About and London Calling Europe. He was the commentator for the British Pathé newsreel, a job he held continuously from 1940 to 1970.

Danvers-Walker died of cancer in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford, England, on 17 May 1990, and was survived by his wife Vera Nita White, whom he had married in 1933; they had a son and a daughter. Conversely, a 1962 Pathé News Issue Sheet lists him as "R. Walker".

Honours Danvers-Walker was named The World's Most Durable Commentator in the Guinness Book of Records.