William Walker

Who was William Walker?

William Walker MVO was an English diver famous for shoring up the southern and eastern sides of Winchester Cathedral.

He was born William Robert Bellenie, in Newington, Surrey, England, in 1869. Around 1900, he adopted the name William Bellenie-Walker, eventually dropping the Bellenie part to be known as Walker.

In 1887, he began diver training at Portsmouth Dockyard. He worked through the roles of diver's attendant and diver's signal man, passing his medical exam and deep-water test to qualify as a deep-water diver in 1892.

In his time, William Walker was the most experienced diver of Siebe Gorman Ltd. In 1906–1911, working in water up to a depth of six metres, he shored up Winchester Cathedral, using more than 25,000 bags of concrete, 115,000 concrete blocks, and 900,000 bricks.

Before his work, the cathedral had been in imminent danger of collapse as it sank slowly into the ground, which consisted of peat. To enable bricklayers to build supporting walls, the groundwater level had to be lowered. Normally, the removal of the groundwater would have caused the collapse of the building.