ALWAYS a good question to debate is:  who is or was the most famous native-born West Cumbrian?

 I know a lot of people would argue the case for the poet William Wordsworth or the physicist John Dalton and others for George the Fourth’s Astronomer,  Fearon Fallows or for Edmund Grindal, the farmer’s son from St Bees who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1576.

And there are others – like the Aspatria-born painter and Royal Academician Sheila Fell or Thomas Henry Ismay, the founder of the White Star shipping line.

And West Cumbria will never forget its three Victoria Cross winners of the First World War, two of whom coincidentally shared the same surname – James Smith (Workington), Abraham Acton (Whitehaven) and Edward Smith (Maryport), the latter a 19-year-old infantry lance-sergeant  when his courage on the western front earned him Britain’s highest award for valour.

But next in line for consideration for the accolade of most famous is one of the finest graphic artists of the twentieth century, a woman whose art works are admired globally and yet, to the shame of West Cumbria and in particular her home town of Workington, whose fame has remained in the shadows.

It’s unlikely that you have even heard the name of Audrey Walker (MBE) - yet her work hangs in private collections around the world, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, in the archive of The Embroiderers’ Guild and in the collections of many educational authorities.

 One of her most admired works hangs in the Roman Pump Room in the city of Bath – entitled  Monarchy 1000, it is a huge tapestry commission hung in 1974 to celebrate the first millennium of the British monarchy.  And another, the Pembrokeshire Banner (a joint commission with fellow artist Eirian Short) which celebrates Welsh history and culture,  hangs permanently in St David’s Cathedral in the city of St David’s.

One reason for the neglect of Audrey Walker’s reputation locally is that she left home in 1944 to study at Edinburgh College of Art and as far as I know never returned to live in West Cumbria. And another reason is that her artistic medium was embroidery, which has never had the universal appeal of painting.

She  chose embroidery because her heart led her there, despite her considerable achievements as a painter, which included the student portraiture prize at the Slade school of Art (then as now the most famous fine art university in the world)..

Audrey Walker  came from an ordinary family and lost her dad Stanley, a brewery sales rep, to illness when she was 12. There may have been something in the family gene pool which inclined her towards embroidery because her widowed mother Jessie Walker was a superb dressmaker and all-round needlewoman.

On graduation from the Slade, Audrey Walker entered mainstream teaching, perhaps an inevitable choice but one which slowed down her artistic output. It was only in the 1960s that she took a career break to seriously study embroidery.

Although she returned to teaching, her career as an artist had by then new wings. And it was after retirement in 1988 as head of the Department of Textiles at Goldsmith’s College, University of London that she produced some of her finest work as an embroiderer and designer. 

And if you think that embroidery is best represented by pretty patterns on cushion covers, then please think again. The work of hers that I have seen is narrative-based, normally figurative and incorporates superb portraiture.

On retirement, she settled to live and work in Pembrokeshire and died there in 2020 at the age of 92.

By all accounts she was a lovely woman and a patient teacher. A vestige of her influence remains in her home town – the kneelers in her home parish church of St John’s.

They were produced by a group of amateur needlewomen, known as the St John’s Kneeler Group, working under the guidance of Miss Walker more than 50 years ago.