James Beck (1929-1973)

Robert Ross pays tribute to James Beck, best known for the role of cockney spiv Private Walker in the beloved BBC sitcom Dad’s Army. And taken from us far too soon.

A cheerful cockney chap, sporting a natty moustache and frantically dragging on a fag, steps out of a shabby caravan to rather muted applause and laughter. Despite his lowly status he is every inch the seventies man. Hip, confident, and ruggedly handsome.

The next moment a shapely red-head emerges from the same mobile abode and the man smacks her playfully on the bottom. She turns and smiles as the name of the actress -Jo Rowbottom - appears on screen. Oh, cheeky!

The situation comedy is ‘One and One Makes Three’, episode one of the second batch of Romany Jones: a slight series from the creative minds of Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe, the writers of The Rag Trade, and On the Buses. And the applause and laughter is rather muted because the cheerful chap is James Beck, and before this episode was first transmitted in September 1973, he was dead, from a heart attack, at the stupidly early age of 44.

Stanley James Carroll Beck was born, in Islington, North London, and discovered a likeable talent to amuse whilst still at school, at Popham Road Primary. He was encouraged to cultivate his interest in creativity, but instead of acting found an early passion in painting, attending the Saint Martin’s School of Art, situated under the Argos of the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.