James Beck

Early life

Stanley James Carroll Beck was born in Islington, North London and attended Popham Road Primary School. His childhood was hard, with his father frequently unemployed and his mother making artificial flowers to provide a small income.

After attending art college and doing his national service in the British Army, Beck took up acting. His early roles included Charlie Bell in an episode of Dr. Finlay's Casebook ("Conduct Unbecoming", 1962), and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1963, for which he gained positive reviews. Moving to London, he concentrated on television, and was cast as a policeman in a 1967 episode of Coronation Street involving a now well-known storyline concerning a train crash. He also appeared as an uncredited policeman in Gideon's Way (1965), and was regularly seen in TV drama, with one-off roles in series such as The Troubleshooters (1965, 1967, 1970) and the BBC's Sherlock Holmes series with Peter Cushing in the lead ("The Blue Carbuncle", 1968).

In 1968 he was offered the role of Private Walker in Dad's Army, originally written by Jimmy Perry for himself. Perry approved of the casting of Beck: "He had the right mix of cheekiness and charm. He gave the role a bit of oomph." While popular in the role, Beck yearned for the challenge of other roles.

Always in demand, he continued to work on TV programmes including A Family at War (1970) and Romany Jones (1972–73), in which he played the lead character of Bert Jones. He also recorded a pilot for an uncommissioned series called Bunclarke With an E (1973), to be based on scripts originally written for Hancock's Half Hour, performing with Arthur Lowe.

Death

By 1973, Beck had already recorded five series of Dad's Army and was working on the sixth, besides working on the radio series of the show. Location filming for series six was completed when Beck suddenly fell ill whilst opening a school fete in aid of Guide Dogs for the Blind. He returned home and within an hour was taken to Queen Mary's Hospital, Roehampton suffering from pancreatitis. He died there three weeks later at age 44 and was cremated at Putney Vale Cemetery, where a tree was planted in his memory, with a marker bearing his name.

His death was a great shock to his fellow cast members, as well as to Jimmy Perry and David Croft. Perry has said heavy drinking was common in showbusiness at the time, and that he paid little attention to Beck's habit until "I saw Jimmy’s legs and they were purple. It was the last episode he appeared in before he died."

In the sixth season, during the episode "Things that Go Bump in the Night", Walker is only present in the location scenes in the second half of the episode, as these were filmed weeks earlier than the studio scenes. In one of the videotaped sequences filmed after Beck's death, the platoon is aboard Corporal Jones' van, when Captain Mainwaring tells Sergeant Wilson to 'take Private Walker's name'. Wilson writes the name 'Walker' in the condensation on the window. In the following episode, "The Recruit" (the season finale) Mainwaring reads a note written by Walker apologising for his absence, as he has gone "up the Smoke" (to London) to conduct one of his deals. This was the last time the character was mentioned. In the radio adaptations of Dad's Army, Graham Stark stood in until Larry Martyn portrayed Walker for subsequent shows. In 1976 John Bardon played Walker in the stage production.