Valerie Walker
Profile
Our new Treasurer is a woman of wide and varied professional experience. Valerie Walker has worked in many different spheres, including architecture, technical librarianship, publishing, educational administration, and youth training schemes, all the while jugglingher career with the demands of life as a single mother, bringing up her daughter Abigail (who is now 30 and a teacher). It is not surprising to hear Valerie say that of all her jobs the one she most enjoyed was working for the British Council in London, finding accommodation for overseas Study Fellows and later developing and organising training courses for engineers, police, and labour relations officers from all over the world. It is what you would expect of someone who loves meeting new people, has a great curiosity about the world, and responds positively to new challenges.
Valerie’s final full-time job, before her official retirement in May 2002, was as a senior administrator with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. She still does occasional part-time work for the QCA and the Cambridge examinations board, pre-testing national tests (‘SATs’) for 14-year-olds, and tests in Thinking Skills for 16-year-olds. The work takes her to well-endowed schools in affluent suburban areas, and inner-city multicultural schools whose social diversity strongly appeals to her.
At around the same time that she retired from full-time work, Valerie began attending Sunday services in the MCO chapel – but this was by no means her first encounter with Unitarianism. As a student of architecture in London in the 1960s, through a fellow student she was drawn into the life of Essex Church, Kensington, and beyond that the wider Unitarian scene in the capital. Many of the august figures in our movement today were young and single then, and Valerie has fond memories of numerous parties and projects – not to mention the lasting friendships that she made in those days. She was active in the Foy Society for young Unitarians, and the International Religious Fellowship (IRF), which brought her into contact with members of liberal religious communities in the USA and Europe; and when her daughter was young she became involved in the organisation of the annual Family Holiday Conference at Great Hucklow. These days Valerie uses e-mail (God’s gift to retired people) to maintain such friendships, forged thirty or forty years ago, as well as to keep in contact with former colleagues whose continuing friendship she values.
Now with more time to spare [joke!], Valerie feels able to be more than ‘a floating Unitarian’. Oxford is a long drive from her home in Buckinghamshire, but she is drawn to the chapel services by the beauty of the architecture and the music; by the need for a focused hour of worship; and by affection for the congregation, whom she has come to regard as part of her extended family. She says that she feels accepted here for what she is. She feels comfortable in a creedless church; likes the fact that Unitarians ‘accept differences and doubts’; and enjoys the monthly meetings of the discussion group.
In what is left of her spare time, Valerie enjoys music (favourite piece: Beethoven’s first Piano Concerto) and plays the ‘Clavinova’ (an electronic piano that can be played using headphones to spare the neighbours). She reads widely (favourite author: Dickens, for his accurate observation of real people despite the wild improbabilities of his plots); supports the local Liberal Democrats (but dodges their attempts to persuade her to stand for election); revels in her membership of the London Society (which, while working to monitor and influence planning decisions in the capital, also organises visits to unusual and interesting places often not open to the public); and dreams of travelling abroad again (she would love to see more of the buildings in the USA designed by the Unitarian Universalist architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work she has always admired, having visited Taliesin West in Arizona). Catherine Robinson January 2004