Byron Edmund Walker

Early years

Byron Edmund Walker was born on 14 October 1848 on the outskirts of Caledonia in Seneca Township, Haldimand County, Canada West.

His grandfather, Thomas Walker, had been a manufacturer of watchcases in London, England. He arrived in Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1834 with four of his children, some books and some pictures. The loss of his wife and four of his children contributed heavily to his decision to leave London for Canada. The third youngest child was Alfred Edmund Walker, Sir Edmund's father, a farmer who became a clerk. He was also an amateur naturalist, paleontologist and watercolour painter. Alfred Edmund married Fanny Murton of Hamilton in 1845. Fanny's parents also were immigrants from England, having arrived in 1832. Her father, William Murton, was college educated and her mother spoke Italian and French and played the harpsichord. She also ran a private junior school in Hamilton.

The Walkers had nine children of which Byron Edmund (or Edmund, as he preferred to be called) was the second oldest. The family moved from their farm near Caledonia, to Hamilton in 1852. There, at the age of four, Edmund began studies at his grandmother's school and then at the Hamilton Central School where he completed all six grades. He hoped to pursue a teaching career but poor health curtailed his enrollment in the Toronto Normal School, the teacher's college founded by Egerton Ryerson in 1851. At the age of 12, Walker entered the service of his uncle, John Walter Murton, who had a currency exchange business in Hamilton.

While working at his uncle's bureau de change, Walker became an expert in recognizing counterfeit bills being circulated during the American Civil War. After seven years at his uncle's firm, he spent a few months in Montreal but poor health forced him to return to Hamilton in 1868 where he began work as a discount clerk in the newly opened Canadian Bank of Commerce.

The Canadian Bank of Commerce was established by industrialist William McMaster in 1867. McMaster would serve as a guiding light to the young Edmund, who quickly rose through the ranks. In 1872, he was appointed chief accountant at the bank's head office in Toronto. In May 1873, Walker was sent to New York City as junior agent for the bank. Charged with responsibility for loans of gold against currency, he successfully maintained proper margins in spite of his clients' many sudden bankruptcies. The enterprising Walker was then sent to the bank's Windsor branch in 1875. In 1878, he was appointed manager of the London, Ontario branch, a year later was made inspector of the bank, and in 1880 he returned to Hamilton as manager.

Walker married Mary Alexander in 1874 while living in New York. Together they had four sons and three daughters. She was the daughter of Alexander Alexander, a carpenter who emigrated from Scotland to Lockport, New York, in 1834. That year, he married Isabella Buchan and moved to Hamilton, Ontario, where he became a green grocer. Together they had five children.

From 1881 to 1886, Edmund was again in New York as the bank's joint agent, giving him the opportunity to increase his talents in foreign exchange and to conduct international banking on a much larger scale. There he could expand his cultural interests, visiting galleries and museums, and beginning, in earnest, his art collection. In 1886, at age 38, Walker was recalled to Toronto as general manager of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. By then there were 30 branches in Ontario and agencies in Toronto, Montreal and New York. The bank's assets at its inception were $2,997,081; 50 years later, these were $440,310,703 with branches across the country, largely attributable to Walker's strong leadership.

Walker is known for developing the first set of written regulations for dividing a bank into a complex array of departments and is widely credited for the Canadian government's 1881/82 revision of the Canada Banking Act that gave Canada a centralized, panic-proof banking system. Walker was also professionally respected internationally. As vice-president of the American Bankers Association he was invited by a U.S. congressional committee to advise on the drafting of the Federal Reserve legislation. He held many key national and international positions; chairman of the bankers' section of the Toronto Board of Trade from 1891 to 1892; vice-president of the Canadian Bankers Association (which he helped found in 1891) in 1893 and its president from 1894 to 1895; chairman of the 1899 Royal Commission on the financial position of the province of Ontario; and chairman of the Section of Money and Credit for the 1904 Universal Exposition in St. Louis. He was a fellow of the Institute of Bankers of England and fellow of the Royal Economic Society of England.

In 1906, he was elected director of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. He served as president from 1907 until his death in 1924.

The Liberal Party government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier appointed Walker to the National Battlefields Commission in 1908. The commission was charged with the recovery of non-Crown land for a "Battlefields Park" in Quebec City where the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was fought between French and British forces. The commission was also charged with supervision of the expenditures of the Tercentenary Celebration of Samuel de Champlain founding Quebec in 1608. Later, Walker was made chairman of the Canadian committee of the Peace Centenary, an event planned by the Canadian, American and British governments to commemorate 100 years of peace between Canada and the United States following the War of 1812-14.

Although Walker tried to stay out of active politics all his life and never joined a political party, he decided to take a pivotal role in the political arena with a group of 18 prominent businessmen who opposed the Reciprocity Agreement with the United States proposed by the Laurier government. Walker feared that the giant American trusts, once allowed into Canada, would paralyze the Canadian market. Furthermore, as an ardent patriot and staunch imperialist, he feared it would weaken Canada's ties with Britain and lead to annexation by the United States. The anti-reciprocity forces led to the defeat of Laurier's government in 1911. Walker was among those who advised the new Conservative Party prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, on preserving the financial stability of Canada during the First World War.