General Sir George Townshend Walker, 1st Baronet, (25 May 1764 – 14 November 1842) was a British Army officer. He joined the army in 1782, serving with the 36th Regiment of Foot in India in 1784 and as aide de camp to General Thomas Bruce in Ireland in 1787. After being promoted to captain lieutenant, Walker studied in Germany until he was promoted to captain in the 60th Regiment of Foot in 1791. When Britain became involved in the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793, he took a force of volunteers to reinforce the Flanders campaign, where he fought at the Battle of Tournay. While on the continent he helped form Roll's Regiment for British service. He took it to England in 1796, and having been promoted to major he went to serve in Portugal in 1797. Here Walker again served as an aide de camp, to at first Major-General Simon Fraser and then the Prince of Waldeck.
Walker was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1799 and given command of the 50th Regiment of Foot. After serving as an advisor in the Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland he commanded the regiment in garrisons at Malta and Ireland until 1807 when the regiment fought at the Battle of Copenhagen. Sent to join the Peninsular War, he notably saw action at the Battle of Vimeiro. Later in the year Walker was promoted to colonel and, after a period of leave and independent service, re-joined the 50th in time to fight in the Walcheren Campaign of 1809. He was made a brigadier-general in 1810 and sent to serve as a liaison with the Spanish patriot armies of Galicia and Asturias.
Walker was promoted to major-general in 1811 and given command of a brigade in the 5th Division with which he fought at the Siege of Badajoz in 1812, during which he was badly wounded in a diversionary attack. Walker recovered from his injuries and in 1812 assumed command a brigade in the 2nd Division. As such he fought at the Battle of Nivelle later in the year, and then was appointed temporary commander of the 7th Division. He commanded the division into 1814, fighting at the Battle of the Nive and Battle of Orthez where he was again wounded. After this he returned to his brigade command, only to learn that his wife had died in February. With his wounds worsening, he took the opportunity to resign his command. He later served as Governor of Grenada between 1815 and 1817, and then as Commander-in-Chief, Madras Army, between 1826 and 1831. His last official position was as Lieutenant-Governor, Royal Hospital Chelsea.
Early life George Townshend Walker was born on the Isle of Wight on 25 May 1764, the eldest child of Major Nathaniel Walker of the Queen's Rangers and Henrietta, the only heir of Captain John Bagster of the Royal Navy. His paternal great-great-grandfather was Sir Walter Walker, advocate to Catherine of Braganza, the wife of King Charles II. He had two younger brothers; Frederick who became a general in the army and Charles who became a post captain in the navy. Walker was educated at Rugby School from 1773. His father, while fighting in the American War of Independence, had him commissioned into the 95th Regiment of Foot as an ensign on 4 March 1782.
Military career Early career Walker was promoted to lieutenant in the 95th on 13 March 1783, serving on Jersey, but the regiment was disbanded on 31 May as part of the cut-downs at the end of the American War of Independence. He instead joined the Second Battalion of the 71st Regiment of Foot on 22 June of the same year; again Walker was unlucky in his choice of regiments, as his battalion was disbanded in October as well. On 15 March 1784 Walker joined his third regiment in two years, the 36th Regiment of Foot. It was stationed in southern India, at which he arrived on 10 March 1785. He was then appointed deputy quartermaster general for the army in the Madras Presidency. In February 1786 he participated in operations against the tax farmers of the Nawab of Arcot, who had previously handed control of taxation in his lands to the East India Company but had attempted to continue taking taxes despite this, at Tinnevelli.
Walker was brought down with jungle fever soon after this and he was invalided home to England in 1787. Being away from his regiment, he chose to transfer to the 35th Regiment of Foot on 25 July 1787 and then from May 1788 served as an aide de camp to General Thomas Bruce, who was a staff officer in Ireland. He transferred regiments again on 13 March 1789, this time to the 14th Regiment of Foot, and was promoted to captain lieutenant. The regiment was serving in Jamaica at the time but Walker chose not to join it there and instead went to study tactics and German in Germany. His regiment returned to England in 1790 and Walker returned to command his company at Hilsea Barracks. Continuing to change regiments to assist his quest for promotion, Walker was promoted to captain in the 60th Regiment of Foot on 4 May 1791. He served at the regiment's depot in England, at the time the rest of the regiment was stationed exclusively in North America, until Britain became involved in the French Revolutionary Wars in February 1793. He then volunteered to go with new recruits to the army of the Duke of York on the Flanders campaign in March, as part of which he fought at the Battle of Tournay on 10 May 1794. After this he was again appointed to the staff of the army's quartermaster general, and he served as such as the army retreated through the Dutch Republic at the end of the year.
Regimental command After having been used to fulfil several confidential missions which took him to The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, in early 1795 Walker was appointed Inspector of Foreign Corps, for the purpose of which he was sent to south-west Germany and Switzerland. Here he assisted the French royalist officer Louis de Roll in forming Roll's Regiment for service in the British army. When the allied campaign against France began to falter in April 1795 Walker took command of the regiment and took it to Civitavecchia in Italy where they embarked for England in August 1796. He was promoted to major in the 60th on 27 August despite still being detached from them in his role as inspector. In October Spain declared war on Britain and began to threaten Britain's ally Portugal. To assist in defending the country, Roll's Regiment was sent to Lisbon in June 1797, with Walker having gone ahead of it in March. He served as an aide de camp to the second in command of the British army, Major-General Simon Fraser, until June when he was transferred to the staff of the overall Anglo-Portuguese commander, Friedrich Karl August, Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont.
Later in the same month Walker was again sent home from campaign because of medical issues. He served as an Inspecting Field Officer of Recruiting in Manchester between February 1798 and March 1799, during which time on 6 September he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the 50th Regiment of Foot. He briefly commanded this regiment in Portugal in early 1799, but was posted to the British military mission assisting the Russians in the Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland in October. Soon after the invasion ended and Walker evacuated with the rest of the army to the Channel Islands. Walker stayed with the Russians until they returned to their homeland in October 1800. He then re-joined the 50th, commanding them as a garrison unit at Malta from August 1801. The regiment moved in May 1802 to serve in Belfast, Ireland, where they assisted in putting down the Irish rebellion of 1803. Walker's next chance to see action did not come until 1807 when the regiment was sent to join a brigade commanded by Brigadier-General Brent Spencer.
This brigade formed part of the army that attacked Copenhagen from August to September. The brigade was not broken up after the Copenhagen campaign, and instead sailed in December to attack naval installations at Cádiz and in the Mediterranean Sea. The brigade's naval transports were upset by constant bad weather as they travelled south, however, and they only reached Gibraltar in March 1808, by which time the opportunity to attack the installations had gone. Walker himself did not make Gibraltar at the same time as the rest of his regiment, as his ship had been separated from the rest of the convoy and driven all the way to Sicily, and he only learned of his regiment's landing at Gibraltar several weeks after the event, at which point he joined them.
Walker and his regiment were not left idle for long after this, forming part of the army of Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley that landed in Portugal on 6 August. He was present at the Battle of Roliça on 16 August but the 50th was in the reserve of the army and did not see action. Their first engagement came in the advance guard of the army at the Battle of Vimeiro four days later; Walker was praised for his conduct during the battle where he turned half of his regiment to respond to a flanking French division that might otherwise have done considerable damage and drove it back down the hill it was attacking. The French unit, numbering around 3–4,000 men, was then forced to retreat with the regiment in chase. For actions such as this, the 50th became one of the most well known regiments in the peninsular army. After the battle Walker went on leave for a while because the 50th did not have enough equipment to continue in the advance of the army and were left as garrison troops in Portugal; during his leave he was promoted to colonel on 25 September. In January 1809, Walker was sent back to Portugal to give some dispatches to Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore, but he arrived two days after Moore had been killed at the Battle of Corunna on 16 January. He took the news of the battle to Lieutenant-General Sir John Cradock, the Lisbon garrison commander, and then returned to England.
He then returned to regular duties with the 50th, forming part of the army that fought in the Walcheren Campaign between August and December, for part of which he commanded a brigade as a staff officer in the garrison forces. Walker was made a brigadier-general in August 1810 to serve as a liaison with the Spanish armies of Galicia and Asturias. He served in this role for around one year and formed a very negative opinion of the Army of Galicia, but thought the Army of Asturias worth supporting by the British. In April 1811 he organised a joint attack by that army and 3,000 British troops on the port of Santona to establish a base for the Royal Navy and a supply point for the Spanish armies. Wellesley, now Lord Wellington, removed the British troops from the expedition and instead used it as a diversion from his manoeuvres around the city of Ciudad Rodrigo.
General
Walker was promoted to major-general on 4 June 1811. The Spanish took Santander on 14 August while he was still working as a liaison. By this time Walker had grown exhausted with the demands and lack of coordination between the Spanish armies, and he successfully applied to Wellington for a regular command in his army. After having briefly served as a staff officer to Wellington, he was given command of the 2nd Brigade of the 5th Division on 2 October.