George Walker

George Walker (1734-1807) was educated at Kendal under Caleb Rotheram, and afterwards at Edinburgh and Glasgow, though he apparently never took his degree.  Two of his classmates were Nicholas Clayton and Newcome Cappe.  He ministered at Durham and Filby near Yarmouth before settling at the High Pavement Chapel (Unitarian) in Nottingham in 1774, where he remained until 1798, when he became Theological Tutor at the New College in Manchester.  His political treatises were numerous and were thought by C. J. Fox, especially the former’s Dissenters’s Plea, to be the best writings on that subject.  His oratorical powers made him an obvious choice in leading many of the political battles the Dissenters of Nottingham faced during the latter years of the 1780s and early 1790s.  He helped begin the Nottingham Sunday School in 1784, and organized the High Pavement Day Schools in 1788.  A young S. T. Coleridge preached at High Pavement in January 1796, as he was raising funds for his Watchman.  He died in London in 1807, aged 72, and was buried at Bunhill Fields.  See John Crosby Warren, The High Pavement Chapel, Nottingham.  A Biographical Catalogue of Portraits . . .  (Nottingham, n.d.), 11, 22.