EXTRACTS: Illustrators Issue 6 © 2013 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

3 IT WAS 1955, AND THE ACTOR Laurence Olivier was strutting and limping across our cinema screens perpetuating Shakespeare’s calumnies against king Richard III. With his dark handsome looks, Walter Wyles was strutting and limping his way around central London, visiting the three major magazine publishers: Odhams Press in High Holborn, George Newnes in Covent Garden, and Fleetway Publications in Farringdon Street, in pursuit of his ambition to become a leading women’s magazine illustrator. Walter Wyles was born in 1925 at Canterbury in Kent. He had suffered from poliomyelitis as a child leaving him lame with a pronounced limp, which resulted in him being considered unfit for military service. His father, Walter Henry, came from a military family and was a regular soldier in the British Army. His mother Francesca Calvente came from near Malaga in southern Spain. At the age of eleven he attended the