Arthur Melmoth Walters
English footballer (1865-1941)
Arthur Melmoth Walters (26 January 1865 – 2 May 1941) was an English amateur footballer who played as a defender for the Old Carthusians and the Corinthians in the late nineteenth century as well as making nine appearances for England. He was president of the Law Society of England and Wales.
He and his elder brother, Percy Melmoth Walters, were known as "morning" and "afternoon" in allusion to their initials. The brothers were generally regarded as the finest fullbacks in England for a number of years; according to Philip Gibbons in his "History of the Game from 1863 to 1900" this was due mainly to their own defensive system based on the combination game used by the Royal Engineers during the early 1870s.
Family and education
Walters was born in Ewell, Surrey, the son of William Melmoth Walters (1835–1926), a solicitor and member of an old Somerset family, and Marian Eleanor Leggatt (b. 1840). He was educated at Windlesham House School, then Charterhouse where he played for the school football team in 1882 and 1883 before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won a blue in each of the years from 1884 to 1887.
In 1892, he married Amy Constance Parbury, the daughter of G. W. Parbury, of Ifield, Crawley and they had 5 sons and 4 daughters, including Amy (born 1894), Anthony (1895), Herbert (1900), Bridget (1914) and Thomas (1917) and Marion Elizabeth (who married into the Palmes Family) (born 1901), his son Guy served in the Irish Guards and was a prisoner of war during World War II.
Football career
Corinthian
In his first year at Cambridge, Walters joined the Corinthian club which had been established two years earlier with a view to giving amateur players the opportunity to play together on a regular basis to improve the quality and strength of the England team.
Arthur made his debut for Corinthian on 13 November 1884, in a 7–1 defeat by Notts Club. He was unable to take part in the Corinthians tour of northern England in December, but was able to join the Easter tour in which five games were played in six days.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4799711. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1865, 1941, 1863 and 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arthur Melmoth Walters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.