William Walden Hammond was born the youngest child of James and Martha Hammond, in Middlesborough in June 1888. Walden was passionate about photography and chose to start working life apprenticed to a photographic chemist. He immediately joined a photographic club, and these two interests set him up for a lifelong career. Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914, Walden married Charlotte Anne Fisher, a talented pianist and singing teacher. When war was declared, Walden tried several times to enlist but was turned down on health grounds. Eventually, he secured an interview at the HQ of the Royal Flying Corps in London, and was accepted. He took some of the finest reconnaissance photographs of the war, acknowledged for their immediacy and precision even today.
After demobilisation in 1919, Walden and Charlotte moved to Leamington, where he set up a photographic studio on the Colonnade, across the river from the Pump Rooms.
In 1921, moving on from the Leamington Amateur Photographic Society, formed in 1887, Walden helped to set up the Leamington and District Photographic Society. In 1938, he donated an annual prize, the Walden Hammond Vase.
Walden Hammond was called on to photograph society weddings far and wide, and in 1929, to capture the new Earl of Warwick, at the Castle, with his mother and younger brother. He exhibited regularly in Leamington and the Midlands, at the London Salon, in Paris, and for the teens of years, at the Royal Academy, resulting in his Fellowship of the Royal Society. His portraits often appeared in publications such as The Illustrated London News and The Tatler.
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