Walter Jekyll (27 November 1849, Bramley, Surrey, England – 17 February 1929, Bower Hall, Riverside, Hanover, Jamaica), was an English clergyman who renounced his religion and became a planter in Jamaica, where he collected and published songs and stories from the local African-Caribbean community.
Local residents would go to him to resolve queries concerning questions of music, literature, religion, botany and science.
Not only did he publish a significant collection of Jamaican folk songs, but he would regularly practice on his grand piano at precisely 1pm each day with the windows open.
Jekyll later had a mentoring relationship other young men: a singer Johnny Lyons, and a Jamaican peasant, whom McKay's brother described as "an ignorant fellow from Hanover Parish", and to whom he left his estate.
On his tombstone this epitaph is inscribed: "Musician, gardener, philosopher, teacher, and writer, he lived 34 years in this Island of his adopting, where he gave himself to the service of others and was greatly beloved by all who knew him.
A Critical Comparison of Contradictory Passages in the Scriptures, with a View of Testing Their Historical Accuracy, London: Watts and Co., The book was reviewed in Open Court, the official publication of the Free Religious Association : Jekyll published Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes, in (1907), with introduction by Alice Werner and appendices by Charles Samuel Myers and Lucy Broadwood.
The Wisdom of Schopenhauer: As Revealed in Some of His Principal Writings, London: Watts and Co. consists of texts selected and translated by Walter Jekyll MA formerly of Trinity College, Cambridge, and issued for the Rationalist Press Association.