His aunt, Edyth Starkie, was an established painter married to Arthur Rackham and his godfather was John Pentland Mahaffy, the tutor of Oscar Wilde.
After winning first prize for violin at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in 1913, his father, wanting a more traditional career for his son, turned down an opportunity for Walter to audition for Sir Henry Wood, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.
His violin teacher was the celebrated Italian virtuoso and composer, Achille Simonetti, a master who had been taught by Camillo Sivori, the only pupil of Niccolo Paganini.
[4][5][6] As Starkie suffered with chronic asthma throughout his life, he was sent to the warmer climate of Italy during World War I where he joined the YMCA providing entertainment for the British troops.
After the armistice in November 1918, he befriended in the town of Montebello Vicentino five Hungarian Gypsy prisoners of war and aided them in acquiring wood to construct makeshift fiddles.
[7] While on tour in Northern Italy he met Italia Augusta Porchietti, an Italian Red Cross nurse and amateur opera singer who was singing to patients and wounded soldiers at a hospital ward in Genoa.
[10] In 1928, while Starkie was away in Italy, Yeats, along with Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson, the other two board members, rejected Seán O'Casey's fourth play, The Silver Tassie, his lament of the First World War.
When he returned to Dublin he voiced his disagreement with the other board members saying that, "This play was written with the purpose of showing the useless brutality of war and the public should be allowed to judge it for themselves.
He travelled to Abyssinia in 1935 and later wrote in favour of the Italian campaign there, opposing Éamon de Valera's call for sanctions,[17][19] fearing they would further isolate Italy and drive Benito Mussolini into an alliance with Adolf Hitler.
One of Starkie's early triumphs was organising a recital by the Czech pianist Rudolf Firkušný, who in October 1940 was passing through Madrid on his way to the United States.
Starkie was able to locate a new Steinway and the concert went ahead, bringing together a significant gathering of Madrid society as well as representatives from the American Embassy and Dutch, Polish, Egyptian, Turkish, and Czech Ministers.
Among the four crew and thirteen passengers who died was the prominent Anglo-German and Jewish activist Wilfrid Israel, Francis German Cowlrick, and Gordon Thomas MacLean, who had lunched together at the British Institute in Madrid.
[27] On any one evening, Starkie could count on finding in the Institute at Calle Almagro 5, a great novelist such as Pío Baroja, a rising star like Camilo José Cela (Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1989), the essayist Azorín, composers like Joaquín Rodrigo and painters such as Ignacio Zuloaga.
[29] Walter and Augusta Starkie also allowed their large flat at number 24 Calle del Prado to be used as a safe house for escaping prisoners of war and Jewish refugees.
Emerging from the shadow of a somewhat blighted inheritance, Walter Starkie chose and enjoyed a lifelong freedom which most of us throw away with both hands on the day we leave school and take our first jobs.