Phyllis J. Walker

She was born in London, 4 June 1897, the only surviving child of John Walker (1873–1945), a wholesale publisher and stationer, and Amy Carter (1870–1913), the elder sister of Howard Carter (1874–1939).

During World War I she volunteered for the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), and after the war she continued to work for them at St Dunstan's Hostel for the Blind in Regent's Park, London. During the 1930s until the outbreak of World War II she worked as a secretary. By then she was living alone in London at Nutford House, 1.5 miles north across Hyde Park from Carter's flat in South Kensington.

During the 1931–1932 season, she visited her uncle Howard in Luxor, where she met colleagues such as Percy E. Newberry (1869–1949). She recalled that meeting when choosing to consult Newberry in 1939, after her uncle's death, seeking his advice on what to do with her uncle's unfinished autobiographical sketches on which she had been working with Carter before his death.

Having arranged the sale or safe storage of Carter's possessions in anticipation of war, including protective deposit of his card catalogue for the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb with the Griffith Institute, in late 1939 she moved to East Sussex, close to two of her father's sisters. In 1941 she moved to nearby Forest Row where she lived until her death. During World War II she worked with the Women's Voluntary Service and at a TOC H canteen and club for service men. She was an enthusiastic gardener and cat-lover.

In October 1945, she converted the loan of Carter's card catalogue to the Griffith Institute into a permanent gift, and over the next fourteen years donated to the Griffith Institute her uncle's set of negatives and prints made by Harry Burton (1879–1940) (May 1946), her uncle's lecture slides and an album of his watercolours comparing ancient tomb paintings with modern birds and animals (December 1946), and finally in 1959 the portrait of Carter painted around 1924 by his brother William Carter (1863–1939), ten albums of Burton's photographs, and the aforementioned autobiographical sketches. In 1946 she also donated to the Ashmolean Museum two predynastic bowls which her uncle had lent to the museum.

Fiercely protective of her uncle's legacy and reputation, she always stressed her own unimportance but did not like being dismissed as a “mere secretary”. Her secretarial skills show in her careful recording of the terms on which she deposited Carter's archive, and her attention to detail in organising transport and conservation.

She died in Uckfield, East Sussex, 8 May 1977.