Nicolas Walter - Walter in The Peace Movement

Walter in The Peace Movement

Walter was heavily involved in the peace movement, being a founder member of the Committee of 100.

Walter was a member of Spies for Peace—the only member to be publicly identified, and only after his death—who in March 1963 broke into Regional Seat of Government No. 6 (RSG-6), copied documents relating to the Government's plans in the event of nuclear war, and subsequently distributed 3,000 leaflets revealing their contents. The impact was enormous.

In 1966 Walter was imprisoned for two months under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Act 1860, after a protest against British support for the Vietnam War. As Prime Minister Harold Wilson read the lesson (on the subject of beating swords into ploughshares) at a Labour Party service at the Methodist Church in Brighton, Walter and friends interrupted by shouting "Hypocrite!"

Walter played a controversial role in the 1987 identification of Michael Randle and Pat Pottle as the people who helped George Blake escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966, five years into a 42-year sentence. Walter had told the story of how the escape was organised by Committee of 100 activists to former MI6 officer H. Montgomery Hyde, an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, who was writing a biography of Blake. Walter had asked Hyde not to reveal the identities of those involved, but The Sunday Times worked it out from clues in Hyde's book and revealed the names. Randle and Pottle eventually wrote their own book, The Blake escape: how we freed George Blake and why (1989). They were subsequently arrested and tried in 1991 after 110 MPs signed a motion calling for their prosecution and the right-wing Freedom Association threatened to bring a private prosecution. Famously, although Randle and Pottle's guilt was not in doubt, the jury—"perversely", according to the authorities, but entirely within their rights—acquitted them. Nonetheless, critics regarded Walter's actions as unacceptable, and Albert Meltzer later commented: "on the whole it was safer to be Walter's enemy than his friend."