Martin J. Walker

Martin J. Walker (born in Manchester in 1947), sometimes styled Martin Walker, is a British writer, artist, political activist, and campaigner, associated with the Health freedom movement. Walker considers himself to be an investigative sociologist, actively involved in the campaigns and causes about which he has written.

Graphic polemics

Walker embarked on a DipAD course at Hornsey College of Art in London, in 1965, where, in 1968, his studies were interrupted by the student occupation, as documented in the The Hornsey Affair, a Penguin Education Special. The student contributions to this book are partially anonymised by initials, and the concluding three pages of the book appear with the initials M.J.W. and date and place of birth. Walker also wrote two other pieces, designed the cover and did some of the graphics inside the book. At that time, and for periods over the next three decades, his commentaries found expression in the form of political poster art. Meanwhile, he also did para-legal work, and was actively involved in cases of and campaigns against wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

In 1971, Walker set up with Bernadette Brittain the Red Dragon Print Collective, and in 1973 he was one of the founding members of what became the Poster-Film Collective. During this time, he produced posters for East London’s Half Moon Theatre, then under the directorship of Pam Brighton. In 1978, he left the collective, and made no more posters until 1989, when he worked with Hackney Community Defence Association, and produced posters for occasions such as the Blair Peach memorial march.

Collections of his posters from both these periods are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, University of London theatre archive, and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. His posters are referenced and reproduced in Dawn Ades's Photomontage, the V&A publications The Art of Selling Songs and The Power of the Poster as well as Images of Aspiration published by the International Institute of Social History. Most recently, his work featured in the exhibition and catalogue of Agitpop, mounted by the London Print Studio (2008). The posters of the Poster-Film Collective can be seen online. A few of Walker’s posters and some collage work can be seen at artist Emma Holister’s Artmargin site.

Writer and activist

Walker’s writing career began with a contribution to The Hornsey Affair, a Penguin Special account of the 1968 occupation of Hornsey College of Art. He then wrote his first book, Poor Man Beggar Man Thief (1973), an account of the setting up and running, with Frank Pakenham (Lord Longford) of the New Horizon Youth Centre, one of the first drop-in centre for homeless teenagers in the West End.

Between 1968 and 2008, he wrote 11 books, and contributed chapters to a number of others, while having articles published in British newspapers and magazines, as well as contributing subjects and research to a number of television programmes such as World in Action and Out of Court. Between 1973 and 1993, his writing dealt mainly with political aspects of policing, crime and imprisonment. Books include George Davis: The Making of a One-Man Gang, which was commissioned by Pluto Press in 1975 but remains unpublished; Frightened For My Life: An account of deaths in British prisons, with Geoff Coggan (Fontana, 1982); A State of Siege: Politics and Policing in the Coalfields: Miners’ Strike 1984, with Jim Coulter and Susan Miller (Canary Press, 1984); A Turn of the Screw: the aftermath of the 1984-85 miners' strike (1985), and With Extreme Prejudice: An investigation into police vigilantism in Manchester (1986), about the harassment of two Manchester students.

Walker writes in favour of certain social movements, while often discussing the issues of bias and objectivity in politics. In 1983, using a pseudonym, he contributed a chapter, ‘Paper Trials: The case of Michael Morris’, to the Penguin Causes for Concern, written after a long investigation into the use of supergrasses by the Metropolitan Police.

In 1984, Walker pressed the NUM to allow him to work in their offices and to write about the Miners’ strike (Walker 1984). Together with Susan Miller, he was given an office in Yorkshire NUM’s headquarters in Barnsley, by the late Owen Briscoe. There, he and Miller joined up with Jim Coulter, a striking miner, to write for the miners their long account of the policing of the strike. This book started out as two separate booklets, A State of Siege and The Iron Fist, which, with a third, mainly about women during the strike, was published as a single volume. Thanks to his experience of para-legal work, and his involvement between 1975 and 1984 in a large number of cases as a Mackenzie Friend, Walker was able to advise and gain representation for many of the pickets arrested during the strike. With Coulter and Miller and the solicitor Gareth Pearce, Walker helped initially to organise the defence of the miners arrested at Orgreave Coking Depot, in what probably remains a unique mass statement-taking (Walker 1984-86).

Walker’s books of the pre-1990s are hybrids of sociology, political campaigning, research and reportage (Turner 1987). His work has always remained to some extent ‘underground’, and only Frightened for my Life, his book with Geoff Coggan, was well accepted by the national press and other media. This book sold 8,000 copies in the two years before it was taken out of circulation by Fontana.

With Extreme Prejudice was written in 1986, while Walker was working for Manchester City Council, and investigated the conspiracy by Manchester police officers against the two students, Sarah Hollis and Steven Shaw. Walker’s style in this period was well described by a reviewer of this book in the Edinburgh Review:

Dirty Medicine
In 1990, while working as a private investigator, Walker was asked to investigate a group of doctors and journalists who had set up the Campaign Against Health Fraud (now HealthWatch). Styling themselves ‘quackbusters’, these campaigners have since the mid-1980s criticised complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Out of this investigation came Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural health care (1993), which became instantly notorious when a member of the CAHF stopped it from being retailed in Britain, and threatened Walker with libel proceedings which Walker managed to fight off, while distributing the book by mail order and selling over 7,000 copies (Walker 1995).

In Dirty Medicine, Walker cited a number of campaigns waged against alternative practitioners, including the first reporting of the attempt to shut down the Bristol Cancer Help Centre. Although many commentators and a few reviewers accused Walker of being a conspiracy theorist, and Walker himself admits that Dirty Medicine is an undisciplined work, a critical review of Dirty Medicine in the Marxist journal Capital & Class by John Abraham, an academic and writer on drug regulation , concluded:

Health freedom
The publication of Dirty Medicine roughly coincided with that of two other books that focused on the same subject, Racketeering in Medicine: The Suppression of Alternatives, by James P. Carter MD (1993), and Guylaine Lanctot’s The Medical Mafia: How to Get Out of It Alive and Take Back Our Health and Wealth (1995), although all three of these books came almost ten years after P.J. Lisa’s influential work Are You a Target for Elimination: An Inside Look at the AMA Conspiracy Against Chiropractic and the Wholistic Healing Arts (1984).

Since Dirty Medicine, Walker has written mainly on political aspects of the relationships between health providers, government and the corporate pharmaceuticals sector. His most recent books include; SKEWED: Psychiatric hegemony and the manufacture of mental illness in multiple chemical sensitivity, Gulf War syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome (2003); Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert strategies in British science policy (2005); and HRT: Licensed to Kill and Maim: The unheard voices of women damaged by hormone replacement therapy (2006).

In 2001, he contributed ‘Raising the Past’, the only one of his recent pieces of writing that is not about medicine, to a book about Toynbee Hall, the University Settlement (Walker 2001).

In 1998 Walker wrote his first article criticising Richard Doll, an epidemiologist who has defended industries against claims that they are causing cancer (Walker 1998). Walker’s work about Doll came to a head with 'Company Men Part One: Sir Richard Doll, Death, Dioxin and PVC' (2005). This essay revealed that Doll had received consultancy fees from Monsanto. Walker’s most recent contribution to what has become an ongoing debate about conflict of interests in academia, was as second author to a peer-reviewed paper in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine (Hardell et al 2007).

Although Walker has had little involvement in writing for television or film, over the years between 2002 and 2007 he was an adviser to the legal drama series Judge John Deed at the invitation of Gordon Newman, the writer and producer of the series, and credited as such in each episode. In 1999 he got involved with the film-maker Alan Golding on a film, still in progress, about a Welsh herbalist who claimed to cure cancer.

Dirty Medicine is the only book to date that made any money for Walker, and he used the profit from it to gain an MA at University of Warwick. Most of his books have, however, run to a second printing.

Slingshot Publications
Walker launched Slingshot Publications in 1993, initially to publish Dirty Medicine. Slingshot has mainly published Walker’s work, with the exception of two anti-vivisection books, a re-publication of the late Hans Ruesch’s work Slaughter of the Innocents (2003), and A Cat in Hell’s Chance (2002), about the battle to close down Hillgrove Cattery, which was supplying cats for medical experiment. Recently Slingshot published Silenced Witnesses (ed. Walker 2008), in which parents of vaccine damaged children tell their stories.

Bibliography
*Poor Man Beggar Man Thief: The story of New Horizon Youth Centre (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1972)
* Frightened For My Life: An account of deaths in British prisons, with Geoff Coggan (Fontana, London, 1982)
*‘Paper Trials: The case of Michael Morris’, in Cause for Concern: British criminal justice on trial, ed. Scraton P, Gordon P (Penguin, 1984)
*Coulter J, Miller S, Walker M A State of Siege: Politics and Policing in the Coalfields: Miners’ Strike 1984 (Canary Press, London, 1984)
*Martin Walker Papers, 1984-1986. GB 0394 MS84/MW Held at: Labour History Archive and Study Centre, at the People's History Museum
*A Turn of the Screw: the aftermath of the 1984-85 miners' strike (Canary Press, London, 1985)
*With Extreme Prejudice: An investigation into police vigilantism in Manchester (Canary Press, London, 1986)
*Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural health care (Slingshot Publications, London, 1993)
*'HERETICAL SCIENCE Alternative Medicine, AIDS - and Duncan Campbell' Open Eye 1995;3: 10 pages
*‘Sir Richard Doll, a Questionable Pillar of the Cancer Establishment’, The Ecologist 1998 (2, Mar/Apr):82-92
*'Raising the Past’ in Settlements, Social Change & Community Action, ed. Gilchrist R, Jeffs T (Jessica Kingsley, London, 2001).
*'Biotechnology and conflicting interests: The European Convention on Bioethics and Human Rights' in Dumontet S, Landi E, Pastoni F (eds) Progresso Scientifico Etica, Tutela delle Risorse: Sfide Professionali del Terzo Millennio Vol.I, (Ordine Nationale dei biologi, Italy, 2002. pp.255-269)
*'Il ruolo del'industria nel mediare informazioni sulla salute occupazionale e pubblica: verso una teoria generale' in Capria MM. (ed.) Scienza e Democrazia (Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Naples, 2003: pp. 361-375)
*SKEWED: Psychiatric hegemony and the manufacture of mental illness in multiple chemical sensitivity, Gulf War syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome (Slingshot Publications, London, 2003)
*'Biotechnology, Ethics and Vested Interests: The European Convention on Bioethics and Human Rights' in (eds) Dumontet S, Grimme H Biology, Biologists and Bioethics: Concerns for scientists, politicians and consumers (Foxwell & Davies Italia S.r.l. Napoli, Italy, 2004)
*Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert strategies in British science policy (Slingshot Publications, London 2005)
*'A Bibliographic History of the Health Freedom Movement' La Leva di Archimede, 2005
*HRT: Licensed to Kill and Maim: The unheard voices of women damaged by hormone replacement therapy (Slingshot Publications, London 2006)
*'Sir Richard Doll: Morte, diossina e cpv' in Capria MM. (ed.) Scienze Poteri e Democrazia: Uomini dell'industria e salute pubblica (Editori Riuniti, Rome 2006: pp 151-215)
*Hardell L, Walker MJ, et al. ‘Secret ties to industry and conflicting interests in cancer research’ Am J Ind Med 2007 50:227-233
*ed. Walker Silenced Witnesses (Slingshot Publications, London, 2008)

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