He was attracted to anarchism at the age of fifteen as a direct result of taking boxing lessons where he met Billy Campbell, a seaman, boxer and anarchist.

He involved himself with smuggling arms from Hamburg to the CNT in Spain and acted as a contact for the Spanish anarchist intelligence services in Britain.

[5][a] Albert Meltzer was a contributor in the 1950s to the long-running anarchist paper Freedom before leaving in 1965 to start his own venture Wooden Shoe Press.

Although the feud started in a dispute arising from the possibility of Wooden Shoe moving into Freedom premises, there were also political differences.

[12] He joined the anarcho-syndicalist Direct Action Movement in the early 80s and was a member of it, and its successor organisation the Solidarity Federation until his death.

His biography I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels: Sixty Years of Commonplace Life and Anarchist Agitation was published in 1996, with illustrations by Chris Pig.

[14] The birth mother was under the mistaken belief that she could not be convicted of kidnapping her natural child, the law having changed weeks earlier.