Born into a Liverpool working class family on 6 May 1933 in Manchester, he began political activity when he was picked up on a canvass by a local activist in 1950.
[3] Terry Harrison has described how when he joined the Labour Party Young Socialists in 1958, it was Wall and Rally that "invited me to make a real commitment to the ideas of Marxism, and made me realise what this meant".
[4] Wall's job as a mail-order company buyer eventually took him away from Liverpool to Market Harborough, and then to Bingley in Bradford, where he worked for the local council.
[5] It also took him abroad, and he established political contacts on his foreign travels in Sri Lanka,[6] Hong Kong, South Korea and the United States.
With Ray Apps, a fellow member of the Militant tendency, he proposed a composite motion calling for "an enabling Bill to secure the public ownership of major monopolies," which was passed by 3,501,000 votes to 2,497,000.
He was quoted as saying: "A Marxist Labour government would mean the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords, the sacking of the generals, the admirals, the air marshals, the senior civil servants, the police chiefs and in particular the judges.