Patterson Walter

Walter Patterson

The Communist Party’s full time National Student Organiser in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

During this period, he apparently left a briefcase with index cards in it, presumably of student members, which eventually got passed onto MI5 after being handed in to the police. He is named in the MI5 files on Eric Hobsbawm (see separate entry).

Patterson left London in the summer of 1962 to return to Scotland, where he became a party organiser in Stirlingshire.

He was then a teacher after taking a degree – probably at Aberdeen – and left the party possibly in the 70s.