Page 6 - SA Chamber UK-NOV News letter 2023

Hedi later reconnected with Peter Stadlen, Nick’s father, who she had met in Austria,
while on a trip to London and they married. Hedi was inter alia a musicologist of
note and Peter was a celebrated concert pianist who later became a music critic in

Britain.

Nick’s human rights education was ignited while on a gap year in the United States in

1968, the year Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Nick caught a bus
to attend his funeral in Atlanta.

“I grew up with a very strong sense of the wickedness of apartheid and of

the wrongness of the rebel tours to South Africa”, said Matthew, a broadcaster
and writer.

As President of the Debating Union at Cambridge, his alma mater, and during a
second “gap year” before becoming a judge, Nick interviewed a series of prominent
global figures in podcasts under the title Brief Encounter on the Guardian website.
They included former South African President FW de Klerk, Archbishop Desmond

Tutu, Shimon Peres, Hannan Ashrawi and Jerry Adams.

Nick was involved in the setting up of the British Irish Association in a bid to secure
peace in Northern Ireland.

From the day spent with Denis Goldberg in Cape Town, Nick learned of the other two
surviving Rivonia defendants – Ahmed Kathrada and Andrew Mlangeni, both well

into their 80’s – and the then surviving members of the legal team: Lord Joel Joffe,
George Bizos and Denis Kuny.

Nick knew that he had to move fast to record their interviews for the documentary
which he produced, directed, narrated, and edited with the help of his cousin,
Jonathan Stadlen. He was seized with a sense of mission and radiated the enthusiasm
of an activist half his age.

He wanted their lives and values to be better known abroad and, in particular,
among the youth in South Africa to ensure that their vision is kept alive, and that the

hard-won democracy endures. “I thought that young South Africans have the right
to know about these unsung heroes and I resolved to record their stories,” he said.

The film was screened more than 100 times at invited audiences on four continents

at which Nick would appear and lead discussions after the film had been viewed. It
was also broadcast on Britain’s Channel 5 and South Africa’s MNET. It was screened
dozens of times during the Mandela Centenary exhibition at London’s Southbank
Centre in 2018, at the British Museum and on interactive virtual sessions during the

pandemic.
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SA CHAMBER UK NEWSLETTER NOVEMBER 2023