Campaigners are urging the Nobel Prize Committee to bestow its most important award on a British hero of the Holocaust who saved hundreds of children from certain death.

A petition to honour Sir Nicholas Winton, now aged 103, with the Nobel Peace Prize, launched by pupils at a school in Prague, has already attracted more than 173,000 signatures.

Pupils at Open Gate Grammar School in Prague expressed hope that their campaign would “spread information about the brave Sir Nicholas to a worldwide public”.

Sir Nicholas was a young stockbroker of Jewish extraction when he visited a refugee camp in Sudetenland in 1938.

The experience moved him to organise the eight trains that made up the Czech Kindertransport and carried 669 children from occupied Czechoslovakia to safety as war broke out.

“Despite the reluctance of the government in his homeland, Winton on his own organised train transportations into Great Britain, giving the children new hope and a new home,” said the campaigners.

“By this act, he contributed to [Alfred Nobel’s] idea of ‘the fraternity of nations’.”