LONG BEFORE HE EMERGED as the most acclaimed producer of his generation, George Martin revealed himself to be a childhood prodigy. In contrast with the scruffy lads from Liverpool who strode into the stately halls of Abbey Road Studios on that fateful evening in June 1962, Martin had enjoyed many years of genuine musical promise, but like the Beatles, he, too, had seen his share of working-class toil and anguish. His earliest memory of music was at age “three or four,” when he “gravitated” toward the family’s upright piano and began playing “funny Chopsticks things.” At the tender age of eight, he wrote his first composition, “The Spider’s Dance,” after half a dozen lessons on the old upright. A quick-spirited ragtime number, “The Spider’s Dance” seemed to herald great things to come in young George’s life.1
But in truth, no one in his family had an aptitude for music. “My parents weren’t at all musical,” he later recalled. “I guess I was a one-off.” The piano had found its way into the Martins’ life because of an uncle’s job in a piano factory. Nothing more, nothing less. And while the person who greeted the London record business some twenty-four years later would sport a pleasingly posh accent, his upbringing was decidedly blue collar. He was working class all the way. The man history now knows as “Sir George” was born George Henry Martin, the youngest child of Henry and Bertha (née Simpson) Martin, on January 3, 1926, at the Royal Northern Hospital in Holloway Road, North London. At the time of his birth, the Martin family lived in a tiny converted garage in Highbury Mews, just off Holloway Road. For Henry and Bertha, infant George and his older sister, Irene, aged three and a half, were more than just the product of a growing family—they were two mouths to feed in truly burdensome times. As the Great Depression mounted across the 1930s, Henry, who went by Harry, found work as a craftsman carpenter to be in increasingly short supply. In the meantime, he moved his young family from the converted garage to nearby Drayton Park. Young George’s earliest memories find their roots in his first real home, the second apartment on the top floor of a semidetached house. In later years, he recalled the nearby Sunlight Laundry and, just around the corner, a church hall run by Donald Soper—“a young man with patent leather hair,” in Martin’s recollection, who found fame as a BBC television personality and religious activist.2
The Martins’ new home was a two-room apartment with an attic and a large sitting room with windows overlooking the road. In the rear was his parents’ bedroom, while George and Irene shared a foldaway bed in the sitting room. But that is where any luxury that might be found in the Martins’ new accommodations ended. As it happened, their apartment had no electricity. Instead, they were forced to rely on coal fires and gas lighting. The sitting room itself was lit by two wall-mounted gas brackets that bookended the fireplace. George remembered having to be very careful in handling the delicate gas mantels so as not to damage them. Any misstep might leave the family without light and warmth, not to mention an invoice that, as the depressed 1930s wore on, would be extremely difficult to pay.
Perhaps even worse, the Martins’ apartment lacked both a kitchen and a lavatory. Indeed, there wasn’t a bathroom in the entire building. A sink with cold running water was available on a half landing down a flight of stairs, while the lavatory itself awaited three floors down in the back of the house, where the Martin children took their baths in a tin tub. Without a proper kitchen to prepare the family’s meals, Bertha had to make do with a communal gas stove on the landing. But for all of the apartment’s shortcomings, it featured one redeeming aspect: the tiny attic rooms where Harry created a makeshift workshop to carry out his trade.
In George’s memory, his father was “the most honest person I have ever known.” As one considers the breadth of the extraordinary career that awaited young George—and the unflinching manner in which he would invariably conduct his life and business—it is not difficult to ferret out his father’s indelible influence. In George’s early years, Harry made his living as a highly skilled wood machinist and a gifted carpenter. In those days, he worked for a firm that fitted out public houses and bars, particularly the finely crafted mahogany trimmings associated with the most stately and glamorous pubs of that era. For Harry, the real attraction was the wood itself. As George recalled, his father not only adored his work but also had a “love affair” with wood. “He used to bring home a piece of wood and encourage us to feel it,” George wrote. “He was absolutely besotted with the stuff, but because of that he was always very poor, finding it very difficult to get work.”3
And by the time that the Depression was in full swing, finding work had become all but impossible for Harry. For two long years, he was out of a job, and the family had little money to call their own. Things came to a head during George’s fifth year, when he contracted scarlet fever. Under British law, his parents were required to report the disease. Yet Bertha, nicknamed “Cissie” by her relatives, took the law into her own hands, preferring to care for her young son at home rather than subjecting him to the trauma of going to a hospital. As a nurse during the First World War, she had learned to hate hospitals and refused to subject her son to their misery. In one of young George’s earliest memories, he recalled seeing a vendor passing by on the street below their apartment on a Wall’s tricycle, complete with a wooden chest balanced on the front wheels and brimming with ice-cream treats. Still recovering from his bout with scarlet fever, George begged his mother for an ice cream. To his great confusion, Bertha broke into tears, saying, “Darling, I haven’t got any money.” As he bluntly recalled, the young family was “that broke.” George would long remember his father’s desperate efforts to comfort his son against the raging elements during one particularly frigid winter of his youth. “I have a vivid memory of a very cold winter,” he said. “My feet were freezing, and he knew this, and we didn’t have a hot water bottle. So he got an old can, which used to hold petrol or oil, cleaned it out, filled it with hot water, wrapped it in towels, and put it by my feet.” As George’s eldest son would remark years later, things became so desperate at this point in their lives that the young Martin family’s most abiding ambition “was simply to be warm,” given their impoverished environs at the time.4
The Martins’ rescue finally came in the form of Harry’s job hawking newspapers on Cheapside, just opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral. As George remembered, “I think he may have got that job through my mother’s side of the family, which we always regarded as somehow the grander side. The men, my uncles and my grandfather, used to run the Evening Standard vans ’round London, and they earned quite good money for those days. I always regarded them as my rich relations.” Earning Harry all of thirty shillings per week, the job “saved our bacon,” George later wrote: “I recall going with my mother to take him some sandwiches one icy winter’s day, and seeing him standing on that freezing corner with the wind howling around him, trying to keep warm. I felt sorry for him.” Finally, after the worst years of the Great Depression had abated, Harry found work again in the wood machinery business in London’s East End. Having suddenly returned to his element, Harry was happy again. In addition to his work as a wood machinist, he took private commissions to build custom furniture. As George remembered, Harry “was a marvelous craftsman,” and “he made us tables, and sideboards, and cabinets, and beds, and toys for Irene and me. But never chairs. For some reason, he never made chairs.” In yet another early memory, George recalled accompanying his father on a delivery in which Harry borrowed a fruit vendor’s wheelbarrow to transport a custom-made wooden cabinet to a far-flung customer. For young George, the long walk made for “quite an adventure.” Afterward, his father pushed the wheelbarrow back across London with little George as its only passenger, having fallen asleep atop some loose sacking.5
In addition to building the Martins’ own furniture, Harry designed several pieces for sale, including one extraordinary item—“a standard lamp that looked rather like Nelson’s Column, with a fluted column and a square base with claw feet.” George recalled, “It was beautifully done, all bas-relief in mahogany, and my mother loved that lamp.” As for Bertha, she was independent minded and, like her husband, determined to make it in spite of the social and economic despair of 1930s England. Along with Harry, she was resolute in providing the best of everything for her young family. She worked as a seamstress and a maid to make extra money. In spite of their lack of disposable income, Bertha and Harry worked tirelessly on behalf of George and Irene while always ensuring that they were properly clothed and fed. “Although we had no money,” George later recalled, “I never thought we were poverty-stricken, and we never went without.” Indeed, in spite of everything, “we lived comfortably enough. It was a pretty normal childhood.”6
In 1931 circumstances forced the family to move yet again—this time less than a mile away to a three-room apartment above a working dairy on nearby Aubert Park, just to the east of the Arsenal football club’s behemoth stadium. The accommodations were about the same as the family’s previous apartment, only this time they had four gas mantels suspended in the middle of the sitting room, providing much more light than the two around the fireplace back on Drayton Park. Aubert Park also marked the first time that young George enjoyed the benefits of having electricity. Better still, life in the new family digs was also marked by the presence of that piano. According to his sister, Irene, the family originally purchased the instrument from a beloved uncle’s piano company back when they lived at Highbury Mews. As George recalled, “A piano then was what the television set has become now, not simply a piece of furniture but a focus for family gatherings, and we managed to acquire one through the good offices of Uncle Cyril, who was in the piano trade. He was the one who always played the piano at parties.” When the piano arrived, George was instantly smitten: “I fell in love with it straight away, and went and made noises on it.” While Irene began taking lessons from a relative, George had to make do at first with being self-taught, as the family had only enough money to cover one set of lessons. But no matter, George later recalled, “I just made my own music. And I made it rather well! I found I was able to listen to tunes and then pick them out on the piano. Music felt completely natural, and I didn’t think there was anything special about it.”7
When George finally earned his opportunity to enjoy a few piano lessons of his own, he quickly penned “The Spider’s Dance,” along with a pair of high-minded classical pieces that he whimsically titled “Opus 1” and “Opus 2.” Having become a composer at the ripe old age of eight, “I supposed I used to think that I was a genius,” he remembered. “You always do when you are a child. Such fanciful ideas.” As he later surmised, “I wasn’t taught music to begin with. I just grew up feeling music and naturally making music. I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t making music on the piano.” But the lessons, alas, didn’t last. “I didn’t learn anything from them at all,” he later admitted, “and then my mother had a row with the piano teacher, and I never went back.”8
When he turned five, young George was enrolled in Our Lady of Sion, the school on Holloway Road that Irene attended. George’s early education clearly reflected his mother’s staunch Roman Catholic beliefs. Three years later, he was enrolled in St. Joseph’s, a Catholic boys’ elementary school in Highgate Hill. But for young George, the world changed irrevocably when at age eleven he earned a scholarship to attend St. Ignatius College in Stamford Hill. A Jesuit college where the schoolmasters were Jesuit priests, St. Ignatius challenged George in a variety of ways, ranging from the intellectual and the artistic to the social and the physical. The Martin family had recently moved yet again—this time to Muswell Hill. They lived on Hillside Gardens atop a steep road only a few miles away from St. Ignatius, where George found himself in a “whole new world.” “I enjoyed football, and played some cricket too,” he recalled. “I loved art and maths, and was fascinated by aerodynamics and aircraft design. I quite enjoyed languages, learning French, Latin, and Ancient Greek.” He remembered his St. Ignatius teachers with a special fondness, particularly Father Gillespie, a “fearsome” presence who instilled a love of language in his young charges. Not surprisingly, George was especially taken with choir—so much so, in fact, that he sang every day during Easter week, staying at the college rather than going home for the night.9
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, George was thirteen and Irene, now seventeen, had taken a job with Sun Life of Canada’s London insurance office. With England’s and France’s declarations of war against Nazi Germany, the “Phoney War” ensued. During the eight-month period that comprised the Phoney War, there was nothing in the way of military land operations until May 1940, when German forces attacked France and the Low Countries. In spite of the relative quietude in London before the Blitz, Bertha was certain that Alexandra Palace, which was less than half a mile from the Martins’ home, would be bombed. After St. Ignatius was evacuated to Welwyn Garden City, about twenty miles north of London, George and his mother temporarily relocated to Cambridge, while Harry and Irene stayed behind in London. When Sun Life of Canada shifted their offices to Bromley, on the outskirts of the southern English countryside, Bertha decided to move the entire family to Kent, where George enrolled in the Bromley County School.10
In spite of the dislocation associated with his family’s wartime evacuation, George continued to pursue his various passions without interruption. As he later observed, “I had carried on with the piano on my own; once you are interested in something like that, you can find out about it without even going to the library and looking things up. A piano is a great tool for finding out about music, about the relationships between one note and another. I remember getting very excited when I discovered a new chord, and especially so when one day I realized that there was a natural cycle of chords.” Years later, George would discover that he possessed that rare gift of perfect pitch. Also known as absolute pitch, perfect pitch refers to a person’s natural ability to identify or play a particular musical note without benefit of a reference tone. As George later wrote, “I was also able to work out, for example, that there were only three diminished chords in the whole range, and that they had different inversions.” This ability to distinguish between various sounds and intuitively understand their musical interrelationships would emerge as an asset throughout his formative years and beyond.11
For their part, the Martin family could hardly begin to account for young George’s innate musical talent. “I started playing things like ‘Liebestraum,’ and various Chopin pieces, by ear. Where that gift came from, I don’t know. There were certainly no professional musicians anywhere in the family. They just assumed ‘George is the musical one . . . let him get on with it.’” Life at the Bromley County School proved to be a great boon for George’s development as a budding musician. The district of Bromley benefitted from a large local musical society, and his school occasionally played host to the likes of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In fact, he experienced an epiphany in 1941, when the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Sir Adrian Boult, performed Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune at fifteen-year-old George’s school. “I thought it was absolutely heavenly,” he recalled. “I couldn’t believe human beings made that sound.” But even in the early moments, George found himself enrapt with the making of music as much as with its aesthetic beauty. It was his first brush with the “tingle factor”—that uncanny instant when the human spirit is awakened by the aesthetic power of music. “I could see these men in their monkey-jackets, scraping away at pieces of gut with horsehair and blowing into funny instruments with bits of cane on their ends. But the mechanical things I saw simply didn’t relate to the dream-like sound I heard. It was sheer magic, and I was completely enthralled.”12
In addition to such high-minded pursuits, the Bromley County School also offered regular dances, which featured acts like the Squadronaires, the Royal Air Force’s popular jazz band. On one memorable occasion, George recalled, “[I] hung around the stage, and when one of them asked if I was a musician myself, I seized my chance and said airily, if brashly, ‘Oh, yes, I play piano, the sort of thing you’re doing.’” When the Squadronaires called him on his “adolescent bravado,” young George joined the bandmates on stage. “That was the only invitation I needed,” he recalled. “It was an unbelievable feeling to be sitting up there playing ‘One O’Clock Jump’ with them.”13
During this same period, George joined an amateur dramatic society called the Quavers, a lay activity sponsored by a local church in Bromley. He enjoyed performing in the Quavers’ productions, including plays by Noël Coward, among others. While George hardly distinguished himself for his acting skills, his experiences with the Quavers took an indelible turn when the dramatic society began hosting dances. He and his friends good-naturedly organized a band to provide musical accompaniment: “We called ourselves the Four Tune Tellers, and then we expanded and became George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers. Fame! My father made us a set of music stands with a double-T design.” During their time together, the group’s personnel shifted several times. As George recalled, “I was its nucleus and organizer, even though I was the youngest. In those days, there was no amplification, so no electric instruments. We always had the drums, and a bass player if we were lucky. The very first group had a violinist, who was a part-time policeman, but he didn’t last very long. The violin isn’t really a good instrument for a dance band, and we graduated to saxophones after that. My sister Irene was the vocalist.” While the group’s lineup shifted periodically, George remained steadfast as the band’s pianist: “I wanted to be George Shearing, and I also modeled myself on Meade Lux Lewis”—a pair of influences that merged young George’s interests in jazz, on the one hand, and boogie-woogie, on the other. George’s time in the dramatic society left him with yet another revelation, one that he would realize at key junctures throughout his young life: as he engaged in regular conversation with other members of the troupe, “I decided that I spoke appallingly.” To remedy this essential part of his nature, he began self-consciously attempting to speak like the well-heeled BBC commentators he heard on the radio.14
Before long, George’s band developed a steady following and a regular musical repertoire. “We played the standards by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and so on, things like ‘The Way You Look Tonight.’ Quicksteps were always the most popular, and we always ended with ‘The Goodnight Waltz.’” The band’s set list was mostly gleaned from hit songs that George picked up from listening to the radio. In addition to pieces like Kern’s classic “All the Things You Are,” the group specialized in American imports such as Woody Herman. For the most part, their gigs consisted of “socials or dances at schools, where boys and girls of 15 or so would dance arm in arm, and in pubs and halls in the area: the Bell in Bromley, the Green Man in Catford, Ravensbourne Country Club, which was rather posh, and various places in Southend, an area north of Bromley.” Soon sixteen-year-old George and the Four Tune Tellers found themselves in fairly high demand, playing one or two regular shows each week. While the bandmates enjoyed the act of performance immensely, traveling far and wide to get to their shows proved to be more than a minor strain. As George recalled, “It was all quite good fun, but we did have to cycle everywhere. The double bass player used to ride with his bass on his back, and the drummer had a real problem. As the pianist, I was the only one who had no instrument to be carried around, so I used to cycle alongside him, with the bass drum carried between us. Rather dangerous, I must say, but we were rarely stopped by the cops!”15
While George’s experience with the Four Tune Tellers imbued him with a newfound confidence—not to mention the pure joy of live performance—he was hardly satisfied with being a scratch pianist who made do with playing by ear. Eventually, he earned enough money from the band’s gigs to pay for piano lessons from a Scotsman named Mr. Urquhart. As George remembered, “Mr. Urquhart had a marvelous Bösendorfer piano, and it was then that I really woke up to music.” As it happens, young George was still vacillating between his new life as a budding professional musician and a young man’s fantasy about achieving untold fame and immortality: “I suddenly realized that I had talent—though, to be honest, the realization was a mite unconfined: I used to romance about how, if I’d had the proper training, I would have been another Rachmaninov. I got that sorted out rather later, when it dawned on me that Rachmaninov’s reputation was under no threat from G. Martin, but at the time I really fancied myself as a classical writer.” Under Mr. Urquhart’s tutelage, George learned to play Chopin etudes and Beethoven sonatas. Perhaps even more significantly, Mr. Urquhart also taught him how to chart musical notation. For the first time, George was able to transcribe—if only very crudely—the musical phrases that danced, unabated, within the staves of his mind.16
As it happens, George’s life—not to mention the tension between his reality as a working musician and the pleasant, diverting fantasia of musical stardom—was quickly arriving at a crossroads of sorts. When he graduated from Bromley in 1941, he had achieved distinctions in French and mathematics. By his sixteenth birthday in 1942, his schooldays had come to a close, and he was on a collision course with the “big wide world.” For his part, George’s gaze most often drifted toward the sky, his interest in aviation having continued to grow since his years at St. Ignatius. While Bertha hoped to spare her family from the perils of war-torn London, she had succeeded, rather ironically, in affording her son a front-row seat as the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe skirmished overhead. As George recalled, “I watched the Battle of Britain unfolding over my head, and our classes were continually interrupted by air-raid warnings, the whistle of bombs, and the chatter of machine guns.” Always ready and willing to immerse himself in the objects of his interests, George quickly fancied himself as “an expert aircraft spotter” who “could tell a Hurricane or a Spitfire from a Messerschmitt or Heinkel miles away. The dogfights made beautiful trails in the sky, and I never thought of the horror of their combat but marveled at the grace of the aerial ballet that had me as a spectator.” On one unforgettable occasion, George “heard a terrific noise of planes and rushed into the garden just in time to see two Focke Wulf 190 fighter bombers sweep over our house at naught feet, firing their cannon. It was a great thrill, even if they were only shooting up a barrage balloon.” Bertha, understandably horrified by the proximity of war, was thunderstruck by her son’s cavalier attitude: “My mother was absolutely frantic, calling me a stupid fool for being so careless of my own safety. I thought it was rather a hoot!” George soon realized that his family’s mortality was threatened by the aviation spectacles that took place in the Bromley skies—the ones to which he had responded so lightly: “I remember one day [after a bombing] a house about five doors down wasn’t there anymore. And the house next door to it, on the first floor, there was a bathroom exposed, and the bath was dangling, holding on from its pipes. And I thought, ‘Well, gosh, that could have been us.’ But you accepted it.”17
Although he continued to dream about a career in aviation, his parents, always influential, loving, and supportive, held decidedly different views about the course of his future: “While I had been at school, my parents were always trying to impress on me the importance of a job with security. I had always been good at mathematics and drawing, so now my mother suggested: ‘Why don’t you go in for architecture?’” Meanwhile, his father, Harry, had different plans in mind: “Why don’t you go in for the Civil Service? You’ll never get chucked out of a job then.” As George recalled, “To him that was, understandably, paramount, having suffered so much unemployment, but in both of them there was the feeling that they wanted me to do better than they had, an ‘Our George is going places’ mixture of parental pride and ambition.”18
As it turns out, the elder Martins’ dream of a better life for their son would have to wait—at least for the moment. Young George didn’t become an architect, and he didn’t join the civil service either. While he continued to nurse a near-fanatical interest in the study of aircraft and aerodynamics, an early attempt to sign on with the vaunted de Havilland Aircraft Company failed to materialize after George learned that the firm required a £250 cash payment for their apprenticeship program in aircraft design. Although he was accepted into a similar program offered by Short & Harland in Belfast, George was loathe to relocate to Northern Ireland. Besides, he reasoned, it was 1942 during the heart of the war in Europe, and aircraft companies had little interest in taking on new designers given their ever-increasing manufacturing backlog. George temporarily worked for Mr. Coffin, a quantity surveyor in Victorian Street. Not surprisingly, George immediately grew bored, and despite Mr. Coffin’s counteroffer of increasing his measly £2 5s weekly salary, George gave notice after only six weeks on the job.
As with so many young men of his day, Martin’s ambitions quickly shifted to the omnipresent military effort that galvanized the nation. After passing the entrance exam, he joined the War Office’s nonuniformed ranks as a temporary clerk grade three. Never straying very far from the sound of music, George continued to tickle the ivories with his dance band by night. Indeed, by this point, George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers netted a tidy sum for their gigs—especially in contrast with his meager earnings as a clerk. But after eight months, during which he mainly provided tea service and worked in the mail room of the War Office’s Easton Square headquarters in London, he strolled into the recruiting office at Hither Green and, without first telling his parents, volunteered to join the Royal Navy. His reasoning, like many would-be recruits, was fairly simple: “It was inevitable I was going to be conscripted before long. The Army didn’t appeal to me because I wanted to fly, but I didn’t particularly want to go into the Royal Air Force because everyone was doing that. I though it would be different to join the Fleet Air Arm.” Like so many young men, he later admitted to being inspired to join the Fleet Air Arm after hearing the awe-inspiring story of its success at the Battle of Taranto, which enjoyed national headlines in November 1940 for its crippling air attack on the Italian fleet using aerial torpedoes. On yet another occasion, he put it even more bluntly, saying that he “didn’t want to be a poor bloody infantryman.” When he went to the recruiting office, he announced that he wanted to be a pilot with flying duties in the Fleet Air Arm. “So I signed on.” It was the summer of 1943, and George was promptly accepted into the Royal Navy. He was barely seventeen years old. When he announced to his mother that he had been inducted into the Fleet Air Arm—“Mum, I’ve joined up”—Bertha went pale and burst into tears. “Oh, my God, you’ll be killed,” she exclaimed, pleading with him that his enlistment couldn’t possibly be true. But there was no turning back, of course. Trying to calm her breaking heart, he pleaded with her, saying, “Mother, I won’t get killed. I promise you that.” In short order, George shipped out to the HMS St. Vincent, a training station at Gosport on the coast of Hampshire in southern England.19
For the next eighteen months, George called Gosport home. During this period, his training was delayed for several months when he was felled by a case of the German measles, which had reached epidemic proportions among the new recruits. As it turned out, Gosport marked George’s most extended stay during his years as a navy man. With the Allies gearing up for D-day, he “had no real leave because we were getting ready to invade France and the whole of the south coast was sealed off. I couldn’t go home, and my parents couldn’t come to Gosport, but for some reason they and I were allowed to go to Winchester,” a Romanesque city some fifteen miles northeast of Southampton. Every few months, George and his parents would meet in Winchester for tea and cakes. After completing a radio course in nearby Eastleigh, he was transferred to Glasgow, where he soon boarded the Nieuw Amsterdam, a Dutch ocean liner that had been refitted as a troopship. Designed to accommodate fifteen hundred passengers, the Nieuw Amsterdam was crammed to the gills with more than eight thousand souls, including some three thousand German prisoners bound for Canada. During George’s voyage to New York aboard the ship, the German prisoners served the troops in the crowded mess halls. At night, George and his shipmates slept on hammocks draped along the open decks of the liner. For the duration of its three-week voyage, the Nieuw Amsterdam zigzagged across the Atlantic in an effort to avoid U-boat entanglements. When life aboard the “dormitory-diner” mercifully came to an end, George spent two weeks in New York City “being amazed by the skyscrapers” and settling into the HMS Saker, the Royal Navy’s facility in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. George later recalled having “a whale of a time. It was like heaven after blacked-out England. We were treated like little tin gods: wherever we went compères would call out, ‘The British Navy is here—give ’em a big hand!’” For George, the highlight was a visit to Broadway’s Diamond Horseshoe. He enjoyed free drinks at the club before venturing to the Paramount, where he basked in the sounds of Cab Calloway and Gene Krupa. “Everywhere was bright lights and tasty food and fresh milk,” he later wrote, “things we couldn’t get in wartime Britain.” During a weekend getaway to Manhasset on Long Island Sound, George finally got to play the piano and enjoy more American cuisine.20
From the Brooklyn Navy Yard, George shipped out yet again—this time for the island of Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela, where the young navy men endured nine months of flight training. By this point, he had been promoted from naval airman second class to leading naval airman. His first flight occurred in a Vickers Supermarine Walrus, an amphibian biplane that shook like the dickens. After getting over his initial fears and becoming used to the plane’s machinations, George began to enjoy flying, which he found to be exhilarating. He trained on a succession of aircraft, ranging from high-winged, single-engined monoplanes like the Stinson Reliant to amphibian aircraft like the Grumman Goose, the Fairey Albacore, and the torpedo-bearing Fairey Swordfish. In Trinidad, George was assigned to be an “observer,” a role that required him to serve as captain of the aircraft. As an observer, he was responsible for being fluent in all of the duties associated with his three-men sorties, including radio, radiotelegraphy, navigation, and gunnery. After completing his training in Trinidad, George earned his wings along with a promotion to petty officer. All the while, he never strayed too far from the piano, seeking out every possible opportunity to play for his mates in the naval canteen.
With Petty Officer Martin’s stay in Trinidad having come to a close in the spring of 1945, his unit was transported back to New York City by an American warship. George fondly recalled the early evening of May 5, 1945, as the warship passed Cape Hatteras off the coast of North Carolina. “I was on lookout duty, and there was an incredible sunset,” he remembered. “Just one lump of cloud over the sun and nothing else in the sky. As the sun was descending below the horizon, there was a huge shaft of light coming out from either side of the cloud, describing an enormous bright V in the sky.” By an “uncanny coincidence,” he had just learned over the radio that the Germans had surrendered, and “V for victory had been declared in Europe.” As the war with Japan was still raging in the Pacific Theater, George and his mates continued their training unabated, returning to England on an aircraft carrier from New York.21
A fortnight stay in Greenwich proved to have a lasting influence on George’s future, with both positive and negative implications. On the one hand, young George relished the company of the older commissioned officers with whom he enjoyed formal dinners in the station’s exquisite Painted Hall, nicknamed “the Sistine Chapel of the UK” for Sir James Thornhill’s elaborate murals. In addition to being schooled in the finer aspects of tableside etiquette, George began to self-consciously refine his unsharpened North London accent with the posh tones of the gentlemen-officers whom he chose to emulate. Years later, George would confess to having long been concerned about the all-too-overt “cor blimey” aspects of his lower-class comportment. He would recall having first heard his recorded voice at age fifteen and recoiling at its unpolished sound. But those evenings among the officers in the Painted Hall would inspire him to pursue a decidedly different path. Tall, lean, and fair-haired, George began to take on the full appurtenances of a civilized and cultured Englishman. In the class-conscious United Kingdom, it is difficult to imagine a more important guise. But no sooner had he completed his stay in Greenwich than he suffered an immediate, unexpected setback. “All my mates, with whom I had gone through all that training, were made Sub Lieutenants. But I was still too young for that exalted rank, so was made a Midshipman.” As if to add insult to injury, George was forced to return a portion of his salary to the Royal Navy when his pay was backdated to his days earning his wings in Trinidad as a petty officer, which held a higher pay rate than a midshipman. For George, it proved to be a debilitating and humbling experience. “It was typical of many points in my life,” he later surmised. “I always seemed to lose out on deals like that. And even when, three months later, I got my stripe, it still rankled.” But he had hardly been left empty-handed by his departing mates, whom he would later credit as having “taught [him] to be a gentleman.” It would prove to be one of the most pragmatic and socially expedient gifts that he would ever receive.22
In England, George’s training continued with a radar course in Burscough, a provincial North Country village outside of Liverpool. His unit learned the cutting-edge technology aboard a squadron of Barracudas. For the navy men, radar was a welcome relief. “In Trinidad, there was no radar,” George recalled, “and when you took off from an aircraft carrier you were on your own. Two and a half hours later you had to find the ship again, relying on your own navigational sense, and on the winds. You found your own winds, worked out what they were doing to the aircraft, and then navigated by dead reckoning.” But before he could settle into life in the North Country, George was called back to London. As it happens, his piano prowess had attracted the attention of an entertainments officer during a sojourn back in the West Indies. To George’s great delight, he was given a spot on a BBC program called Navy Mixture, a variety show hosted by future character actor and comedian Jack Watson, along with the BBC’s Dance Orchestra conducted by popular bandleader Stanley Black. By then, George had gained his missing stripe and life had righted itself with his promotion. For the occasion of the BBC program, George selected an original composition—a three-minute ditty titled “Prelude.” On July 26, 1945, he arrived at the Criterion Theatre on Piccadilly Circus, where Watson jauntily welcomed the nineteen-year-old composer and pianist to the airwaves: “Stepping off the Liberty boat this week is a bloke who’s making his first broadcast, and who, incidentally, has just received his commission—and so it’s a double celebration. He’s a pianist, and after a great deal of persuasion—during which he held up our producer at the point of a gun—he’s going to play a composition of his own, which he calls ‘Prelude.’ His name is Sub Lieutenant George Martin.” And with Watson’s bravura introduction dissipating into the sound of applause, Martin launched into his tune with great abandon, playing before a live audience of 3.7 million—and still more, four days later, when the episode was rebroadcast by the BBC General Overseas Service.23
Lieutenant Jon Pertwee, who also performed on Navy Mixture, was so impressed by Sublieutenant Martin’s abilities that after the show, he invited him to join the Department of Naval Entertainments. While flattered, George was taken aback. He was days away from completing his training and seeing his squadron into action—a journey that had begun way back in Gosport, been delayed by the German measles, and now seemed finally to be nearing its end. Pertwee proposed that Martin join him on the SS Agamemnon, an amenity ship that was setting sail from Vancouver to the Pacific, where it would entertain the troops with “concert parties” consisting of live music and all the beer that they could drink: the Agamemnon was fitted out with a brewery capable of producing three thousand gallons of beer a day. While it was appealing, George declined the offer, preferring to stay with his mates in the Fleet Air Arm and to see out the war together. “I often wonder what would have happened if I’d accepted,” he wrote years later, “because in retrospect it obviously had much more to do with my future career than flying bits of metal and wire in the sky.”24
In August 1945, with their three-month radar course complete, George’s unit was finally formed into an operational squadron. On August 9, they were preparing to travel east at Ronaldsway on the Isle of Man when they learned the news that the Americans had dropped the second atomic bomb over Nagasaki, bringing about the Japanese surrender and effectively ending World War II. For George, an additional eighteen months of service awaited him. After a “drunken farewell party” with his unit, his squadron was disbanded, and he returned to Bromley on leave. His tour of duty continued with an extended posting as a resettlement officer at the Royal Naval Air Station Donibristle in Fife, just north of Edinburgh. The cornerstone of his duties involved seeing his fellow troops “demobbed” or demobilized out of the service and back into civilian life. Hence, as more and more navy men left the service, George’s job became progressively easier.25
During this time, he occasionally indulged his love of flying as an observer for several peacetime missions while also becoming heavily involved with a local choral society at the naval station. In addition to singing in the chorus, George composed various pieces for the group to perform. By this time, his skills as a composer had grown substantially thanks to his lengthy correspondence throughout the war years with Sidney Harrison, who served on the Committee for the Promotion of New Music, a London-based nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting young composers with their craft. Over the years, Harrison had established himself as a well-known pianist and BBC commentator. George came into Sidney’s orbit after meeting Eric Harrison (unrelated), who held a piano recital in Portsmouth that George had attended during his Gosport days. After hearing George playing the piano after the recital, Eric suggested that the navy man share his work with Sidney. With a new Debussy-like piece called “Fantasy” in hand, George sent his latest composition to Sidney, who provided painstaking feedback. To George’s great delight, Sidney “sent me back a criticism which extended to three foolscap pages. How remarkable to take all the trouble! He told me everything that was wrong with it, but also how to improve it. Above all, he urged me to go on writing.” In addition to his inspiration and encouragement, Sidney counseled the novice composer to learn how to work with and compose for a range of instruments beyond the piano, thereby improving his versatility.26
During this period, George also came into the orbit of Jean Chisholm, a member of the choir, as well as the Wrens, the Women’s Royal Navy Service branch. Chisholm served as the leading soprano at King’s College Chapel in Aberdeen. Martin soon learned that he had a great deal in common with the twenty-five-year-old Jean—especially in terms of their mutual interest in music—and he became smitten with her beauty, not to mention her “very fine, Isobel Bailey type of voice.” Born in February 1921, she was nearly five years older than the Fleet Air Arm officer. A brunette with piercing blue eyes, she was known as “Sheena” (Gaelic for “Jean”) to everyone but her father, who used to sing to her, “I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.” At one point not long after they met, George gave her a Jack Russell terrier that the happy couple called Tumpy, a name that—even years later—never strayed very far from George’s senses.27
With Sheena, George was invariably attracted to the central place that music held in her life. Over the years, music had been the one constant across George’s existence. But with his new love, he also realized the limitations that making sound could impose on those who lack the temperament for public exhibition. A classically trained musician in her own right, Sheena could be painfully shy and was never truly comfortable as a performer. She had attended the University of Aberdeen as a choral and organ scholar, and when she met George, they naturally bonded over music. While she had her own limitations, she quickly learned the source of her new boyfriend’s. Although he could play virtually anything by ear, she recognized early on that he was acutely insecure about not being able to read music with the fluency of conventionally trained musicians. People in their circle understandably thought he was a very accomplished pianist, and with this in mind, he was occasionally invited to sit in with other players, a situation that left him feeling bemused by his inability to keep pace with anyone who held a more pronounced musical education.28
As George demobbed more servicemen from his unit, he increasingly enjoyed greater free time, which allowed him to write for and perform with the choir at his leisure. Sheena was equally smitten with George, whom she recognized as a gifted pianist. Yet she later confessed to being surprised to discover, as they played together in the choir, that his ability to sight-read music was still progressing very slowly. He could play the piano beautifully by ear, but when it came to accompanying the choir, he was at a decided disadvantage given his lack of formal music education. For Sheena, it seemed rather odd that a man with such talent and the crystal-clear accent of fine breeding was bereft of the fundamental musical knowledge that he needed to progress at his instrument.29
After serving as a resettlement officer for many months and later as a transport officer, George was finally posted as a release officer, a harbinger of his own impending demobilization. And so it came to pass that in January 1947, the newly minted twenty-one-year-old was tasked with the happy duty of releasing himself from the Royal Navy, thus ending his service on behalf of His Majesty’s Forces. For all intents and purposes, George had experienced a “good war,” avoiding injury and seeing no action. But he was suddenly at a loss about how to contemplate his future: “But of what I was going to do with myself I had no idea. It was a case of ‘physician heal thyself.’ I had no education to speak of. I wasn’t trained for anything. It was too late to become an aircraft designer. So there seemed only one possibility, and in what was really desperation I turned to music.”30
On tenterhooks about his future, he penned a letter to Sidney Harrison, his fairy godfather. Over the years, Harrison had marveled at the young composer’s budding talent, and his letters had become increasingly insistent that Martin try his hand at a professional career in music. In 1947 Harrison was a professor of piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Founded in 1880, Guildhall was an independent arts conservatory located in London at the Barbican Estate. Having finally met Harrison in the flesh, Martin was impressed with the older man’s confidence about his prospects for a life in music, possibly even as a teacher. “You can go and study for three years at a music college. I’ll tell you what you do,” he exclaimed to Martin. “You come along to the Guildhall, and play your compositions to the principal, and if he likes them as much as I do, you’re in.”31
Despite being riddled with self-doubt, Martin accepted an interview, arranged by Harrison, with Edric Cundell, the principal at Guildhall, in February 1947, less than a month after his demobilization. In short order, George was accepted into the school’s “Three Years’ Course for Teachers.” Armed with a £160 annual grant from the British government for his service during the war, George could hardly believe his good fortune. Only a few days earlier, he had been bewildered by the bleak possibilities of an uncertain future. But now, with the likes of Sidney Harrison and Edric Cundell in his corner—not to mention his fledgling romance with Sheena—things were indeed looking up for young George. Looking back, he realized that he had grown up rather quickly from the young man who left Bromley not so long ago. “When I came back from the service,” he later wrote. “I thought I was a grown man. The Navy had been a shock to the system, because I had never been away from home in my life before. You grow up very quickly in that environment.” In September 1947, he was set to begin his studies in composition, conducting, and orchestration. As George returned to Bromley that February, having bested his interview with the principal, it must have seemed as if his whole life were spread out before him.32