Jim Martin had always cultivated an air of mystery, partly because he was naturally shy and partly because it added to his authority as an expert on the future of the planet and those of us who currently dwell on it. I think he would have rather enjoyed the idea that his death had a whisper of the Agatha Christie about it, his body found floating in the sea off his private island in Bermuda.
When I was first invited to meet Jim he was already a legend amongst those who were bringing Information Technology to the world. At the end of the eighties I was writing a company history for an IT consultancy that bore his name. Everyone had different stories to tell about him, some indisputably true, many more apocryphal. He had exotic homes around the world; he made millions of pounds a year from the books he had written about technology and from the lectures he gave. People like Bill Gates had gone to him for insights at the beginnings of their careers.
‘Jim is thinking of writing an autobiography,’ the consultants told me, ‘will you meet him?’
Catching him on a flying visit between lectures, we met briefly and got on well. Socially awkward when it came to normal small talk, he became wildly enthused and animated when standing on stages or lecturing about all the subjects that caught his interest. I was very happy for him to talk constantly about the things that fascinated him. It was like receiving a crash degree course in technology at a time when I, like most of the world, still knew nothing of computers or the IT revolution that was about to change everything.
I went out to his house in Bermuda’s Tucker’s Town; it had two private beaches and a next door neighbour who had just run for the job of President of America. I stayed a week and Jim never stopped talking, never losing enthusiasm, never losing focus.
The book failed to find a publisher and we lost touch for a while, but I never forgot that week, or how much I had enjoyed the company of the tall, awkward, professorial Jim.
Some 20 years later he got back in touch to tell me he had just donated £100 million of his own money to Oxford University to found the Oxford Martin School of the 21st Century.
‘And I’ve bought an island in Bermuda,’ he told me. ‘You and your wife must come out to stay. There is so much to talk about.’
The invitation was irresistible. The island was magical and the result was a book called James Martin: The Change Agent, which was a mixture of biography and conversation, all set on the island.
We met several times after that at a variety of venues and he came to stay with us in England. He became a friend. I was shocked when reporters rang to tell me that his body had been found in the sea and to ask if I thought there might be foul play involved. I could also imagine how he would have turned the incident into another of the anecdotes that he polished and delivered so lovingly, both in lectures and in conversations. To be able to finish your life swimming around your own private island at the age of 80, when you started it as a working-class boy in war-torn England’s Ashby de la Zouch, is no mean feat. I’d choose that every time over the option of a safe and sterile hospital bed, which was the answer I gave to the reporters.
Jim always said, ‘We can build any sort of world we want’, which was just what he did.