Martin Shaw - The Biography. Stafford Hildred
for the first 11 years of his life after first coming into the world on 21 January 1945. It was a grim time, with the last battles of World War II still being fought out. Birmingham was a city of shortages and damaged buildings; young Martin arrived in a world desperately weary of conflict, but fortunately for him he came into a warm and loving family. His father Frank was a sales engineer in the heating business and his mother Jo was a champion ballroom dancer who was vivacious and beautiful, and always looked very young for her age. More than once in the years to come, much to her delight, she was mistaken for Martin’s sister.
He got the acting bug very early. ‘My parents were both artistically inclined and they were very keen on amateur dramatics. When I was 3 they took part in a revue and I made my first stage appearance in it. I wore a straw boater and spectacles with a pipe in my mouth and held a carrier bag. I was told to walk across the stage, look at the audience, wait until they laughed and then drop the pipe out of my mouth into the carrier bag. I didn’t understand anything about it, of course, but it brought the house down. I enjoyed the experience so much I wouldn’t leave the stage. I loved the applause but I hadn’t learned anything about entrances and exits and finally I had to be lifted bodily over the footlights by my father.’ A little later the whole family got involved in a street party and Frank played Al Jolson, Martin’s grandmother Agnes was Al’s Mammy and Martin himself took off Arthur English’s popular spiv act, offering nylons for sale to all the girls. All three of them won prizes.
Money was frequently short in those post-war years but Martin’s parents somehow always managed to provide a holiday for the family. When Martin was 4½ for instance, they spent a blissful week in a caravan at Golden Sands at Rhyl.
The famous Spitfire factory was just down the road in Castle Bromwich and even as a very young boy Martin was always totally fascinated by aircraft. It was a passion he must have inherited from his father that became one of the many strong bonds between the two of them. Father and son spent hours locked together by their love of aeroplanes. ‘I’ve been a real aircraft nut as for long as I can remember,’ said Martin. ‘Anything to do with aircraft that I could read, or buy, or make… I would. My dad loved aeroplanes as well so I’m sure it came from him. We used to make Airfix models and go to airshows together.’ But Frank helped encourage his son’s interest in all sorts of subjects, as Martin once said: ‘… From astrology to zoology. And it is his knowledge and interest and endlessly enquiring mind that has helped me throughout my life.’
There was never too much money about in those heavily rationed and restricted post-war days and Martin’s parents had to work hard to provide for the family. But they shared a belief that entertainment and education were important aspects of life and they were both determined to stimulate and inspire their young son. Martin’s younger brother Jeremy, who was forever known as Jem, came along when Martin was 7.
Girls entered Shaw’s life in a big way somewhat later on but, he recalled, not too seriously: ‘My first love was a girl at primary school. Her name was Marie. She was very tall for a 10-year-old, with very blonde hair and very blue eyes. I was totally smitten. There were smiles and blushes but it never went any further.’
On another occasion he spotted a pretty girl who was playing on the top of an old baker’s van. Young Martin climbed up to join her to try to chat her up and the girl’s twin brother arrived and threatened him: ‘If you don’t come down from there I’ll knock you off!’ With the sort of fearless disregard for his own safety that has landed him in trouble more than once in his life, Martin refused to back down. ‘I said, “You and whose army?” And he climbed up and knocked me off! Just like that. It’s funny how you meet your friends, because he became one of my best mates and I used to see him every time I went home.’
‘We lived in Erdington until I was 11,’ Martin said. ‘My parents and myself – and later my brother – shared a World War I council house with my maternal grandparents. My grandmother was like a second mother to me. She had an enormous influence on me. She was a wonderfully imposing figure. She didn’t have bosoms, instead she had a kind of bolster like a sort of mobile hanging shelf. It was an Edwardian shape that you don’t really seem to see these days. The house had a range with an open fire and we still had gas mantles. My grandfather’s bedroom was lit by a gas mantle, which he kept going all night. God knows what that did to his breathing! My mother’s passion was ballroom dancing and she used to win competitions in Warwickshire and Birmingham. She absolutely adored it and she could do all the flowing head turns and the incredibly intricate steps.’
There was a real warmth and openness about family life and Martin recalls there were always challenging arguments going on about the issues of the day and even a young voice was able to find an audience. ‘Of course I took my parents and grandparents completely for granted,’ said Martin. ‘Who doesn’t? But later I knew how fortunate I had been with my upbringing. Times probably were pretty hard for them when I was little but I must have been very well protected from that. Laughter and happy voices are my main memories of growing up and I know now that makes me a very lucky guy.’
A happy upbringing does not necessarily mean a dull one. Martin recalls handling guns from being a very small boy. His grandfather was a gunsmith in Birmingham. ‘My grandfather used to work in a shed at the bottom of the garden,’ he said. ‘He would never allow anyone in while he was working but I used to peep through a hole and watch. It was like an Aladdin’s cave in there to me. There was my grandfather tapping away with a little copper hammer at the stock of a sporting gun, hammering in bits of silver chasing. It was a rare occasion indeed for me to be allowed to hold one of these works of art, because that is what they were.’
Then, when Martin was leaving primary school, his parents managed to buy a house in Streetly, Sutton Coldfield, which was a huge step. It was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream for Martin’s father Frank. He had always wanted a place of his own, preferably further out of the busy city and within reach of some countryside. ‘Nowadays people’s impossible dream seems to be to win the Lottery,’ says Martin. ‘Ours was to simply buy a house and a car. It seemed out of reach for a long time so to have achieved both aims felt amazing.’
When Martin was growing up as a teenager, Sutton Coldfield was on the edge of farmland. But although he had put a little distance between himself and Birmingham he retained a strong Brummie accent and a great affection for his birthplace. For many years afterwards his parents remained living in the same small semi-detached house which meant so much to them. It was a real family home. ‘It might not have been very big at all, but it felt like a mansion,’ he recalls fondly.
In his early teens, Martin joined the local Sea Scouts. He was a keen member for a while, until playing make-believe sailors landed him in trouble, thanks to his acute sense of humour. Martin’s natural sense of fun would bubble over into giggles when they were required to ‘pipe’ people aboard ship, which was just the top half of an old boat planted on the grass in a local park. He was thrown out for not playing the game!
At secondary school he struggled to make any sort of mark for quite a while. He loved playing football and quickly made friends, but in the classroom he spent most of his days dreaming about aircraft or waiting impatiently for the lesson to be over. By his own account he was inclined to be untidy, absent-minded, clumsy, fragile, over-sensitive and a popular target for bullying.
‘I was a bit of a whimperer, I suppose,’ says Martin, with his own brand of brutal honesty. ‘But I do remember a few useful lessons from my childhood. Dad used to say, “Bullies are always scared. If you stand up to them, they’ll back down.” But for a long time I was always too scared to put that theory to the test. There was one particular bully at our school and he was being such a nightmare that it got to the point where I thought, “I’ve got nothing to lose if I end up having his fist halfway down my throat.” It couldn’t be any worse than I was already going through. He kept on and on, and one of the techniques to make the weakly kids miserable was to say, “I’m going to get you tonight outside school.” You had the whole day to suffer. So one day, as he was pushing me around, he said, “I’m going to be waiting outside school and I’ll get you.” I thought, “This is insane. I’m going to get hit anyway so let him just do it and get it over with.” So I planted my feet apart and put my fists up and said, “Don’t