Iris Margaret MARTIN (1920-2001)

Individual Events and Attributes

Marriage

Individual Note

Iris was an exceptionally strong character, who had totally opposite sides to her character. Seemingly from her father she inherited an absolute belief in the superiority of the English Upper Class and the Conservative Party, and a total acceptance of all related beliefs. At the same time she had a wild and adventurous element in her character, which manifested itself in her love of international travel. When she inherited some money from her aunt late in life, she took the opportunity to travel to places as remote as Antarctica, Indonesia, Mauritius, the Galapagos, Alaska and New Zealand; early in her marriage (in the early 1950's) she and Peter had motored from Nigeria to South Africa - this in an age where there would have been no made-up roads and no communications infrastructure. They also drove from Britain to Iraq, where Peter was working, with their two extremely young children. Iris was also an enthusiastic music lover and spent many years developing her piano playing, after her two children had left home.

When Peter and Iris were divorced in the early 1970's, she never accepted the divorce, mainly because she strongly believed that by divorce she had lost status on the basis that a divorced woman would have a lower status than a married woman, and secondly that Peter, by her own view of life, had come from a "better" background than she, and through the divorce had lost her connection to this background.

When she was a young woman, Iris worked as a secretary in the Bank of England, but was mainly interested in going to concerts and the theatre: she was clearly drawn to people from "arty" backgrounds, but finally found her man sitting quietly by himself at the Hampstead Cricket Club; she noticed straight away how bad his teeth were, but obviously did not let this fact stand in her way!