When the legendary music producer George Martin, known as the ‘Fifth Beatle’, died in 2016, Paul McCartney offered his condolences to George’s ‘wife Judy and their kids Giles and Lucy[sic], and the grandkids.’
But Giles and Lucie aren’t George Martin’s only children. Before he married Judy Lockhart-Smith, Martin had another wife, Sheena Chisholm, and with her, two children: Alexis and Greg. (Sheena changed her last name to Martin after marrying George.) It isn’t only Paul McCartney who seems to have forgotten about them; Martin’s first family, though not a secret, were sidelined both behind closed doors and in the public eye.
Alexis, now in her early seventies, lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands in the house left to her by her dad. When she recounts tales of her past, her demeanour remains upbeat, ‘I have had some difficult times in life, but I’m not the type to dwell on anything bad. I’m so very grateful for my two amazing kids and grandchildren and friends.’
The first time she heard the Beatles mentioned at home was in 1961 when George Martin returned home from work and recounted that he’d been in the studio with some rather dishevelled guys from Liverpool. ‘Nice bunch of lads but they need proper haircuts’ he’d said – he even thought they were pretty good, though nothing special. At the time, individual artists were popular but successful bands were rare. George was prepared to do a demo with them, to see if they would prove to be worth his time; the demo was Please Please Me.
Around a year later, with Beatlemania beginning to proliferate around the world, George left Sheena for Lockhart-Smith, who changed her name to Judy Martin. In the weeks following George’s announcement that he was leaving her, Sheena would cry down the phone to him, begging him to return. It haunted Sheena for the rest of her life – she never remarried and was mired in a state of permanent grief, pining for the man she loved who was never coming back.
The Beatles were a banned topic of discussion, their music prohibited in the house. Sheena held The Fab Four partially responsible for her husband leaving her, a reminder of the life she had been torn from. There’s certainly truth in this – Alexis believes that her dad considered Sheena a bit too quirky for his new life in the limelight, but Judy was refined and patrician, a much more suited partner for the man behind the greatest band of all time.
Before he left, Sheena and George Martin had been happily married, at least as far as people around them recall. They met in Donibristle, Scotland, in 1947; their wedding day was George’s twenty-second birthday (Sheena was five years older). Both came from working-class backgrounds and held a keen interest in classical music; George had sold his oboe in order to pay for the wedding. Alexis was born in 1953, and when she was a year old the family moved from their small flat in Acton to a house in Hatfield, where their second child Greg was born a few years later.
After George left home in 1962, Alexis and Greg, or sometimes just Alexis, would travel to London to see their father. She was a young teenager navigating her father’s sudden departure from home; meanwhile, he was lauded in public for launching the careers of the world’s most revered pop group, and now had the great and good at his door, clamouring for his expertise in the producer’s booth.
