In My Life

George Martin was the man who made The Beatles. Here's an interview with his daughter.

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.

Alexis never attended a studio session with The Beatles, but she did sit in on sessions with some of her father’s other artists. ‘I remember sitting in on one session with Jeff Beck. It was very funny, he was just the opposite of Dad – swearing and outrageous – while Dad was saying, ‘Come on, Jeff!’ At Abbey Road, Alexis mainly sat in during orchestral recordings, though she did once meet Peter Sellers and Charlie Drake, with whom George Martin produced comedy records in the years before Beatlemania.

Even in these glimpses into her father’s working life, that key separation remained. Alexis got to be there for other, lesser-known artists, but when it came to the band that gave George Martin his global status, she was once again excluded. It’s impossible for her to say if this was purposeful, circumstantial, or something in between, but it certainly doesn’t disprove her sense of being cast aside from her father’s main life.

Martin’s new wife Judy was never openly cruel towards Alexis and Greg, but she was cold, snobby, and determined to maintain a clear distinction between her family and George’s past life. ‘I really think that Judy was deeply insecure, to the point of being insanely jealous that my father had had a previous life, and wife and children,’ Alexis says. This would manifest in small ways: curt snipes, comparisons between Alexis and Lucie, and put-downs about members of Sheena’s family – Alexis included.

None of this is to say that Alexis sees Judy as a ‘wicked stepmother’ – it is, as she graciously presents, a more complex and nuanced predicament. Despite his betrayal, she never hated or resented her father, and this isn’t how she wants people to think she feels. ‘I never questioned whether my dad loved me – I know he did – but I think I was lower down in his love than others, as it were,’ she says. Nor did she demur in her efforts to forge a bond with her new family, even as her brother Greg pulled further away from doing so.

Two flashpoints stick in her mind. The first came in 1997, when her father organised the star-studded Music for Montserrat benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Both families were invited, but Lucie told Alexis there was no afterparty. Of course, there was – there always is – and when she found her way over to it, Alexis saw Judy. Annoyed and angry, her step-mother’s first remark was to ask how she’d managed to get in.

A few years on, in the mid-noughties, came the only Christmas Day that the two families spent in each other’s company. Usually, Alexis, who now had children of her own, would visit her father on Boxing Day, but one year, Alexis persuaded Lucie Martin to gather together a day earlier than usual. The day went relatively smoothly, until evening approached and George’s second family began preparing for their Christmas meal.

Suddenly, everyone disappeared upstairs. When they reappeared, they were dressed in formal dinner wear – tuxedos and ball gowns, an annual family tradition. Nobody had thought to tell Alexis, and Christmas dinner was spent sitting in sharp contrast to her father and his new life. It’s hard for Alexis to say if this was a purposeful attempt to embarrass them, to distinguish them from the rest of the family. In some ways, it doesn’t really matter: the effect was the same.

Through it all, Alexis contends, she attempted to smooth things over behind the scenes with her father’s second family. It was they, she said, who continually dismissed the reality that she and her brother had been treated more like ‘second cousins’ than immediate family. It was only after George Martin’s death in 2016 that Alexis decided to take a stand. When he died, Alexis was left out of arrangements for his memorial. Shortly after, she received a copy of his will and found that his inheritance was split unfairly between his children; Alexis’s portion was listed alongside her dad’s secretary, driver and niece, while Judy, and her children Lucie and Giles received significantly more.

Hurt, Alexis gave an interview to the Daily Mail and even appeared briefly on This Morning to talk through the injustice of the situation. Though she doesn’t outright regret these appearances, she is frustrated that the tabloid media has always focused on the money. She’s also clear that the division of funds in George’s will was not upsetting because she got less money, but for its physical symbolism of the emotional toll she had endured her whole life. She has never had the chance to rectify the way her story was stripped of its layers and sanitised into one of financial envy – until now.

It might be hard to understand Alexis’s apparent lack of bitterness and anger towards her father, but it is possible that these emotions might have been redirected towards Judy and her children, particularly Lucie. Alexis is still an outlier in biographies of George Martin, referred to in passing and as if the part of his life that’s worth remembering only began once he met Judy.

Alexis hopes that other people from disrupted families will relate to her experience, despite the unique role her dad holds in the history books. Judy died in October 2023 and Alexis no longer speaks to her half-siblings, but she wouldn’t rule out reconciling with them. ‘It’s sad that Lucie and Giles seem to have continued to pretend we don’t exist, but I hold no bitterness or anger towards them and truly never have. I only wish them well,’ she says. It’s very possible that a simple acknowledgement of her reality, of the separation between George Martin’s children and how that was upheld over decades, might help towards her healing.