The real Jack Martin

To celebrate the forthcoming release of my  western Wild Bill Williams in digital format - published this November from Piccadilly Publishing  and available for pre-order NOW, I thought I'd post a little something about the man who gave me my pen name.

And so I present the real Jack Martin

Jack Martin. The man whom I looked up to as a kid, he seemed ten feet tall, and the man whose name I use for my western fiction.

Jack Martin was a coal miner in the South Wales coal fields - indeed it was the dust from this environment that eventually killed him - pneumoconiosis, black lung disease,was common among a certain age group in the village I was raised in. The  sound of chesty coughs would accompany the dawn chorus across the village and sticky mementoes of the coal mines would fill handkerchiefs held in the scarred hands of the old colliers.

The original

 Coal mining, given the then primitive conditions was a  arduous job, and in those days there was only basic safety equipment. Lives were often lost in explosions and one time the level where my grandfather was working flooded and over 20 men were drowned. That was all before I was born. I learned much of this from my grandmother and Gramp never really talked about it.

I was born in 1965 and Gramps had retired by the time I was five so I can't really remember him working, though he was never idle and his garden gave us the best tomatoes around . He was a tall man, always dressed immaculately, even when doing the garden he wore a shirt and tie, as people of his generation did. He grew incredible tasty vegtables  and my first ever paid job was collecting horse manure from the mountain for his garden. I think he gave me something like 10p a bucket which was good money in those far off days when the world was black and white and the sun always shone.

My Grandmother often referred to him as Father Christmas and although they would argue as people did in those days, about anything really - leaving the door open, not wiping your feet and trampling garden over the mat, their relationship was a strong and loving one. They both spoiled me rotten and I always got the latest comics and would go on the annual British Legion day trip to Porthcawl with them. Though often only me and my nan went. Gramps stayed home and probably went for a sneaky pint down the legion. He did so like a sneaky pint or two.

Hey, sorry about the ancient history but I feel almost old enough to remember black and white radio.

My nan and grandfather, possibly the 1930's

Gramps loved the westerns and was always reading a western novel. When there was a western on TV I would watch it with him and he would tell me stories of when he was in the wild west (completely invented, of course. The furthest West he ever went was Tonypandy) and in these stories he would be teamed up with John Wayne or Gary Cooper but never Clint Eastwood - he never really liked him and would refer to him as an unshaven hooligan. As a young boy I believed every word of these wild stories:

That he had been a one legged fighter pilot in the war, that
he had been there when Custer arm-wrestled Wyatt Earp for the price of a drink, that he had smoked the peace pipe with both Geronimo and Sitting Bull.

Jack Martin MK 2

Gramps was a natural storyteller.

Jack Martin - it was his  love of westerns that was passed onto me and apart from the fact that Eastwood is my all time fave, our tastes are very much the same - John Wayne is still the ultimate man's man, and the cowboy creed is a  design for life.

When I published my first western novel, Tarnished Star with Robert Hale LTD (now available as LawMaster)  I was proud that it contained the byline - by Jack Martin. When trying to decide on a pen name to keep my western fiction separate from my other stuff it was only natural to use Gramp's name.

He's been gone now for longer than I care to remember,  and I still miss him but I guess he's still here, inside me - his ideals, his ways, his humour and every one of my westerns that has seen print  is as much his work as mine. For without him I would never have developed my interest and love for the American West.

So saddle up and check out Jack Martin's western page HERE