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Terry Martin (Author)
Terry Martin (12 November 1946 - 29 April 2010) is a British author best known for writing ‘Halfway to Heaven’, the most highly sought-after history in the field of railway literature. The internationally claimed author and correspondent Sir Mark Tully wrote: “The Darjeeling Railway is one of the world’s most remarkable journeys. UNESCO has recognised this pioneering mountain railway as a World Heritage site and Indian Railways have committed themselves to making it worthy of that status. I am delighted to recommend this new book by Terry Martin, which will deepen all his readers’ commitment to the DHR”. His subsequent definitive treatise on Darjeeling and its railway, ‘The Iron Sherpa’, was described by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Governor of Bengal and the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, as “An extraordinary piece of research, narration and presentation”. Martin has also contributed to numerous books and magazines with his experiences of extensive travels behind the Iron Curtain in vintage cars and motor cycles.

Biography Early years Born in Lambeth Hospital (London) to Reginald and Daisy Martin, he was raised in Pimlico and attended Churchill Gardens Primary School, the 11-plus taking him to Archbishop Tenisons Grammar School. Family finances had confined the annual holiday to hiring a caravan for a week in Weymouth until the mid-1950s, when his father bought an ex-Army tent, strapped it to the roof-rack of a pre-War Jowett Eight car, and set off across Europe. The innocence of European travel at the time was such that he was occasionally allowed to please himself for the day, recalling that it was when wandering the streets of San Feliu de Guixols in search of a can to kick, that he came across a railway station and found there was something indefinably romantic about the narrow gauge steam engine he saw and its rake of elderly carriages. Using his lunch money for a return ticket to Gerona, the little train took him away from the dubious pleasures of beach balls and ice cream to the charmed world of rural Spain, where he was smiled on by old ladies returning from market, teased with offers of cigarettes by gnarled old men, waved to by the occasional passing car, and indulged by the locomotive crew for him wanting nothing more than a ride on their train.

Trains for him became a means of escape from the mundane and a promise of adventure, and for him there was no greater pull than the unknown lands that lay behind what was then the most impenetrable barrier of them all, the Iron Curtain. He later wrote that:

It was the school atlas above all the other books that had held a grip on my imagination. You could keep Dickens, and I was barely able to raise concern over the boiling point of mercury, the integration of calculus or the reproductive activities of the amoeba. For me it was maps, and the names of the countries conjured up all sorts of images as I journeyed across the pages. I was rather fickle and unreasonable with my affections, but it was East Germany that played most on my mind, for that was shown as little more than a grey void of nothing. They called it the German Democratic Republic, but I was told it was not German, it was not democratic and it was not a republic.

Career Shortly after starting his first job with the Civil Service, he bought an ex-police 192cc Velocette LE motor cycle for £20.00 and rode it across Europe to the GDR in the blind belief he would find more charmed railways. Behind its brittle and hostile façade he found a land locked in a time warp governed by the stone-faced tyrant Walter Ulbricht, where he learned to tread lightly, not to ask questions, and avoid the prying eyes of the secret police. The Civil Service was not impressed, particularly as there were no diplomatic relations between the UK and the GDR at the time, and made it clear that such travels would severely affect his career. His passport said otherwise, and over successive years he travelled to the hidden corners of Eastern Europe and beyond in his beloved 1934 Morgan Super Sports three-wheeler. Constantly dodging and confusing the omnipresent Stasi and stumbling across railways of immense character, he found people who were united in adversity and saw beyond the dogma and disciplines of Berlin, these being appealing contradictions that would often occur as themes in his writing. In 1988 the Soviet Government gave permission for a week of celebration to inaugurate the founding of the Riga Motor Museum in Latvia, inviting clubs from Western Europe to participate. This could only be achieved by arriving and returning by a chartered car ferry from Helsinki, but Martin and eight friends were adamant about riding all the way. Motor cycle travel in the USSR was forbidden at the time, added to which permission was always denied for independent travel through Lithuania and Latvia. Undaunted, Martin unstapled the sections about the ferry from the volumes of paper work and at the same time had the organisers confirm their invitations with the London Embassy by telex, the fait accompli resulting in them being the first motor cyclists from the West travelling overland through these then-closed countries. Their subterfuge did not escape the eyes of Whitehall, and Martin was later interviewed and firmly rejected the offer of developing a new career.

However, his father had been a motorcycle despatch rider in India when serving with the Royal Signals at Peshawar on the North West Frontier during World War II, his regular runs including the infamous Khyber Pass. It was inevitable his son would be drawn to the sub-continent, and in 1995 in the company of eight friends, he rode an Indian-made 500cc Enfield motor cycle across the Himalayas and to the top of the Kardang la, the highest motorable road in the world.

Seizing the opportunity to take early retirement from the Civil Service the following year, he returned to India and travelled to Darjeeling where he found that “everything was nearly true”. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway that had taken him there not only scaled mountains that lay in an earthquake zone, but its trackbed was ravaged annually by monsoon rains and it served a kaleidoscope of cultures that were governed by an alarming array of religions and political beliefs. It was not until he dug deep into the archives of the British Library that its story began to unfold.

Bibliography

Halfway to Heaven (2000) ISBN 1-900622-03-3 The Iron Sherpa Vol 1 (2006) ISBN 1-900622-10-3 The Iron Sherpa Vol 2 (2010) ISBN-13: 978-1-900622-12-7 References

[www.theironsherpa.com]