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Keep on running
It’s hardly the ideal training regime for long-distance runners, but booze and fags have not held Buster Martin back. At 101 he’s limbering up for the London Marathon. Julian Champkin reports. Photograph by Mark Read
All sorts of people run the London Marathon. There are proper, serious runners, there are runners dressed in rhino suits and as deep-sea divers. And there is even one who is made up to look like a 101-year-old man.
Well, actually, no. That IS a 101-year-old man running the London Marathon. Buster Martin will be out there at the start line on April 13 with the best of them; and if all goes to plan he will be there at the finish line 26 miles and, at a guess, some five hours later. “I don’t run as fast as I used to but it’s a bit faster than a jog,” he says. “I don’t promise to finish, because I never make promises I cannot keep, so when I have actually finished is when I will promise.”
Buster is a phenomenon. You may remember him from The Zimmers, a rock group of 80-year-olds and above who recorded their version of My Generation for a TV programme last year. Buster was their oldest singer. He is also Britain’s oldest working man. For three days a week a firm of plumbers in Pimlico employs him to clean and valet its vans – and he still belongs to a boxing club.
Buster is obviously fit. He attributes this to the past 96 years of his lifestyle. “You stay fit by working, and I have been working since the age of five.”
He was born in France, but his mother abandoned him in a Cornish orphanage when he was three months old. “They got five years’ work out of me at the orphanage, then they slung me out when I was 10 because I was eating too much. They paid my train fare to London. I got there at 10.30am and by 12 I had a job setting up stalls in Billingsgate market.” He joined the Army at 14 – nipping out of the barracks before dawn each morning, he says, to earn extra money on the market. He was a PE trainer, and ended up as Regimental Sergeant Major. “You have to be a bastard to be an RSM. I always say I was born one.”
He married in 1920 – he was 14 at the time. His wife, Iriana, was 12. They married in France, where it was legal.
“I don’t say how I got to France. That might not have been quite so legal.” They had, believe it or not, 17 children: “Twins, triplets, singletons – all sorts. Our first-born is 86 now.” Iriana died in 1955. “I still talk to her each morning, and ask ‘How is my guardian angel?’”
He made headlines again last year when three muggers attacked him. If you talk to Buster for long, you won’t be surprised to hear that it happened when he was leaving the Fox and Grapes pub. You also won’t be surprised to hear that they ran off after he fought them back. “A hard kick where it hurts,” he says.
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