The Man Who Built an Aeroplane

Geoff Martlew was living on Bolton Road in Ashton-in-Makerfield when Frederick’s ice cream factory exploded and his windows were blown in. The banal topic of Geoff’s windows was a fleeting sub-discussion on a 2009 Wigan World thread: “aw, what a shame”, a user named Tonkers posted, punctuated by a gleeful face; “who was Geoff?”, to which Tonkers responded only with a cartoon of a pilot. The breadcrumbs were cast asunder – this 16-year-old clip art cipher was the start of my journey into becoming a fully fledged Geoff Martlew archivist.

A later reply explains how Geoff crashed a plane onto the M62 sometime in the 80s and traumatically amputated a driver in the process, commenting that: “he cut a lads leg off with one of the propellers. Everybody thought he would get prosecuted but he ended up getting a Queens Commendation.”

I was captivated by the idea that there could be someone so mythologised living just one street away. Each house I could see from my childhood bedroom window had its own adage: “She’s been learning to drive for 17 years”; “They’ve got a naked photo of the wife up in the living room”; “His sister was on Crimewatch”. But then I get to Geoff’s house and it’s a gaptooth, there’s just nothing there. You grow up in small towns like Ashton with the assumption that everybody knows everybody’s business, so how strange a thing it is to discover such silos of local lore.

It’s only a later post remembering how Geoff had been perpetually building a church organ, and another time how he’d nailed a dead fish under his boss’ desk that authenticates his existence for me. I realise the more threads there are to pull on someone’s life, the less people in their orbit are compelled to pull them. Instead they trade in salaciousness, in whose wife’s nipples are hanging over the mantel. Is it true, though – the plane crash, the medal of honour?

Born Arthur Geoffrey Martlew, most of what’s documented about him is around the time he worked at Parkside Colliery as an electrician and surface shift foreman in the 70s, although as far back as 1956 he makes an appearance in the papers as a 21-year-old television engineer in court for stealing from his employer. The stolen electrical equipment was to supplement low wages by enabling him to take on odd jobs and is evidence of a life of tinkering to come.

In listings throughout the 60s, he appears alongside his dad and aunty as the organists of various churches around Golborne and Lowton. In 1972, Geoff makes the papers again for his role as a “blackleg” – a strikebreaker, who worked for over a week during the miners’ strike until he was assured by the National Union of Miners that his part in the strike wouldn’t negatively impact his chances of adopting two-year-old Lorna who he’d raised since birth (he’d been warned by social services that strike action would jeopardise the adoption). Put in entirely unfair circumstances, Geoff’s 1,700 peers froze him out when he eventually joined them on strike: “The people who do this sort of blacklisting, just have no idea of the kind of situation I found myself in,” Geoff tells the papers. Later, a post elsewhere online: “I remember Lorna. Her dad had an aeroplane in their garden”.

I track down Geoff’s grandson, Cai, who confirms the plane in the garden: “My dad would have to start it every couple of weeks to stop the engine ceasing.” And, attempting to help me piece together a timeline of his life as an aviator: “No one wanted anything to do with him, calling him an ‘earthworm’ because of his mining background. So he read a book and went on a solo flight…”

Geoff’s former colleague, the previously mentioned Tonkers, recalls that if anything was wrong with the plane, they’d repair the parts in the electrical workshop at Parkside. “No wonder the coal board was losing money,” he says. Foreshadowing the events to come, and recalling Geoff’s magpie tendency for pilfering spare parts: “I could never understand how that plane passed its airworthiness tests, it was held together with mining machinery.” The Auster crashed after being blown sideways and both wheels fell off.

Around the time of the ice cream factory explosion in the mid 80s, Geoff retired from the colliery. He then worked as a flight instructor and aircraft engineer at Keenair out of Speke airport and whilst there, in June 1988, he made the headlines again:

HORROR ON THE M62.

In a different plane, during a flight from Speke to Barton airfield in Eccles, black oil shot onto the windscreen whilst the propellers malfunctioned leaving Geoff and co-pilot Martin Keen blinded to the flightpath and road ahead. They hit a coach and two cars. The second car, having only a fabric sunroof, provided no protection when the nose of the plane and its propeller collided with it. The leg of backseat passenger Santiago Abasalos, an Argentinian student on holiday in the UK, was immediately severed. The following autumn, Geoff was cleared of blame when it was confirmed that the sealing mechanism of the propellers containing the oil had failed (notably, he hadn’t built or tinkered with this plane), and he was recognised for his part in helping Santiago in the aftermath by ripping a strip of rubber from the car to make a tourniquet.

The commendation was true then, he received a bravery award from Greater Manchester Police for “risking his life to save a car crash passenger from bleeding to death.” Aware of this duality of causation and heroism, Geoff looks apathetically off camera during its presentation, remarking: “I don’t think I deserve any award, for it was I who caused the damage to the fellow in the first place.” The resulting photo is a thing of uncanniness, not only for the ennui exuding from Geoff as he holds his commendation, but in how it’s regrettably marred by the gormless grin of tactless bigot, then-Chief Constable, James Anderton who presented it.

The Martlew family left Wigan for Wales soon after, with Geoff working at Caernarfon Airport and then together with his son Simon, eventually running Prestige Light Aircraft services in Haverfordwest. “Grandad was described as the biggest rogue in the business,” Cai recalls. He tells me how Geoff had been in legal trouble after restoring a WWI fighter plane for Maurice Kirk, the flying vet (oh boy, is he worth a Google). Around 2008, anti-establishment Kirk had spread news that the plane had a machine gun which he could use to attack the government. And whilst the plane was indeed fitted with a machine gun, Geoff evaded any complicity charges when the gun was declared deactivated.

Geoff Martlew died in 2022. I ask his grandson about the circumstances around Lorna’s (successful) adoption and learn that Geoff and his wife Dorothy had fostered many children before her: “About the only more amazing person than my grandad is my grandma.”