Martin Green, who died last week, had a party at London’s Brown’s Hotel to mark his 90th birthday. By happenstance, it was on the night of 7 October 2023, and Martin, who was a passionate Zionist and fighter for the Jewish people, asked people to think about Israel, when reports were just coming through and nobody knew the full scale of the horrific Hamas attacks.
But Martin – a mainstay of the Anglo-Israel Association, a founder of the recently launched UK Israel Future Projects, a sometime close associate of Israeli intelligence, and a networker supreme – was, typically, ahead of the curve in that respect.
Occasionally blunt and uncompromising, impatient and bursting with ideas and initiatives, he was the ultimate man behind the scenes, a mover and a shaker where frequently people, lured by his charm, did not know they needed to be moved or shaken.
Martin Green was born in Manchester in 1933, the eldest of three sons born to Sam and Miriam — known as Mirrie. On the outbreak of war, as his younger brother Alan recalled, the family moved to Cleveleys, near Blackpool, to escape the blitz.
Martin and his middle brother Peter were sent to a nearby independent boarding school, Rossall School, as day boys, but aged just seven, Martin ran into antisemitism and was severely beaten, to his mother’s fury. Mirrie Green confronted the headmaster — but the damage had been done and soon Martin and Peter were taken out of Rossall and sent to the Jewish boarding school in Brighton, Whittinghame College.
Sam Green became wealthy, with both retail and wholesale textile businesses in Manchester, and so directed Martin, after school, to read for a degree in textile chemistry at Manchester University. Family members say he was “completely unsuited” to this discipline — but it didn’t matter because he joined the army for National Service after the war and became, proudly, one of the few Jewish officers in his call-up.
Around 1959 or 1960, Martin was working both in the family business and also for Tesco, when he went on holiday to America and met relations on his maternal grandparents’ side of the family. While there, his brother said, “he observed the success of what were then called “self-service stores”, which had begun in England, but not in the North. He saw an excellent business opportunity”.
Martin persuaded his father — and brother Peter — that this idea would work in the North of England. Together with a local businessman, Sonny Seaberg, Sam Green financed the first Adsega mini-supermarket in Gorton, Manchester.
In just five years, with the financial savvy of the Green brothers’ uncle, Leslie Barclay, and the support of a merchant bank, Adsega grew from one shop to 50, all over the north-west. The brothers sold out to Tesco in 1965, and Peter always paid tribute to Martin’s “initiative, judgment and drive”, on which the success of Adsega was based.
Martin had a series of business ventures throughout the years, some successful, some not. He was a knowledgeable art collector and after his move to London, at one point ran a gallery specialising in Native American art. He became interested in Ireland and was part owner of a broadsheet newspaper, the now-closed Sunday Tribune. He was a voracious reader and in his home (he also had a house in France) had hundreds of books and paintings, many of them related to Jewish themes.
He became close to the Israeli diplomat Uri Lubrani, a former ambassador to Iran, and is understood to have performed unspecified services for Israeli intelligence. He was widely respected for his extraordinary networking, which included an array of what he termed “posh Christians”, and his discretion over the work he undertook.
Some of that related to purely financial support, and some to his ability to introduce the right person to another right person — at the right time.
On one occasion in 1998, he encountered the novelist John Le Carré on a cruise. Le Carré complained that, after the publication of his novel, The Little Drummer Girl, he was mistakenly viewed as antisemitic. There was a quick solution to that, Martin Green said: come and be the keynote speaker at an Anglo-Israel Association dinner, and convince the audience otherwise.
To some astonishment, Le Carré accepted the invitation and allowed his address, an essay entitled “Nervous Times”, to be turned into a book published by the AIA and sold to benefit the charity. The Israeli novelist David Grossman — usually a big draw on his own account — was the subsidiary speaker at this event.
At least once — if not twice — Martin Green is understood to have refused a peerage. He told one associate that his shrink had advised him against accepting such an honour, on the grounds that it would drive him mad.
Martin Green at his 90th birthday party pic David Jacobs
He was described by another close colleague as “a doer, creative, innovative… full of schemes, some brilliant, some crazy, some illegal. But above all he was not afraid, of anyone or anything — because he was wealthy enough not to care”. He was “a super-Zionist who wanted nothing more for the Jewish community and Israel than to be strong and powerful — in the right way”.
Sir William Shawcross, the journalist and broadcaster, said: “My wife Olga (Polizzi) and I got to know Martin when we served with him on the Anglo-Israel Association in its great days under Ruth Saunders, and then on the successor organisation, UK Israel Future Projects.
“Martin was passionate about finding ways for Britain and Israel to co-operate. He spoke in a very considered manner with both wit and purpose. His suggestions were always valuable and often brilliant”.
Ruth Saunders added: “When Martin had something to say that was ‘out of the box’, he would always start by saying ‘I’m from Manchester and where I come from, you call a spade a shovel’, and then he would outline the most creative, brilliant and sometimes outrageous ideas.”
The Anglo-Israel Association was one of Martin’s few public ventures related to the Jewish community. He preferred to work behind the scenes, but a massive internal row within the AIA in recent years caused him to pull out and help to found the UK Israel Futures Project. Many of his close non-Jewish friends in AIA, including Lord Bew, Sir William Shawcross, and the Marquess of Reading, followed him to the new organisation, which was launched in May 2023.
He was described as “an unapologetic defender of Israel and the Jewish people”. Certainly in the last decades of his life he took no prisoners in his determination to confront enemies of Israel. Blunt-speaking, but taciturn when he needed to be, he famously asked people’s opinion about those in the public eye — and those in the Jewish community. Was Person X “a goodie or a baddie?” he’d ask. If they were potential “goodies”, Martin Green would seek a meeting, invite them to lunch, bombard them with ideas and emails (often in the middle of the night, when inspiration struck). Baddies, however, were beyond rescue.
With his first wife, Gill, Martin had four children, Deborah, David, Daniel and Sam, and six grandchildren, by whom he is survived, together with his second wife, Jacky. He and his wife were members of Chelsea Synagogue.
