Meet the Boss

Born in Portsmouth, Martin is the son of a Royal Marine Commando and a school teacher (Mum was the teacher!). With two older brothers and a younger sister the family was forever on the move, from the South of England to Singapore to Scotland and back to the South of England, where Martin finished his education and promptly ran away to join the circus!

Well, not exactly the circus but a safari park owned by a circus family! Here Martin met the love of his life: Asian Elephants. Working his way up from being a trainee keeper ("a security guard on a gate keeping animals in and letting cars out") he worked at the famous Royal Windsor Safari Park; Gansendorf Safari Park in Austria and finally John Aspinall’s Howletts and Port Lympne Zoo Parks in Kent, where he had the enviable position of Head Keeper for the Asian Elephant breeding group, a position that took him around the world, meeting elephant keepers, trainers, specialists, veterinarians and zoo directors until finally he landed in Thailand, a country that quite literally took his breath away (the first time he landed at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport the humidity was so great that his first breath literally got caught in his throat….. "it reminded me so much of growing up in Singapore I immediately knew I was "home") and a country that was destined to actually become "home", and even if it meant no longer working in close proximity to his beloved elephants, at least they weren’t too far away from his front door!

Incidental occupations that have kept Martin busy during the years before he found Thailand have been as: apple picker, Sussex pig farmer, antique faker for a famous Brighton con man, general manager for a Burmese furniture manufacturer, security guard escorting Queen Adelaide’s crown and treasures on a tour to Sydney, London building services, maintenance, packing and dispatch manager and European exhibition coordinator for Garrard the Crown Jewellers…. all of which probably gave him invaluable training and experience to become an entrepreneur in Thailand!

Another passion that has remained consistent throughout his life is his love of motorcycles: from pleading a loan of his brother’s 49cc Garelli moped to buying bashed and crashed BSA Bantams for a tenner (less than 700 baht!) and terrorizing ramblers in the local Sussex countryside ("course I’ve got a license Mrs., it’s a British Young Schoolboys Scrambling license!!") to over polishing but never actually getting "on the road" his first "real" bike, a 1962 250cc AJS (a period when he decided the "Rocker" image combined with the "Greaser" style suited him perfectly, meaning he never washed his Levis and everything else was studded leather!).

Martin has owned, raced, toured and scratched almost every style of machine on (and off) the road, culminating in the year 2000 when he purchased his schoolboy dream: an Electra Glide…. in Blue! This was long after Martin had become an expat in Thailand, but was the beginning of a still active love affair with Harley-Davidson motorcycles ("in England to own a Harley you’ve got to earn enough to have a house with a garage to keep all that chrome out of the bloody rain, sleet, hail and snow!") which he indulges in as often as he can either touring the length and breadth of Thailand on a fully dressed pearl white Ultra tourer or scratching around local town and country lanes on his custom built 60’s style cafe racer with his biking brothers in the hugely popular Nagas Motorcycle Club