Phillip grew up in England, attended Sherborne School, spent three years as an officer in the British Army, serving in Germany, and finished his education at Lincoln College, Oxford. During those years “Phil” became an excellent Rugby player, representing his county, Cornwall, and capped by the Greyhounds, the Oxford University second fifteen – for those interested he played fullback. Further in that vein he also became an excellent skier, and did in fact live for some years in Switzerland.
Post university Phillip Martyn began to travel, Europe first and then the USA, eventually living in New York City. It was there and then, in the early to mid-1960s, that he (and I) learned backgammon, and swiftly got hooked. Phil struck up a camaraderie with Ted Bassett a smooth and amiable golf and backgammon expert, whose own year divided into segments — Palm Beach, St Moritz, Monte Carlo, Biarritz and the airports between. Phil saw nothing wrong with that and so for the next three decades his lifestyle was set.
In parallel with this, he became more and more consumed by backgammon. And not only him. It was in the early to mid-1960s that the game spread across the globe, with the two centers being New York and London.
The center of backgammon in London was the Clermont Club, run by that charismatic figure the late John Aspinall. Others in that mix were Charles Benson, Greville Howard, Sir James Goldsmith, Dan Meinertzhagen and the ill-fated Lord Lucan. Every afternoon in Berkeley Square was a game, and the game was high stakes for its time, 100 pounds per point, and scores seesawed up and down often until late into the wee small hours. Phillip was for sure the best player, and for more than just his initials he was known as the Prime Minister! It was a great era for him, which only ended when the Club was sold to Playboy and Victor Lownes took over.
From then on, the ambience changed drastically from ‘English Country House’ to an international jet set clientele. While Phillip Martyn also felt comfortable in that world, life was not the same and he decamped to Lausanne, and married Nina Rindt (widow of the Formula 1 great Joachim Rindt).
By then backgammon had really spread with tournaments all over the world, and in 1974 Phil and I were retained by the Mark McCormick group to front and run three tournaments in South Africa, then still in the grip of the apartheid government. Our efforts went down very well and the exercise was next repeated in the USA, although I was felled half way through by appendicitis and P.M. had to finish up alone.
In 1975 interest in backgammon had grown to the point that Phillip decided it was time to write a book. The Grand Prix star Jackie Stewart offered to pen the introduction, and Stanley Paul of London was eager to be the publisher. The result was Phillip Martyn on Backgammon, a book both instructional and informative while written with flair and wit. It has always stood out as one of the very best of that pre-bot era.
Slowly but inevitably, however, the media fascination with backgammon began to wane. Phillip Martyn had enjoyed the best of it, won many tournaments (and was runner-up in the 1974 World Championship), but as he said himself “You cannot stay too long at the party”.
Now divorced from Nina (and father of Tamara, a lovely young girl), he began to devote his time to sports, in which he had many friends. Among the closest were the Formula 1 champion Sir Jackie Stewart, and also the celebrated, long haired figure of Vitas Gerulaitis, a Grand Slam tennis great.
Of course there was betting on high level sports too and Phil got increasingly involved in that, with the predictable up/down ooh/ah results. However, from 2008 until just before his passing, a virtually foolproof opportunity fell into our laps and during that period, every Sunday from September to February was devoted to NFL which we watched in my study on three screens. I must add that the patience of Jane Spencer-Churchill (his close companion for more than thirty years) was quite staggering. Herself an able and successful business woman, she accepted the role of “football widow” with good grace, for which he and I were duly grateful.
Phil had always guarded his health perhaps better than anyone I know. No drinking, no cigarettes, and daily exercise were his mantra, so the rapidity of his final three/four weeks was a shock to us all. He stood up to it, but it was a bitter blow to his friends — I knew him for over fifty years.
Phillip Martyn was one of the leading lights during those long ago media and backgammon days and we shall never see that again. I was privileged to have lived the life — what Gordon Forbes called “A Handful of Summers” in his most famous of all tennis books — and it is in that setting Phillip Martyn will always be remembered, one of the luminaries in the greatest era of the game of backgammon.
— Lewis Deyong
