Alan is shown above left filming with Tony Hawks’ Probably Peru, and centre with Martyn & FANY veteran Juanita Carberry, and also with his camera.
Martyn is also shown with Juanita, and above right with former French SOE officer Bob Maloubier DSO at the Free French Club in Paris.
HOW IT STARTED
In 2001 Martyn filmed the WW2 memories of a small group of women veterans - members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a unique corps in that it’s the only surviving all-women British military unit, and which has recently celebrated its Centenary. This was a personal, mainly self-funded, project which he set up with Lynda Rose MBE, the FANY’s then commanding officer.
Martyn was soon hooked on the veterans' stories and, having inevitably become fascinated by the FANYs’ covert activities during the Second World War, tracked down the then eight surviving female British agents who'd secretly entered German occupied France to work with the resistance.
Knowing of the imminent release of the film adaption of Sebastian Faulks’ Charlotte Gray novel he instigated the 2002 Channel 4 documentary Behind Enemy Lines: The Real Charlotte Grays of which he was Associate Producer. He'd taken the idea to the award-winning production company Darlow Smithson, and when first screened in 2002 just before the royal premiere of the movie the programme was watched by more than 2m UK viewers - twice the audience expected by Channel 4. This documentary was later made available as an 'extra' on the DVD release of the feature film.
To reflect a cross-section of the work of the thousands more wartime FANYs Martyn used audio excerpts from additional interviews to produce a short series for BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, items from which can still be heard via the programme's 'History Timeline' web pages. He has also written and supplied his own photographs for features about the FANY and 'The Real Charlotte Grays' in Woman's World, the Times Educational Supplement, French News, and France magazine; plus the Warner Brothers, Film 4, Channel 4, and www.64-baker-street.org web sites.
2007 AND BEYOND
During 2007 Martyn was able to not only continue the oral history filming but to extend its scope to also include the stories of some of the men who worked with these 'women at war'. The filming of such a wealth of interviews has provided a brand new strand of 'secret war' stories which also deserve telling in their own right. These either involved clandestine roles, or work that may just as well have been secret because it remained so little known after WW2 - hence the project becoming known as Our secret war.
This year's end will see the completion of a series of 'Women at war' mini-documentaries commissioned by the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset for the interactive content of its 'Women at war' exhibit. The museum had heard about Martyn's efforts and created this new display content with the help of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Short excerpts from the filmed oral history recordings form the core of this permanent and expanding display. The complete archive of interview footage is also available for television use and excerpts will eventually feature in full-length documentaries.
Martyn set up Wide-eyed.tv Ltd as the conduit for all this work and, working with lighting cameraman Alan Benns, he will continue with more filming and new documentaries during this year and 2009. The FANY's one hundred year history encapsulated many important facets of the concept of 'Women at war' and it's for this reason that he was also committed to capturing and documenting the Corps' unique, varied, yet hardly known roles since 1907.
At the outset Martyn had arranged with the Imperial War Museum that when these productions are finally complete he will donate all his footage and interview transcripts to the IWM archive. This material will also be made available as downloadable resources for history teachers and their school classes.
OTHER PROJECTS
Martyn Cox has also been working on two other very contrasting projects. For one he is also collaborating with artist/writer Heather Hacking on a humorous audiobook for Francophiles. More on this later!
He has also been working with one of BBC TV's 'Grumpy Old Men', writer/comedian Tony Hawks. Six years ago Tony set up a children's care centre in poverty-stricken Moldova, and as he's also an accomplished songwriter and musician has specially recorded a fund-raising music CD. [For more info on this click HERE.]
For information on Martyn's earlier activities please click HERE.
For information about Alan Benns click HERE.
To return to the ‘Welcome’ page click HERE.
