Buster Martin
British marathon runner (1906-2011)
Pierre Jean "Buster" Martin (1 September 1906/1913 – 13 April 2011) claimed to be the United Kingdom's oldest employee, stating that he was born in 1906. Until his death, he worked for Pimlico Plumbers, a plumbing company in southeast London, as a van cleaner, and refused to take a day off on the day he celebrated what he claimed was his 100th birthday. He also received coverage in the media for reportedly fending off an attack from a group of youths in 2007; he was cited by the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell as "living proof of why people should not be written off once they pass retirement age". Martin stated that he would not retire from working.
Doubts have been raised about all of Martin's historical claims, including his age, which may have in truth been 97 at the time of his death, as well as his purported marriage and family.
Biography
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Martin claimed to have been born "up in the hills of the Basque Country" in France. He stated that his mother fell pregnant to a member of the affluent family she served, and he and his mother were smuggled to Britain to avoid the disgrace. His mother was put in a convent and he was placed in an orphanage near Bodmin in Cornwall, run by the Sisters of Mercy, when he was three months old. Martin says that he picked up his nickname "Buster" at age three for "whacking a priest on the nose".
He reputedly met his future wife, Iriana, a native of Tonbridge, Kent, when he was 13 and she was 12.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Buster Martin” as british marathon runner (1906-2011). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1017772. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1906, 1913, 2011 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Buster Martin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.