The last time I had face time with Martin Irish was a few years back on the Rovos Rail as part of a small group over a long weekend. Him being a leading stockbroker, over the decades we’d chatted quite a lot about business and shares. But being together in a train carriage for a few days was the first opportunity to engage at a deeper level. It was a privilege. And even though my road took a different path since that trip, we stayed in touch. The last email I received from him on Monday night was typical – a cartoon making light of the changing times. Martin was incredibly smart, well read, erudite and insatiably curious. A highly civilised man. To hear this week that he was murdered in his Bryanston home, that he has become yet another violent crime statistic, wrenches the gut in a manner experienced too often by South Africans. Simon Lincoln Reader penned this beautiful tribute to his mentor, a former director of the JSE and long-time leader of the stockbroking community. Martin Irish will be deeply missed by those whose lives he touched. Myself included. – Alec Hogg
By Simon Lincoln Reader*
For one entire week in 2011, Martin Irish and I had dinner at the same restaurant in Hurlingham, at the same time each night, Monday to Sunday, and drank at least 3 bottles of wine between us upon each occasion. Just before we received the final and seventh bill, Irish went uncharacteristically quiet, before slamming his hand on the table. “Jesus!” he screamed, “drive me to a hospital immediately! I’m having a stroke!” The Congolese waitress, who doubled as the Sicilian proprietor’s girlfriend, ran over to the table and calmly re-assured him that it was just an electrical fault in the ceiling that was making the lights flicker.
Irish, who was murdered in Johannesburg this week, was something of stockbroking royalty. His career started at Davis Borkum Hare, and he ended up chairing Irish & Menell Rosenberg – where I am led to believe he spent less time in the office than he did in restaurants, perfecting the art of acquiring information long before the advent of the Bloomberg Terminal – a skill that accompanied him throughout his professional and social lives.
We met in 2009. He was the best kind of mentor as he cringed at the very thought, never seeing himself as anything close. He was instrumental in the early stages of my energy firm: watching him listen and listening to him speak were master classes in social intelligence, executed with possibly the most sophisticated sense of humour I have encountered. He would frequently split with laughter, especially when the subject involved a gold digger or jilted lover or a double life – things that Johannesburg’s northern suburbs will, happily, never be short on.
Irish was loyal to the largely immaculate company he kept. Strangers never quite knew where they stood with him – and this is exactly how he intended to keep them: suspended. You knew once you’d been approved: a procession of invitations followed, and once a year you’d have to hire a computer technician to clean out the colorful, and sometimes astonishing, content he’d email. One of the greatest professional mistakes I ever committed was to open one of his mails in the presence of colleagues.
If he didn’t like you, it was either awkward or unpleasant or both. In a restaurant in London, Irish unwittingly cut the queue waiting to be seated and addressed the host directly. “I say excuse me,” a voice boomed from behind, “you are bloody rude.” The voice belonged to a puce, heavy-set Englishman who looked remarkably similar to Giles Clarke, the former chairman of the English Cricket Board. After dinner the Englishman, reduced to guilt, approached the table and offered his hand to Irish who took it. “I’m sorry but it’s not often I get reminded of the great man who sent thousands of young British troops to their slaughter,” Irish said to him, smiling.
It was vintage Irish – a lightning-speed calculation of disguises, the coupling of history to charm, lined and delivered with impeccable timing, a way of humiliating someone without them knowing it. We often wondered whether it was indeed Clarke that night. Clarke is a plonker. I sincerely hope it was.
In 2012, Irish discovered an anti-ageing serum, manufactured in Australia. “It works,” he said excitedly one evening, “they tested it on lizards and it works.” Believing this would turn the local skin care market on its head, we set about trying to get the Dischem chain to sell it. After weeks of begging, I finally got Dischem’s CEO, Ivan Saltzman on speakerphone. “Hi Ivan, we’ve got something that is going to blow your socks off.” “I…very much doubt that,” came a breezy, dismissive whine. Irish burst out laughing next to me and wouldn’t stop. I had to hang up.
Such an analytical mind cannot exist without complexities and there were parts of him that were impossible to fathom. In 2011, whilst reading the journalist Mandy Weiner’s mediocre account of the disgraced mining tycoon Brett Kebble’s murder, I jolted upright at the sight of his name printed, alongside that of the late Business Day columnist David Gleason, as some of the last people to see Kebble alive. “Why did you go see that scoundrel?” I asked him. “Because he owed me money,” he replied, expressionless.
An era of Johannesburg had wrapped itself around his soul. He spoke fondly of the past, of the Anglo American and Southern Prospecting glory days – but never allowed it to influence his immediate judgment – and this was reflected in his enthusiasm for his network that consisted of, quite literally, everyone. Seeking his counsel was an examination in measurement and fairness, something revealed in the quality of those he worked with following his official retirement from stockbroking.
During the past day I’ve read interviews of him during his time with Irish & Menell Rosenberg, long before we met. In the lines I see a man uninterested in the hysterical bluster of then-imminent democracy, a man eager to assess results, who believed, perhaps above all, in the theory of continuation, through the working parts of links that led to roundness and sense. An extraordinary communicator, he was kind to a fault and, despite the appearance of sometimes-wild hair and a battered car – both of which I always suspected were choreographed – was profoundly civilized and thoughtful.
Those who live and have lived through this unnaturally violent era of Johannesburg that has now spanned decades are required to say farewell more often than what one would consider just. What we know of this deeply damaged time we will never reconcile, even less understand, with the only small comfort being the theory of continuation, and the very great lives who have advocated it.
- Simon Reader is the chief operating officer of Fourex, a financial services firm based in London.
