That poster...

I don’t usually post on a Saturday but I heard on the Radio 4 news yesterday morning that Martin Elliot had died.

Martin who?

Martin Elliot was the dashing thirty-something Wolverhampton Polytechnic photography technician in the late Seventies when I was at college studying first fine art and then design. He was tall with a beard, wore faded 501’s and drove a Volkswagen beetle. At weekends he would drive down to Cornwall to go surfing. He was cool.

His much younger girlfriend, Fiona Butler, was on my design course. She went surfing with him and I used to daydream about her in her wet suit. She was cool as well, cool and sophisticated, very sophisticated for a girl in her very early twenties. She was tall and blonde and very beautiful and she was one of the colouring girls, there were three of them - Fiona, Liz and Jayne. They drew and coloured with pencil crayons, flowers mostly, with great care and very beautiful blends. I was a scribbler by comparison.

One evening, after a few glasses of wine, Fiona told us that she was the girl in that poster. We didn’t believe her at first - how could she be the girl in that poster? That poster? Yes, that poster. That poster, the one I and ALL of my school friends had pinned to their bedroom walls a year or so before, the one that I’d bought out of the NME with a three quid postal order, that poster with the girl in her tennis gear hitching up her dress to show her bare bottom, the one that sold over a million copies for Athena, their best seller ever.

THAT poster.

Martin took the photograph. Fiona was the model. It was a spur of the moment thing, they were about to leave the tennis courts when, seeing the evening sun shining through the trees, Martin had an idea. The rest, as they say, is history.

Imagine what it was like for us testosterone driven male students with Fiona wandering all over college in those ‘so’ tight jeans of hers and knowing EXACTLY what they were covering. After all we’d seen it on our moonlit bathed bedroom walls night after night.

Martin sold the rights to the photograph to Athena for a few hundred quid but, good for him, he kept the copyright.

Martin died in Cornwall, a mildly wealthy man, from cancer yesterday. Fiona married a multi-millionaire businessman years ago and still lives in the Midlands. Between them they created a twentieth century icon and a ‘branded on my brain’ memory in me.

THAT poster.

Tennis anyone?