He stayed with his maternal uncle Frank Turberville on a farm near Grahamstown, now Makhanda, Eastern Cape, returning to his family in January 1914.
[9] He did not join the school's Officers' Training Corps (OTC); but his close friend Thomas Applebee, a year older, did, was conscripted, and was killed in 1916 a few days after arriving in France.
[8] Taking inspiration from his father's opposition to the Second Anglo-Boer War, which had put him at the risk of violent attack, Martin adopted an attitude of non-resistance and declared himself a conscientious objector.
From January 1917 he worked as an orderly at Uffculme Hospital in Birmingham, making a further appearance before a tribunal and being granted a conditional exemption from conscription.
[10] In 1919 Martin attended a socialist summer school, where he gained an interest in guild socialism from G. D. H. Cole and his wife Margaret.
He gained a double first in two parts of the Historical Tripos, and his college awarded him a bye-fellowship, which he used to visit Princeton University for a year.
[2] He joined the Union of Democratic Control: a 1921 revival meeting he organised, addressed by Norman Angell, was broken up by students.
[16] In 1934, it took over the Week-end Review owned by Samuel Courtauld, through the good offices of Gerald Barry, gaining about four thousand readers.
[18] Martin wrote after the 1938 Anschluss: "Today if Mr. Chamberlain would come forward and tell us that his policy was really one not only of isolation but also of Little Englandism in which the Empire was to be given up because it could not be defended and in which military defence was to be abandoned because war would totally end civilization, we for our part would wholeheartedly support him".
[22] He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union after the Hitler–Stalin Pact, which he denounced; in response the Communist Party Daily Worker ran an editorial attacking Martin.
[23] He supported the policy of demanding an unconditional surrender from Nazi Germany[24] After attending the Soviet-sponsored World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław, Poland, in 1948, Martin wrote a hostile account of it, entitled "Hyenas and other Reptiles".
[27] Orwell continued to write for the New Statesman, but made "wounding remarks" in his journalism about the magazine being "under direct communist influence" and its readers being "worshippers of Stalin".
[27] Orwell's list of fellow travellers, passed in 1949 to the Information Research Department, a branch of UK intelligence, included Martin's name and described him as "Decayed liberal.