Peter Martinelli
Leading figure among Smithfield Market traders who had started out as an offal salesman in the 1950s
PETER MARTINELLI, who has died aged 86, became one of the merchant princes of Smithfield Market, having begun his career there in the 1950s as a humble offal salesman.
Smithfield’s great meat market has operated in one form or another since the 10th century. In the 18th century Daniel Defoe called it “without question, the greatest in the world”.
The market’s buildings were badly damaged by a V-2 rocket in 1945. By this time all meat had been rationed in Britain to support the war effort, and Smithfield had been forced to open for business at 6am instead of the traditional hour of midnight. The curtailed schedule persisted until 1954, when meat became the last foodstuff to come off rations.
It was in this year that Martinelli got his first job at the market. With a young family to support, he answered an ad for a cashier at Smithfield. With the market coming alive once again, he was soon given his chance “on the front”, as an offal salesman for AJ Poels. Business in those days was done mostly in the smoke-filled surroundings of the local pubs.
Working for some of the established trading families, Martinelli did well, and in the mid-1960s set up, with a partner, his own business, PJ Mallinder. He was quick to invest in new technologies in packaging, refrigeration and freight-handling, and imported much of his meat from South America and Africa. In 1987 he sold the business to the Botswanan government, and a year later, with his son Paul and another partner, Michael George, he set up PJ Martinelli. He retired in 1995, and his son continues to run the company today.
Pietro Giuseppi Nicola Martinelli (he later changed his name to Peter by deed poll) was born on December 7 1930 in Paddington, the only son among six children. His father had left Pontremoli in Tuscany as a teenager in 1909 and had worked his way on the railways to London, where he opened a café in Warren Street. The Fitzroy Café was patronised by policemen and criminals. Among the latter was Stan “The Spiv” Setty, a second-hand-car dealer who was murdered in 1949; his mutilated corpse – clad in a cream silk shirt and blue silk shorts – was dumped from an aeroplane on to the Essex marshes, where it was found by a farm labourer in search of a duck for his supper.
Peter was educated near the family home in Stockwell, and with his youngest sister he was evacuated to Lancaster for two years. On his return he worked at his father’s café. Aged 17, he married Marie Caluori, a Swiss girl he had met at the local Catholic youth club. He then joined the RAF for National Service, his experience in Sunderland flying boats leaving him with a lifelong dislike of aeroplanes.
On demob, he took jobs as a runner for Fleet Street photographers, supplementing his income by playing alto saxophone at pub gigs with a jazz band, before starting his career at the meat market.
Martinelli was an independent spirit. In the late 1980s, appalled by what he saw as restrictive working practices, he faced a mass picket by the Transport and General Workers’ Union. In an attempt to prevent the doubling of rents of Smithfield traders, in 1993 he was elected to the Court of Common Council, the City of London Corporation’s ruling body. He served there until 2013, and in 2010 was appointed MBE.
He was a member of the Worshipful Company of Butchers from 1966, and president of the Smithfield Market Tenants’ Association.
Those visiting his office might be offered an early morning glass of champagne, and his work for charities never lacked imagination: he once hired the Top of the Pops dance troupe Pan’s People to entertain a fundraising evening at the Grosvenor House Hotel; and on another occasion arranged for a racehorse, prior to its auction, to be ridden into the River Room of the Savoy.
A keen golfer, he was also a lifelong Millwall supporter, becoming a director of the club in the 1970s. He embraced social media, in his eighties enjoying his Twitter account. In 2013 he moved permanently to Tenerife, where he had rented a house for many years.
Peter Martinelli’s marriage to Marie was dissolved. She survives him with their two sons and three daughters, and he is also survived by his long-time partner, Lana Horton.
Peter Martinelli, born December 7 1930, died April 27 2017