Martha Lane Fox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Martha Lane Fox (born February 10, 1973) is a British e-commerce business woman and charity trustee, daughter of the British historian and gardening correspondent Robin Lane Fox and great-granddaughter maternally of Charles Henry Alexander Paget, 6th Marquess of Anglesey.

She was educated at Oxford High School, Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where she read ancient and modern history.

Martha Lane Fox, together with Brent Hoberman, founded Lastminute.com in 1998, an online travel and gift business that generated great publicity, becoming an icon of the UK internet boom and floating at the peak of the dot-com bubble but managing to survive its subsequent burst.

She is a strong advocate of progressive causes including prison reform and is a trustee of Reprieve, a prison reform charity.

On November 20, 2003, it was announced that she would step down as managing director of Lastminute.com so that she might "explore other challenges", though she remains a non-executive director. She was replaced by Ian McCaig, Lastminute's chief operating officer.

On December 28, 2003, it was revealed by The Sunday Telegraph that Martha Lane Fox would become "right hand woman" of Galen Weston, owner of Selfridges, and take over the day-to-day running of the business.

In May 2004 she was seriously injured in a car accident in the tourist resort of Essaouira, near Marrakesh in Morocco. She was holidaying there with boyfriend Chris Gorrell Barnes when their car swerved on a wet patch of road. She was not wearing a seatbelt and was flung from the car. She landed on a rock, broke her arm and her pelvis in six places, and suffered horrific leg injuries and massive internal bleeding.

She spent a year in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford having metal inserts and bone grafts, and as of 2006 is on the road to recovery.