Beatles’ accountant battled ‘Taxman’
A fixture in their lives who saved band millions
Harry Pinsker, who has died aged 90, was the Beatles’ accountant from 1962 to 1970, overseeing their tax affairs, setting up their companies, helping them to buy their homes and even handling their grocery bills.
“Harry was the only one who really knew what went on,” said Paul Mccartney.
Pinsker was a partner in the West End of London offices of Bryce, Hanmer, a Liverpool-based firm of accountants, when he was asked to take on the affairs of four young unknowns who had been marched into the firm’s Liverpool offices by their manager, Brian Epstein.
Unimpressed by the pasty-faced youths, the senior partner in Liverpool decided to pass them on to London.
“I first met them in my office — they were just four scruffy boys,” Pinsker recalled in an interview in 2017.
It was he who registered their first company as Beatles Ltd and he became such a fixture in their lives that band members, with or without partners, would drop into his home for tea and a chat, though Pinsker’s wife Ana drew the line at admitting Mccartney’s giant sheepdog, Martha.
It was Pinsker who told the band in 1964 that they were millionaires, and he who noticed an ad for a farm on the Mull of Kintyre that became a home for Mccartney and his wife Linda.
The 1966 Beatles song Taxman was a protest against the 95 per cent “supertax” (“Let me tell you how it will be/ There’s one for you, 19 for me/ ‘Cause I’m the taxman...”).
He exploited a range of legal ideas to keep the taxman at bay, including creating the songwriting company Lenmac — which he persuaded the Inspector of Taxes to treat as a trading company, rather than an investment company whose revenue would be subject to higher tax.
In 1966 he was behind the idea of turning the band into employees of The Beatles Co, in which they each owned a five per cent stake, with the remaining shares held by the company and thus subject to corporation tax at around 50 per cent, a move reckoned to have saved them almost three million pounds.
It was Pinsker, too, who in 1967 suggested the creation of Apple, a holding company of which he became a director.
HOUSTON • Sunday is traditionally a quiet day for Chuck Pryor’s Houston funeral home, but on this Sunday in February, almost a year after the pandemic reached Texas, the phone was still ringing.
Pryor took the call: COVID-19 had taken yet another American life and another grieving family required the services of the exhausted funeral director and his staff.
“It’s just mentally taxing,” said Pryor, 59, who runs a small funeral home business with his wife Almika.
The United States on Monday crossed the staggering milestone of 500,000 COVID-19 deaths just over a year since the coronavirus pandemic claimed its first known victim in Santa Clara County, Calif.
About 19 per cent of total global coronavirus deaths have occurred in the United States, an outsized figure given that the nation accounts for just four per cent of the world’s population.
The National Cathedral in Washington tolled its bells 500 times on Monday evening.
President Joe Biden, who marked the grim milestone with a moment of silence and a candle-lighting ceremony, also ordered that U.S. flags on federal property be lowered to halfstaff for five days.
The sheer number of coronavirus deaths has overwhelmed many U.S. funeral homes. Some family-owned businesses have handled a crushing case load, with some seeing the same number of deaths in a couple of months as they would normally handle in a year, said Dutch Nie, a spokesperson with the National Funeral Directors Association.
“Most funeral home directors know that it’s a 24-hour, 365-day career, but you’re just not used to every single day working those hours,” Nie said.
The pandemic has brought profound changes to the way Pryor must operate. Overloaded hospitals want bodies to be removed quickly.
It has been difficult to find trained staff, caskets and protective equipment. And every day brings a multitude of phone calls from families in pain and distress.
As the virus showed no sign of releasing its grip and deaths mounted over the summer and in the fall, exhausted workers at Pryority Funeral Experience fell ill while others quit.
“People quit because they mentally can’t handle it,” he said. “I pray God, — just give me strength ... I want to run away right now, to be honest ... I’m concerned about myself breaking down so I just ask God to help me.”
Sometimes the stories he hears on the job haunt him.
Like the one he was told when he answered a COVID-19 call on a recent weekend in The Woodlands, a suburb of Houston.
A woman in her 30s had just died from complications from the virus, a while after doctors performed a C-section to save the life of her twins as her condition deteriorated.
The following day, Pryor was having a hard time processing the tragedy, one of the hundreds of thousands that have marked a year of profound loss across the entire country, and the world.
“I slept with it last night and I hate that, you know, when you take them to bed,” he said.
January was a terrible month. Even as hospitalizations in Texas fell by 10 per cent last month from a 36-per-cent rise in December, coronavirus deaths increased by 48 per cent, according to a Reuters analysis.
“I do pace myself and I do turn people down because I can only do so much,” Pryor said.
Embalmers and others who come directly into contact with bodies and are at higher risk of contagion, have been hard to find, Pryor said.
And caskets are in short supply due to the pandemic.
On a Thursday earlier this month, Pryor’s uncle drove four hours from Dallas to deliver eight of them.
While caring for those who lost loved ones in his community, Pryor’s family was faced with their own grief. The virus took his nephew and his uncle while his wife lost her cousin and her aunt to COVID-19.
In late January, Pryor and his team handled the funeral arrangements for Gregory Blanks, a 50-year-old COVID-19 victim who ran a heating and air conditioning business in the Houston area. He was a huge fan of the Dallas Cowboys football team.
In keeping with restrictions to prevent infections, only a limited number of family and friends were able to attend the burial at San Felipe Community Cemetery where a preacher spoke next to a table lined with baseball caps for the Cowboys and other Texas teams.
Clad in a face mask sporting the logo of her husband’s company, Blanks’ wife Lila solemnly watched as some of Pryor’s workers lowered the casket into the ground.
“People, they can’t hug,” Pryor said.
“They cry and no one’s there to wipe your tears.”