‘Man from the motor trade’ tried to satisfy Beatles’ craving for luxury cars
As one of the Beatles’ most trusted confidants, Terry Doran rolled joints for the band, kept them laughing with his Scouse wisecracks and escorted their wives to clubs and movie openings while their husbands were working.
He was also the inspiration for ‘‘the man from the motor trade’’ in She’s Leaving Home.
It mattered not that the song’s writer Paul McCartney insisted that the character was ‘‘just fiction’’. In the Beatles’ world, Doran was ‘‘the man’’, not least because he was the one who ‘‘supplied the wheels’’ as the Fab Four went car crazy in the midsixties.
So insatiable was the group’s lust for expensive automobiles that Doran and their manager Brian Epstein set up a car dealership called Brydor, which operated from a showroom in Hounslow, west London, and provided a succession of increasingly prestigious vehicles for the group.
They started with four coach-built Mini Coopers
– metallic black for John
Lennon and George Harrison, sage green with Aston Martin rear lights for McCartney and a burgundy model for Ringo Starr, converted to a hatchback so he could get his drums in.
Lennon swiftly moved on to a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Mercedes-Benz stretch limousine and a Rolls-Royce Phantom V that was later given a psychedelic makeover.
Harrison took delivery of a Jaguar E-type on his 21st birthday and then a white Aston Martin DB5. McCartney went for the Aston Martin DB6, complete with an inbuilt tape recorder on which he wrote parts of Hey Jude.
Starr was a Mercedes man but also owned a Facel Vega while Epstein ordered a customised Bentley S3 saloon. Doran arranged to have it delivered to him at Heathrow when he returned with the Beatles from their first all-conquering American tour.
He also supplied sports cars to Mick Jagger, Lionel Bart, the Yardbirds and the Moody Blues. When Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager, selected a model but could not decide on the paint job, Doran arranged to have eight vehicles in different colours driven around Berkeley Square while Oldham looked down from his office window high above and made his choice like a Roman emperor.
It represented a rapid rise through the trade for Doran, who had begun supplying the Beatles with more mundane transport in their Liverpool days, when he sold Harrison a second-hand Ford Anglia in 1962. It was the guitarist’s first car and he negotiated a discount in return for posing with his band mates in an advert for Doran’s dealership.
Once the Beatles started gigging farther afield he provided them with an eight-seater Ford Thames van.
He went on to work as a personal assistant to Lennon and Harrison at different times and after Epstein’s death in 1967 was made head of Apple Publishing and managed the Beatles-associated acts Grapefruit and Mary Hopkin.
He offered further invaluable service by filling a hole in the lyrics of A Day in the Life on 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. ‘‘There was still one word missing when we came to record,’’ Lennon said. ‘‘I knew the line had to go, ‘Now they know how many holes it takes to . . . something the Albert Hall’ but for some reason I couldn’t think of the verb. What did the holes do to the Albert Hall? It was Terry who said ‘fill’ and that was it.’’
Terrence James Doran was born in 1939, the only son of Elizabeth (nee Molloy) and Joseph Doran. He grew up in Liverpool with three sisters and on leaving school went to work for a car dealership in Warrington. He met Epstein in a Liverpool pub in 1959 and was introduced to the Beatles two years later.
He was initially closest to Lennon, who was attracted by what the group’s biographer Mark Lewisohn called his ‘‘sharp mind and ready Liverpool wit’’. ‘‘We immediately clicked. There was a chemistry,’’ Doran said.
When he joined Lennon’s payroll, the Beatle ‘‘promised to keep him as long as he made him laugh’’, according to fellow Beatles employee Chris O’Dell. After Lennon married Yoko Ono, Doran transferred his allegiance to Harrison, becoming his estate manager at Friar Park, the 120-room Gothic mansion the guitarist bought in Henley-on-Thames in 1970, just as the Beatles were splitting up. – The Times