'He blew his mind out in a car. He didn’t notice that the lights had changed’.
Everyone knows the words to one of the Beatles most famous hits ‘A Day in the Life.’ But how many are familiar with the tragic true story behind it? At the height of the Swinging Sixties, Tara Browne, 21 year old heir to the Guinness fortune, was killed instantly when he slammed his Lotus sports car into the side of a parked van at 120mph on a Chelsea street.
Since Tara’s tragic accident, his older brother Garech, now a pony-tailed 73 and founder of the Irish folk band The Chieftains, has been rather silent about the excesses of his family. Now, however, he has decided to give his blessing to a book, Luggala Days, which celebrates the extraordinary memories of fabulous wealth and eccentricity associated with the house near Dublin where he and Tara grew up.
But it was Tara who was the centre of attraction. By the time he was in his teens, the impossibly precocious boy, who had already hobnobbed with the likes of Cocteau, Dali and Beckett, was clearly a chip off the old block and even Oonagh was despairing of her younger son and his intemperate habits. ‘He used up too much money for a small boy. Too much money and too much emotion,’ she wailed.
Tara drifted from Eton to Chelsea and the burgeoning fashion world of mini-skirted models and hallucinogenic drugs. He was only 16 - and still a ward of court as a result of his parents’ bitter broken marriage - when at a party in Battersea fairground he met the waiflike 21 year old Irish farmer’s daughter Noreen MacSherry.
In one of the great scandals of the Sixties the couple married in secret in France. Within two years they were the parents of two boys Dorian and Julian -- now 50 and 48 respectively. At Dorian’s christening at St Patricks cathedral in Dublin, Nicki, as Noreen was soon calling herself, was a picture of Sixties chic in black Cossack boots, brown suede jacket with fur collar and white mohair cap. Parental responsibilities failed to slow the gilded couple down. The two soon became emblems of Swinging London where aristocrats and pop stars partied together living high on the hog.
Tara’s 21st birthday party in March 1966 at Luggala is still remembered for its monumental excess - particularly for the amount of acid dropped. Tara brought the group du jour - the Loving Spoonful - over from America, paying them £1,000 to serenade him.
Two private jets flew in the 200 guests, including oil heir John Paul Getty Jr. and his soon to be wife, the exquisite Talitha Pol who would be dead of a heroin overdose by the age of 30.
In London the partying went on, soon taking its toll on the young couple’s marriage. When they separated later that year, Nicki moved to Spain, and Tara, who was about to inherit £1million, took up residence in the Ritz hotel on Piccadilly.
Meanwhile his formidable mother Oonagh took their baby boys back to Ireland, leading to a bitter custody case that is still talked about. The super-rich Guinnesses won.
Ominously however Tara, whose new ambition was to become a racing driver, invested his inheritance in a garage and drove a hand-painted Lotus sports car. In the run up to Christmas 1966 he was about to return to Luggala to spend the weekend with his brother Garech, when he changed his mind and stayed in London to spend the day with his friend the musician Brian Jones.
That evening he took the 19 year old model Suki Poitier, one of the Bond girls in Casino Royale, out to dinner, then drove her home in his new pale blue Lotus Elan. When the car hit a white van at speed Suki survived - only to be killed in another car crash 13 years later – but Tara had no chance and met his fate.
Christopher Gibbs the antiques dealer who was part of that exotic set in the Sixties, remembers the dreadful shock of his death. He was ‘an incredibly beautiful golden youth.
Rather spoilt but very sympathetic and with a sweetness of character. At that age we didn’t know about death unless it was granny. Here was a golden sparkler removed from our midst.’
In the midst of tragedy the beat went on. The memorial service in Knightsbridge was more like a fashion show than a wake. Le tout Swinging London was there with a full complement of titled sons and daughters decked out in Carnaby Street’s finest.
Tara’s body was finally returned to Luggala to be buried by the lake and Nicki, who always complained she was not even given enough to live on, continued to live in reduced circumstances in Spain.
She saw her sons rarely and used to say they were forever being shuttled from one school to another - 20 in all. Poignantly she remained loyal to the memory of her husband and even managed to convince Marianne Faithful to remove a reference to which she objected when the old songstress wrote a book about those days in Luggala.
But if Nicki expected to be embraced by the family when her longtime adversary her mother-in-law Oonagh died in 1995, she was mistaken. When she turned up unexpectedly to the Chelsea funeral, she talked to no one, not even her now grown sons.
This summer Nicki died in Spain aged 70 and her ashes were finally returned to Luggala, which her sons will presumably inherit eventually– Garech who was given it by his mother in 1970 has no children. The wheel has come full circle. For Luggala remains a shrine to Tara. Every year on the anniversary of his brother’s death Garech holds a little ceremony beside the black loch which he has surrounded with white sand, the more to look like a glass of the family Guinness.
Sometimes old friends such as Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Seamus Heaney join him to plant trees in his dead sibling’s memory. ‘I went to the mortuary and kissed his frozen face. I brought the body back to Ireland on the aeroplane. Nothing has made up for Tara’s death,’ he recalls.
Another casualty of the Sixties.
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