A Day in the Life: Tragic true story behind one of the Beatles' most famous hits revealed in new book

By Glenys Roberts

PUBLISHED: 22:32 EST, 22 November 2012 | UPDATED: 06:14 EST, 23 November 2012

Tragic: At the height of the Swinging Sixties, Tara Browne, pictured, a 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

'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.

Swinging London was stunned.  With his angelic blond looks, Tara was a leading figure on the hedonistic scene,  close to many of the most iconic personalities of the age including David Hemmings, Terence Stamp, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger,  Marianne Faithfull – and The Fab Four.

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.

Called Luggala, pronounced Lugalore, the place  is spectacular. A touch of Gothic, a smidgeon of Oriental, with fairytale battlements and a virginal white façade it is  set in an idyllic  sylvan landscape that could have been conceived by Walt Disney. And yet it  has hosted some utterly outrageous behaviour.

It all started with Garech and Tara’s mother Oonagh, a legendary beauty who was given the house by her doting father Ernest, brother of Lord Iveagh.

The prettiest and kindest of Ernest’s three daughters, the so-called Golden Guiness Girls, Oonagh had a reassuringly  innocent sense of humour in comparison to her  racier sisters. 

The eldest  Maureen was famous for opening the door to visitors dressed as a ribald Irish maid who embarrassed them with indecent questions. The other  sister Aileen used to place a bowl of artificial vomit next to her guests’ beds and wait for the scream.

The incorrigible three roared through society in the Twenties and Thirties. As one friend who still remembers the late nights and even later mornings said recently: ‘So many tiaras were worn, I was told the value of the diamonds at one ball was about £50 million. Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton, Beaverbrook, the Duchess of Windsor, the Aga Khan, American film stars, Prime Ministers, the visitors books of their houses were crammed full of so many famous names that it was like reading Who’s Who.

Horrific: This is the wreckage of the car belonging to Tara Browne

'You didn’t dare think about going to bed until 4am.’   Though everyone else was suffering monumental hangovers the morning after, the Guinness girls were always full of energy.

Fortified by ‘Pink Specials’ the explosive Bloody Marys delivered to guest bedrooms by their 22 butlers and maids, they spurred everyone into more action by noon.

Their privileged lifestyle is long gone and many of the grand houses   frequented  by their set have been turned into hotels  --but Luggala remains.

Many are the stories of the great film director John Huston’s sojourns there with his daughter Anjelica. He recognised that the  Guinness sisters were such a handful that he  used to call them witches ‘lovely ones to be sure, but witches nonetheless.’

The spirited Oonagh’s first marriage was to amateur rider Gay Kindersley who left her for one of her bridesmaids. Undaunted she tied the knot with Garech and Tara’s father, Lord Oranmore and Browne. He  kept pigs in the living room, but shared his wife’s passion for chaotic house parties where the rich and famous rubbed shoulders with poets and revolutionaries.

Many thought the couple were the reincarnation of the 18th century pleasure-seekers who had built Luggala in the first place. ‘The only trouble is when you tell people about the party afterwards no one can believe you,’ remembers one guest.

‘An IRA chief might be there with Brendan Behan bellowing toasts of ‘Up the Rebels’ alongside a bank bigwig. Oonagh loved free spirits, so if you were one you were welcome. Cyril Connolly, Lucien Freud, everyone was there. You could say anything you liked as long as it was witty.’ 

The Browne marriage, like Oonagh’s first, did not last long and there followed a brief third union to a Cuban dress designer whose son drank himself to death in these fevered surroundings.

Wild: Luggala Days celebrates the extraordinary memories of fabulous wealth and eccentricity associated with Luggala, a house near Dublin where Tara grew up

The glorious chatelaine herself went on attracting admirers into old age. One used to send at least four telegrams a day which were delivered by a boy who had to cycle five miles from the nearest post office.

But soon 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. 

With his huge fortune Tara had a stake in all the era’s trendy concerns, including a clothes line called Dandie Fashions and the notorious discotheque Sybilla’s frequented by David Bailey, Michael Caine, Mary Quant, the Beatles and the Stones.

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.

Famous: Tara Browne was a leading figure on the hedonistic scene and close to many iconic personalities including Mick Jagger

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.