When Brian Epstein went to his family’s solicitor and next-door neighbour Rex Makin and asked him to draw up an unbreakable contract for the pop group he had decided to manage, Makin sniffily informed him there was no such thing. He told Epstein to buy a standard contract from a legal stationer’s and he’d have a look over it.
He wanted nothing to do with “this nonsense from Brian”, but he did have dealings with The Beatles. “At Paul McCartney’s 21st birthday party, John Lennon punched the Cavern DJ Bob Wooler and broke his nose,” Makin recalled.
“He came to me to sue Lennon, but I settled the matter in a way which would today be held improper, for £200-odd plus costs.”
But if Makin missed out on The Beatles – though he claimed credit for inventing the term “Beatlemania” – he played a full role in the postwar life of Liverpool.
He acted for five of the 26 Liverpool fans charged with manslaughter after the Heysel Stadium tragedy, and for several families of Hillsborough victims, as well as for James Bulger’s father Ralph, the parents of the Walton sextuplets born in 1983, and for local figures such as Bill Shankly, Ken Dodd and Carla Lane.
In the mid-1980s he acted for employees of Liverpool Council who said they had been victimised by members of Derek Hatton’s Militant Tendency, and in the early 1990s he represented Alison Halford, the high-ranking police officer who sued Merseyside police for sex discrimination.
