UK Edition
Rex Makin, lawyer who invented the term 'Beatlemania'– obituary
Rex Makin, who has died aged 91, became Liverpool’s best-known lawyer, thriving on confrontation both in and out of court and often going out of his way to attract controversy.
There was scarcely a Liverpool cause with which he was not linked during the city’s agonised post-war decline; he put this down to gulping platefuls of “narkiness” – quarrelsomeness or contumaciousness – which he liked to think gusted in off the Mersey.
A legal maverick, he was an accomplished media manipulator years before his rival solicitors, in a city bristling with tales of villainy and intrigue.
Contemptuous of the establishment, he enjoyed the earnest attention of visiting metropolitan journalists to whom he dispensed titbits of criminous gossip and insight from his armour-plated office above a sex shop.
His one-time neighbour Brian Epstein asked Makin to draw up his contract with the Beatles, and sought his advice when the foursome caught the clap; Makin recommended a doctor in Rodney Street, Liverpool’s Harley Street, and subsequently claimed the credit for coining the expression Beatlemania, noting ruefully that he never received a royalty for doing so.
As an advocate defending the city’s criminal classes, his reputation was one of a brilliant entertainer. His trademark at the dingy Dale Street magistrates’ court was a carnation in his buttonhole – “So refreshing” – cut from his garden each morning.
But his enemies identified a streak of malign unctuousness that could mask a bullying temper. He harassed senior solicitors, terrorised junior ones, assailed journalists, and struck fear even in judges and insurance companies. His firm, E Rex Makin and Co, pursued more than 60 compensation cases after 96 Liverpool football fans were killed at Hillsborough, and represented others after Heysel.
Critics who disliked his style nevertheless respected Makin’s advocacy and envied his professional success, earned – he invariably boasted – by the sweat of his tongue. One characterised him as a mixture of Jewish nous, Irish blarney and Welsh passion. Pasty in appearance, with a congenitally deformed ear (sliced off, according to baseless local legend, by an outraged naval officer’s dress sword) he was universally, if unfathomably, known as Sexy Rexy.
Elkan Rex Makin was born on August 20 1925 in Cole Street, Birkenhead. His great grandfather had set up a seamen’s outfitters shop in Liverpool that attracted mariners from all over the world, and which continued to trade until long after the Second World War; his father, raised in the city’s old Chinatown, made trunks and travelware for seamen.
Makin’s mother, a dressmaker, who had emigrated from Russia as a girl, had a brother who became Trotsky’s second secretary.
When he was two the family moved across the Mersey to Liverpool, where he attended Liverpool College, as one of the few Jewish boys in a High Anglican foundation. Evacuated to North Wales in 1940, he attended the John Bright Grammar School, Llandudno, and read law at Liverpool University where he edited the undergraduate Guild Gazette and the more subversive Sfinx magazine.
On graduating in 1945, he was articled to a firm of Liverpool solicitors and qualified four years later. During his training, Makin also worked as a supernumerary reporter for the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo newspapers, covering assignments ranging from a Rose Queen coronation at Speke to the annual meeting of the Band of Hope.
After working as an assistant solicitor for six months, Makin set up on his own, taking offices in Hackins Hey, an old Liverpool “jigger” (alley) in which pressgangs had once operated. Forbidden to advertise, Makin promoted himself by grabbing local headlines with purple prose. In 1952 he appeared for 19-year-old Harold Winstanley in the Knowsley Hall murder case in which Lady Derby was shot behind the ear, her butler and footman killed and a housekeeper wounded.
Makin issued a press statement denying the (non-existent) rumours of an affair between Winstanley and the Countess, so tarnishing the Derby escutcheon and damaging its evidential credibility. Winstanley was found guilty but insane, and Makin was on the map.
For years he was known as the dockers’ solicitor, taking on personal injury compensation cases and opening up the floodgates of claims that disgruntled rivals believed quickly got out of hand. Thieves and thief-takers alike turned to him in trouble. In the early 1990s Makin gave public relations advice to the sacked assistant chief constable of Merseyside, Alison Halford.
He courted celebrity clients too, and they courted him. Makin handled the comedian Freddie Starr’s change of name by deed poll, the Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s will, and the journalist Anne Robinson’s divorce (he gave her the story about Brian Epstein that launched her Fleet Street career). On the day President Kennedy was shot, he was preparing to defend Gerry Marsden of the Pacemakers on a charge of stealing two golf clubs. The case was dismissed.
Rex Makin helped to magnify Merseyside to the wider world. In 1984 he brokered media deals for the Walton sextuplets and in the 1990s represented Ralph Bulger, father of the murdered toddler James Bulger. In 2000 his son Robin, a partner in Makin’s firm, acted for the Moors murderer Ian Brady in his “right to die” case.
He once confessed that he had not wanted to be a lawyer at all, but rather an actor or journalist, or both. “I would love to have been a John Junor,” he explained, “distilling caustic wit each weekend, to be creative but also to control.” The nearest he came was a rambling, Socratic weekly column in the Liverpool Echo – thin gruel (some thought) compared with Junor’s volcanic broth.
Makin regarded himself as a liberal lawyer “with a radical streak that makes me vibrate for the underdog”. But where some saw an iconoclastic rebel, others saw a bombastic self-publicist. When he was convicted of indecency in a public lavatory in the early 1980s – “my hiccup” – many relished seeing Makin falter.
Unabashed, he raised his charitable profile, endowing a Chair of Criminal Justice at John Moores University, a lecture theatre at the Walker Art Gallery and a drama centre named after his father. In 1994 John Moores University awarded Rex Makin an honorary professorship.
His wife Shirley, whom he married in 1957, survives him together with a son, Robin, and a daughter, the writer and art therapist, Susan Makin.
Rex Makin, born August 20 1925, died June 26 2017