Allan Williams, who has died aged 86, was popularly proclaimed "The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away". Some painted him pop music's most spectacular loser, the small-time coffee bar owner and self-confessed "bloody fool" from Liverpool who let a fortune slip through his fingers.
Although he promoted the Beatles and acted as their first booking agent, Williams never formally managed the group. It was true that in 1960 he drove the fledgling band to Hamburg and a seedy nightclub called the Indra that proved a forcing house on their road to stardom. But his relationship with them was indeterminate and never enshrined by the law of contract.
Beatles manager Allan Williams, his wife Beryl, Williams' business partner and black Calypso singer Lord Woodbine, Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best at Arnhem War Memorial in 1960.Credit: John Lennon / Getty
With his sleek Jaguar car, shock of curly hair and piratical black beard, Williams liked to pass as a hustler from Denmark Street, London's Tin Pan Alley. A plumber by trade if not by training, his early efforts to establish himself as a wheeler-dealer had reaped rewards, suggesting something of a Midas touch. But for all his stocky pugnacity and colourful panache, Williams was no hard-nosed manager. Lacking polish or refinement, he was, as one observer of the Merseybeat scene put it, better suited to running "slightly shady clubs" back home on Merseyside.
During hitch-hiking tours of Europe with his young Chinese wife, Williams had admired the cellar clubs they visited in Paris, as well as the raffish 2i's club and coffee bar in Soho, epicentre of the emerging London skiffle scene. In 1958, in an attempt to replicate such a club in Liverpool, the couple converted an old clock repairer's building at 23 Slater Street near the city centre into a coffee bar at a cost of £300.
Allan Williams helped the Beatles get early gigs.Credit: AP
Their club, the Jacaranda, was an instant success. Students from the Liverpool College of Art gravitated to it because one of the tutors, Don McKinley, had decorated the walls with original paintings. One such student, John Lennon – a scruffy youth then playing in a group called the Silver Beetles with his friends Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe – became a regular customer.
Even though Williams regarded Lennon as little more than "a bum", he booked the band to play at the "Jac" and in May 1960 secured them several gigs in Scotland as the backing group for a singer called Johnny Gentle.
That August he secured them a booking in Hamburg, and with Williams at the wheel of a battered Commer van, the group (now augmented by a drummer, Pete Best) drove to Germany for the first time. On his return to Liverpool he set to work on plans to open a luxurious nightclub, the Blue Angel, as well as a rock and roll club to be called the Top Ten. But after falling out with the band the following year over their refusal to pay his 10 per cent commission, Williams severed ties – sacked them, in his words – and had no further business dealings with the group.
In 1962 Brian Epstein, before he became the Beatles' manager, contacted Williams to check there were no outstanding contractual ties. Assuring Epstein that there were none, Williams added a forthright piece of advice: "Don't touch them with a f---ing bargepole," he told Epstein, "they will let you down."
Williams never recovered from his split with what would become the world's most famous band. In the 1970s he helped to stage the first Beatles conventions in Liverpool, and for many years was a familiar figure in the pubs around Mathew Street, site of the original Cavern Club and a place of pilgrimage for Beatles fans from all over the world.
The son of a council building inspector of Welsh ancestry, Allan Richard Williams was born in Bootle, a dockland suburb of Liverpool, on March 17, 1930. As he noted in his memoir, his formal education amounted to very little, and on leaving school he drifted in and out of plumbing. His claim to have tried his luck as singer, working with the Joe Loss Orchestra in the Isle of Man and even in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, remains unverified.
In 1975 he published memoir The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away, an amusing but unreliable account of his links to the group, to which Lennon gave his endorsement. Williams complained of night-time torments when "my teeth make a gritty noise in my skull and the sweat starts to pop out of my brow as I think of how I let the band and a million quid slip through my fingers".
Allan Williams married, in 1955, Beryl Chang, with whom he had two children. He also had a tempestuous long-term relationship with Beryl Adams, Brian Epstein's secretary, until her death in 2003.
Telegraph, London