Pattie Boyd’s Father Forbade Her to Marry George Harrison

TL;DR:

• Pattie Boyd’s mother and father split up without telling their children.
• Pattie Boyd’s father expressed his disapproval of her marriage to George Harrison.
• She invited her uncle to give her away instead.

In 1966, Pattie Boyd prepared to marry one of the most famous people in the world, and her father wasn’t happy about it. She had a very distant relationship with her dad, but she still wrote to him to invite him to her and George Harrison’s wedding. Instead of RSVPing, he wrote back, forbidding her to marry Harrison. Boyd didn’t listen to him. 

Pattie Boyd didn’t have a close relationship with her father

Boyd lived in Kenya as a child, and, to her dismay, her parents sent her to boarding school. On one school break, she returned home to realize that her family life had changed dramatically.

“On one half-term holiday, I was taken to a new house in Nairobi,” she wrote in the book Wonderful Tonight. “Inexplicably, my mother had moved. Then, she dropped a bombshell. She introduced me to a tall, dark stranger and said, ‘Darling, this is your new father.'” 

Boyd hadn’t even realized that her parents had divorced. Later, she learned that her father was spending a “suspicious amount of time” with a woman with whom he used to go horseback riding. Her mother left with Boyd’s younger siblings and asked for a divorce.

Though Boyd spent many school breaks with her father after the divorce, she said that they didn’t get along. 

“He wasn’t approachable in any way: he was awkward, humorless, silent, and distant,” Boyd wrote.

They grew even more distant from him when her mother and stepfather moved all the children to England with them. 

Pattie Boyd said her father forbade her to marry George Harrison

Years later, Boyd and Harrison prepared to marry. They met on the set of the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night and had dated for two years. As they planned the wedding, Boyd’s mother encouraged her to invite her father.

“My mother thought I should invite Jock Boyd, my father, to the wedding, so I wrote him at an address in Devon,” Boyd explained. “He had apparently been living there with a new wife for several years. I didn’t know how to address him — Daddy, Jock, Mr. Boyd? In the end I called him Daddy. I said, ‘I am going to marry George, he comes from Liverpool, I’m sure you’d like him, and if you’d like to come to our wedding, please do.'”

Her father’s response wasn’t exactly friendly. 

“He wrote back saying he forbade me to marry someone so young whose family he hadn’t met,” she explained. “He didn’t come.”

She said her uncle ended up saving the ceremony

As her father wouldn’t come, Boyd had her Uncle John give her away at the ceremony. He lived in Somalia, so she didn’t see him very often, but she considered him “the main male influence” in her life. 

“Uncle John not only gave me away, he saved the day,” she explained. “After the ceremony, we all went back to Kinfauns for lunch and the photographer Brian [Epstein, The Beatles’ manager] had booked had a problem with his camera — he couldn’t synchronize the flash. John came to the rescue with a little Instamatic he had just bought in Selfridges, and took pictures at the reception.”