The heartbreaking family tragedy that the BBC left out of its film on the Loaded years

As a magazine, it changed everything in the Nineties – but when hijinks led to a life-changing accident for one of its brightest stars, things rapidly fell apart. Here, former editor Tim Southwell tells the story of Beth Summers, the fashion editor who was left living in assisted care for the rest of her life, but who you won’t see mentioned in this week’s documentary

‘Beth was like our big sister at Loaded’: The fashion editor pictured with her daughter Eden (Tim Southwell)

Standing at the bar at The Crown & Two Chairmen pub in Soho on a cold Wednesday night in November, I am surrounded by a large gang of my old magazine pals. It’s noisy, everyone is laughing and hugging each other. It’s been too long. We’ve reunited to watch an advance screening of the BBC documentary Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem, about the magazine we started, which became the publishing phenomenon of the Nineties. In one way or another, Loaded changed all our lives.

Irvine Welsh is here. Katie Puckrik too. And a whole gaggle of young TV execs who probably weren’t even born when Loaded burst onto the scene. But there is one person who isn’t here: Beth Summers, Loaded’s fashion editor – a trailblazing stylist not just of Loaded, but of the Nineties.

When James Brown left to join GQ, he singled Beth out for elevating the fashion section and turning it into something completely distinctive. He was right. Beth did change Loaded, and her life irrevocably changed after working there too. While working for us, Beth and her assistant, Tom Stubbs, were in a terrible accident.

They had been in Milan for Fashion Week and were on a scooter travelling home from a party. At about 2am they hit the kerb of a pavement outside Armani so hard that Beth flew some 20 yards through the air. They were not wearing crash helmets.

She survived. But only just. Her brain injuries meant that life would never be the same. Her parents had to raise her seven-year-old daughter Eden and Beth would need assisted care for the rest of her life. After the accident, Loaded was done. In a matter of months, most of the original team had left. We were no longer, as my book title claimed... Getting Away With It. Not anymore.

I remember being in the office leafing through the new issue with Martin Kemp on the cover when the publisher came in to tell me what had happened. As editor, I flew out that night to Milan with Beth’s father Alan. We had also been trying to get hold of Ben Marshall, another of Beth’s best friends from the magazine, who is fluent in Italian.

This is the story, as told by Ben:

Beth was like our big sister at Loaded: Smart, funny, witty and pretty – a strong, independent woman, we all loved Beth. She was also definitely one of the lads. And a fashion genius. Bad stuff did not happen to people like Beth. Bad stuff doesn’t happen to people like us. And then I got the call.

I flew out the following day. By then Beth’s parents Alan and Lesley had told us that Beth was in a very bad way. Alan had already been to see her and he looked utterly devastated. Then I went in. The lights were very dim. She was sat upright, but she was unconscious. She was deep in a coma. Her head was completely covered in bandages, like an Egyptian mummy, and a myriad of wires and drip feeds dangled from her body. Around her bed monitors fizzed and beeped, casting a weird blue light over her. Her head was huge; the size of a watermelon.

Southwell: ‘The documentary is very good but it still feels crushing that Beth wasn’t in it’ (BBC/KEO FIlms)

I stood for a minute or two talking to her. Talking at her. I am guessing this is what everyone did. I tried to be cheerful. “Hey Beth, how ya doing?” or similar platitudes, as meaningless as they were inaudible to her. I still had this bizarre idea that things were going to work out fine. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The following day I had to organise a hospital flight home for Tom who was in a different hospital and asking about Beth. There was a part of me (which I am not at all proud of) that was furious with him. How could he have been so dumb as to hurtle round Milan on a Vespa without a helmet, and with my friend, our big sister, on the back?

But I now know that I probably would’ve done the same as Tom. We all would have done. People later described the Loaded team as nihilists, but a nihilist is someone who hates life. Everyone I knew embraced life, but we embraced it idiotically. Like climbing a tree that is too high we had no idea of the risks until someone fell out. That was Loaded.

Going to strange places, daft places, dangerous places. Doing things we were patently unqualified to do. Extreme sports. Drinking too much. Taking too many drugs. Going a bit too crazy... but always having a laugh. We were a crew of extremists and none of us had a stop button. And we got away with it. We were always getting away with it... Until we stopped getting away with it. And no one was laughing anymore.

Adam Black, James Brown and Tim Southwell on a night out (BBC/KEO Films/Chris Floyd)

Tom was likely to be permanently disfigured and Beth, one of our best friends, our big sister, was on the verge of death. Her dad, Alan, kept getting me to ask the doctors: “Will my daughter die?” I felt sick asking it and the doctors, hardened men, looked sick answering it. I had to tell Alan as gently as possible that things were touch and go.

Back in England at the Loaded office, everyone had made tapes of Beth’s favourite music, tapes of her then seven-year-old daughter Eden chatting and all this other stuff that we assumed would act like some magic key and wake her from her coma. We had watched way too much TV. Comas don’t work like that. As the Italian doctors told me, the coma is much more comparable to being deep, deep underwater. So deep that most things are not audible and cannot be felt.

If people emerge from comas at all, it is gradual. Still, we played her the tapes, and after we had played them Alan and I would go and look at scans of her brain. The black patches were dead, the doctors said – they would never come back. As the weeks passed, Beth gradually began to resurface. She spent most of the new millennium’s first winter in that Milan hospital.

Southwell and Ben Marshall pictured with Beth and Eden (Tim Southwell)

Every weekend I flew out to translate for Alan and to babysit Beth’s daughter Eden when her parents were at the hospital. I would take Eden ice skating in the main square, taking advantage of the freezing Alpine winds.

The Italian mums who crowded the square with their own children would remark on how pretty and bright she was. But I kept thinking, she is only seven years old, and she will never get to know her mum properly.

When Beth finally got back to the UK after six months or so, it wasn’t to go home to the daughter she loved, or back to the job that she was so good at, but to another hospital that specialised in head injuries. After that, I wanted out of Loaded. It could never be the same again. Beth wouldn’t be there and the hijinks now had a darkness to them that I did not want to associate with the magazine.

Brown and Southwell pictured with a mock-up of the first ‘Loaded’ magazine (Getty)

Within a few months, all of us were gone and Loaded, to all intents and purposes, was over. I saw Beth a couple more times at that hospital in west London. She could speak, albeit falteringly. After that the doctors needed her to work on her short-term memory and we were a distraction, the past that was eclipsing the present. I get that. To some degree that is true of me and Loaded. True of all of us and Loaded.

Tom, physically at least, made a full and quite astonishing recovery. On the surface, he seemed his normal buoyant self. Then, in 2007, Beth was awarded damages taken out against Tom’s insurers. Alan had fought for them and the sums now keep her in 24/7 assisted living. The Italian helmet law, which had existed for a long time before Beth and Tom had their accident, is now being enforced with proper vigour. Alan had not just succeeded in winning damages for his daughter; he almost certainly saved lives.

***

None of this story is told in the documentary. Although her daughter Eden, now a glamorous 32-year-old music PR was interviewed about what had happened to her mum, it was left on the cutting room floor. As were the recollections we all had on that dark time.

(Tim Southwell)

Of course, this is just one story about Loaded. There are many others, a number of other interpretations of that time. The documentary is very good but it still feels crushing that Beth wasn’t in it. Ben and I both broke down while filming the stuff about Milan. God knows how Eden coped with it when she was filmed.

The film had gone from two one-hour programmes to a 90-minute film. That’s showbiz for you. I feel bad. I told Eden I thought it was a good idea to be in it and a nice way of marking her mum’s role and importance to the Loaded story.

Tom was there for the screening – still a funny, likeable and gregarious guy. He made a good recovery from the accident, but he and Beth had a special bond and I can’t imagine he likes going over what happened. At the screening, I saw Eden and Tom talking. Eden looked tearful. It’s a moment in time. I felt like crying myself.

Alan and Lesley had to learn to be parents all over again and both sadly passed away during the Covid pandemic. They have done a fabulous job with Eden, she is still very much a part of her mum’s life. Beth is now 62 years old and living in Bedfordshire in a house with 24/7 care.

Eden remembers her as the woman who did it all! School runs, family holidays, working long hours, and everything else that came with working at Loaded.

For my part, I remember the seven-year-old skating on the ice in Milan with Ben. And I feel protective. I feel like I let her down. Beth is very much missed. But she will never be forgotten. Not by the people who know the real story of Loaded.

‘Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem’ airs on BBC Two on Friday 22 November at 9pm and will also be available on iPlayer. ‘Getting Away With It: The Real Inside Story of Loaded’ is available here