Bugatti Type 57S Atalante (57502) - Harold Carr

Harold Carr

Harold "Harry" Carr was born in Newcastle in 1917, and died on 14 June 2007, aged 89. Carr gained both medical and engineering degrees, and had worked both as an orthopaedic surgeon and an osteopath, and ran a family wholesalers business in Newcastle, JJ Macy's. He was described as "generous", "eccentric" and a sort of "mad doctor" by his family. The life of Dr Carr was compared with that of eccentric American millionaire Howard Hughes, due to a passion for machinery, aviation and adventuring, and also due to suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which in later life turned him into a recluse. The reasons for Carr storing the car unused for so long was attributed to a hoarding instinct which he had developed and had progressively worsened since the 1950s, due to his OCD. In addition to the Bugatti, the hoarding had led to Carr collecting everything from receipts for pencils to 1,500 German beer steins. His hoarding instinct also meant that the documentary history of the car had been preserved.