If you know me well you may be thinking, 'Beatles tour Megan? You
went on an all-day Beatles tour? Why would you do that? You’ve never expressed an
interest in the Beatles before.' Trust me, if the people who run the Beatles
tour we went on had known how pitifully little I knew about the fab four,
I probably wouldn't have been allowed in the van at all. I can now tell you however
that there are four, not five, Beatles, they came from Liverpool, not London, and
I actually knew a lot more of their songs than I thought I did. In fact, I
can now tell you even more, including most things about John, Paul, Ringo and George’s early
lives, such when and where they took the bus each week.
Nevertheless, there I was, sitting backwards in a van on the way to I-had-no-clue-where. The driver chatted with us a bit on the way to our first
stop, going over a few Beatles facts and answering any early questions we had.
He was a friendly man with an easy, open smile.
Schools
We had driven uphill away from the Mersey and before long we pulled up to the sidewalk next to a monument of piled, concrete suitcases, each bearing a plaque with a name of a famous person who
had come from Liverpool. A
street stretched away from us behind the suitcases with striking, white
columned buildings on one side and red brick, Victorian row houses on the
other. The large white buildings turned out to be two schools: the Liverpool
College of Art which was attended by John and Cynthia Lennon and the original
Beatles’ bass player Stuart Sutcliffe, and the Liverpool Institute next door
where Paul McCartney and his brother Mike, their friend Ivan Vaughan who
introduced Paul and John, George Harrison and the Beatles future road manager
Neil Aspinall attended. It was early and the misty haze that covers England in
the morning was still sitting over the street. We snapped a few photos while
listening to our guide describe the youthful pre-Beatle lives of John, Paul,
George and Stuart while they attended the two schools that were before us.
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| One of the cases was a guitar case and had Paul's name on it |
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| The Liverpool Institute |
Mendips
After a brief walk down the street we piled back into the
van and drove on. Soon we were driving along wider, residential streets with
grass medians separating the two sides of the road. The guide pulled up next to
251 Menlove Ave and the blue plaque on the front of the house informed us that
we were standing in front of Mendips, the childhood home of John Lennon. As
another, larger bus pulled up behind our van on the curb, our guide left us,
promising to meet us again outside of our third stop.
An older man came out of the house and met us in the front
garden. He introduced himself as Colin, and explained that he and his wife,
Sylvia, actually live at Mendips and work on preserving and restoring the
house when they aren't giving private tours. They also look after 20 Forthlin Road,
Paul’s childhood home, which is in another part of town. Colin gives the tours
at Mendips while Sylvia guides people through Paul’s home. He
added as a side note that English Heritage had added the blue plaque and is in charge of adding plaques throughout the UK. The National Trust had originally said they
weren't interested in buying the house since no Beatles songs had been composed
in it, unlike Paul’s house. (Incidentally not true: Please Please Me and a few other songs were written there.) Yoko
Ono bought the house and donated it to the Trust anyway, saying she wanted
Beatles fans to be able to enjoy the history there. (Side Note: I seriously
love blue plaques.) Colin went on to explain that blue plaques were only given to
notable, non-fictional people that had either been dead at least 20 years or had reached their 100th birthday, which is why Paul McCartney's home doesn't have one. (And this, right here,
Colin then began to tell us about John’s early life and how
he came to live at Mendips. His father was largely out of the picture, so John
lived with his mother until at the age of five when she sent him to live with his
Aunt Mimi and Uncle George at Mendips, thinking her sister and husband would be
a better influence on her young son. His Aunt Mimi was a strict, good woman,
Colin explained. In 1945 when John moved in, Mendips was considered to be a
rather large, luxurious house; certainly the most
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| John's bedroom window |
When Ivan introduced Paul and John in
July 1957, the two hit it off quickly and John invited Paul to join his
band, The Quarrymen, which was named for the Quarries in the area where red sandstone is mined. From then on Paul was a frequent visitor at Mendips, traipsing
through the front garden and the gate on the side to the door at the back of
the house, guitar in hand.
John had
started to reconnect with his mother, Julia, (Beatles' song anyone?) not long before meeting Paul.
While he loved his aunt, he felt a strong connection with his mother since she also enjoyed music. She encouraged his talent and when Mimi would tell him he couldn’t
practice or get a new guitar, he would go to his mother who would sympathize
and say yes. Almost exactly a year after he met Paul, his mom was hit by a car
and killed when she left Mendips one evening. While Lennon was heavily affected
by his mother’s death, it did draw him closer to Paul, who had also lost his
mother at a young age. The two quickly became inseparable.
Colin stopped his story and directed us up the stairs
towards John’s bedroom and the bathroom. John had the box room, a small room
big enough for a twin bed and a space to walk around it. It wasn’t big but John
loved his room, Colin said. There were records and drawings John had doodled in
school around the rooms and the wallpaper was original from when the Beatle had
lived there. Although it was one of his favorite places in the house, he and
Paul rarely practiced or spent much time there. Not only was it small, but its
position in the house made it such that the hot air rose and made it stuffy
during warm summer days. They usually practiced in the sitting room or the
side, glass room since they liked its “bathroom acoustic,” as they called it.
When they were a bit older, Mimi allowed them to practice in the front parlor, permitting that they were careful.
Back downstairs, Colin said a warm goodbye and we piled into
the tour bus, which drove on to 20 Forthlin Road. The house was in a poorer
area than John’s house, but it was a step up for the McCartney family. Sylvia met us
in the front garden and began to tell us a little bit about the family that had
lived inside the house. Paul’s father Jim was a quiet, kind man with a large family
that liked to play music. From the time when Paul and his younger brother Mike were
infants, they would attend large family gatherings where their family members
would play various instruments and dance late into the night. Jim played the tuba, double bass, trumpet, and piano among other instruments and
sang, and he encouraged both Mike and Paul to learn how to play different
instruments as they grew up too. This musical background was one thing that impressed
John when the two boys met since Paul could harmonize instantly with John and
effortlessly played around him on a variety of instruments.
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| Paul's front door |
Sylvia led us through the front door into a comfortable
sitting room at the front of the house and invited us to sit down while she
played a recorded message from Sir Paul himself on the stereo. He recounted a
few memories from his time in the house before inviting us to share the
memories with him as we explored.
Paul hadn’t been back inside the house since moving out in 1964. He had stopped by once when Sylvia and Colin were out of town, and driven by another time when there was a group touring. Not wanting to cause a scene with the tour group the second time he tried to visit, he parked further up the street to wait. Soon an old man knocked on his window. He rolled it down expecting to sign something and was shocked when the man asked, “so did you want to know where he lived?” By the time he went back to the house, no one was there.
Paul hadn’t been back inside the house since moving out in 1964. He had stopped by once when Sylvia and Colin were out of town, and driven by another time when there was a group touring. Not wanting to cause a scene with the tour group the second time he tried to visit, he parked further up the street to wait. Soon an old man knocked on his window. He rolled it down expecting to sign something and was shocked when the man asked, “so did you want to know where he lived?” By the time he went back to the house, no one was there.
Sylvia began to tell us more about Paul’s early life at
Forthlin Road. The McCartneys were able to move into the house in 1955 thanks to
Paul’s mother Mary’s wages as a midwife. The year after they moved in, she died from cancer.
Paul was 14, and like John four years later, he was deeply affected. His
brother said he never saw Paul cry and he never talked about it, but after their
mother’s death he traded the trumpet his father had given him for an acoustic
guitar, re-stringed it so he could play it left-handed and took to his room for
long periods of time to practice.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere that Sylvia
described at 20 Forthlin Road was lighthearted and warm. Mike was an amateur
photographer, and asked Paul if he would trade rooms, giving up his larger one
for the tiny box room at the other end of the upstairs hall so Mike could develop
his photos in the larger room. Paul kindly agreed to switch. The brothers remained partners
in crime throughout most of their adolescence. When they were out too late and
their dad grew tired of waiting for them, he would lock the doors downstairs.
Upon finding the door locked, the brothers would climb up the drainpipe on the
back of the house and dive through the small window in the upstairs bathroom. (Mike took a photo of Paul in the process of climbing before they moved out of
the house almost ten years after moving in.)
After Paul met John they often wrote songs at Paul's house,
including Love Me Do and I Saw Her Standing There, and then practiced them in the living room. They would perform their songs for Paul’s dad once they deemed them good enough. They didn’t always follow his feedback,
Sylvia told us as she patted the piano next to her in the living room, otherwise the
lyrics to She Loves You would be “Yes,
Yes, Yes,” instead of Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” since Jim didn’t like the
Americanism. Sylvia also pointed out the different wallpapers around the rooms,
explaining that since the family was poor Mary would get scraps and left over
swatches of wallpaper from the store and then make do.
Through the hall was the kitchen with the original sink,
draining board and cupboard from when Paul was a child in the house. Up the
stairs we found Mike’s larger room, Paul’s small bedroom and the bathroom they somersaulted into late at night. Photos that Mike had taken from when they
lived in the house were hung on the walls.
St. Peter's Parish Church
After another warm goodbye we split off from the group and
met our guide by the curb. He took us to St. Peter's Parish Church, an ornate, red sandstone building whose grounds are marked by family graves with crooked, sinking headstones. Paul had played here as a
child and was introduced to John at one of the church’s functions at another
hall in town. Our guide
pointed out the names carved into the shoulder high gravestones as we walked among them. “Thomas Riding and Edward Jones and Ellen Riding
and Ethel Riding and…” People died and if they were related, they were stacked
on top of each other, he explained. Since the country was so old, there wasn’t a lot of new
ground to bury the dead. Thus as the coffins were stacked higher, the lower
ones decomposed and the ground sank in places; leaving the graveyard with an
eerie, decayed look.
After a little bit, he stopped beside a grave with five
inhabitants, one of them being the famed Eleanor Rigby. Several stones away a grave
marker had the last name McKenzie. Although Paul said he made up the names when he wrote the song Eleanor Rigby, he admitted later that he had most likely seen the names when he played there as a boy and retained them.
Strawberry Field
We drove back down the street and stopped in front of the
two ornate, strawberry-red gates of Strawberry Field. The sign inside the gates told us they
were replicas that were almost exact copies of the original gates. A guitar was
on the ground inside, surrounded by golden colored leaves. Our guide
described again how John and later Paul would climb over the fence behind his house
to play in the field, a space that had been owned by the Salvation Army since
the 30s and was converted to an orphanage in the 70s. Now it is only a fenced
in field and destination for Beatles fans. People had scrawled messages in
permanent marker and chalk on parts of the gate and the walls surrounding it.
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| Looking through the gate at Strawberry Field |
Penny Lane
song was standing
beside the now closed Sgt. Pepper’s Bistro, and the barber who showed “photographs of every head he’s had the pleasure to know” is on the street
beside the roundabout. He now has a sign that reads, “’The Original’ World
Famous Penny Lane Barber Shop as written, Sung about and visited by The
Beatles,” (odd capitalization and all) instead of the photographs Paul
mentioned. The pretty nurse who was selling poppies from a tray and felt as
though she was in a play was a schoolmate of Lennon’s named Beth Davidson, our
guide explained. She was dressed in a nurses’ outfit for fun, but she was
actually also in a play at the time. She was selling poppies for Remembrance
Day when John and his friends walked by and stopped to talk to her. St.
Barnabas Parish Church where Paul was a choirboy rose in rusty red sandstone
off to the side of the roundabout. It was fun looking at the street as Paul
might have when he rode the bus through it each week. |
| "The bus shelter in the center of the roundabout" |
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| The now closed Sgt. Peppers Bistro |
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| St. Barnabas Parish Church |
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| The barbershop |
George and Ringo's Childhood Homes
After leaving Penny Lane we stopped at 12 Arnold
Grove, a small red house where George Harrison was born and lived for the first
six years of his life. The house was so small it only cost his parents ten
shillings per week in rent when they first moved in.
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| 12 Arnold Grove |
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| 9 Madryn Street |
Later we also saw 9 Madryn Street and 10 Admiral
Grove. The first was the house where Ringo Starr was born. It was due for
demolition when we saw it, and was actually supposed to have been torn down
several months before we arrived, but somehow the street still stood. “Save
Ringo’s home” was scrawled across the boarded up door in black sharpie with
other messages from fans. The second house was where Ringo had lived during the
few years preceding The Beatles’ rise to fame. It looked to be exactly the same
size as George’s house, but this one had been repainted white with bubble gum
pink accents. The eccentric older woman who lives there now has permanently
positioned a creepy looking baby doll in the upstairs window, which I can only
presume is meant to add a final touch of weird to the house’s appearance.
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| The houses on Madryn Street that are due to be demolished |
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| 10 Admiral Grove |
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| The upstairs window at 10 Admiral Grove |
Casbah Coffee Club
Finally our guide dropped us off at the third big tour of
our trip: The Casbah Coffee Club.
A black sign with the name of the club and “Established
1959” is nailed to a gnarled oak tree beside the path that runs next to the
large house. We walked around to a basement door at the back of the house where
the original Beatles’ drummer Pete Best’s brother Rory met us.
Rory is a kind, older man. After smiling and shaking
each of our hands he led us into the Casbah. The house above it is large, and
when the Bests first moved in the basement was empty. One night while watching TV,
their mom Mona ‘Mo’ Best saw a program about a popular club in London called
The 2i’s Coffee Bar where several singers had been discovered. Inspired, she
informed her family that she was going to open a Rock N’ Roll club in the
basement. Her husband said no, but the next day Pete, Rory and their friends
began to help Mo clear out the cellar.
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| The outside of the house where the Casbah Coffee Club is located |
The Quarrymen, all friends with Pete Best, heard about the club and approached
Mo to ask her to let them play. She said they could play there but she needed help
finishing up the cellar first, so Paul, John and George picked up paintbrushes and added
color to the ceilings, a dragon on the wall of the entrance (a traditional,
Eastern sign of good luck that Mo, who was raised in India, wanted by the door)
and other decorative finishes. John apparently had an urge to leave his mark
that went beyond simple colors though, because he had begun to carve his name into
the black wall when Mo caught him and yelled at him. When The Beatles came back and played a show further
into their rise to fame, he got a little further, carving “John Im back” into a
panel of the multicolored ceiling over the larger stage.
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| The Aztec ceiling |
The first room, the Aztec Room, has geometric shapes on the
ceiling and was John’s third attempt at decoration. Mo hated the human figures
he painted first, and she vetoed his second attempt of plain green since
green was her unlucky color. Finally what she had called Aztec shapes were
born. The small room that comes next has Paul’s rainbow ceiling, the same one
the Quarrymen stood under when they played on the club's opening night and on quite a few nights after. The next room is the
Spider Room, and has different colored panels in the ceiling that everyone
helped paint and a giant spider web behind the slightly raised stage. When The
Beatles returned from Hamburg and nearly disbanded, they were saved by an offer
from Mo for them to play regularly at the Casbah in front of the web. Finally the last room has tables and a used-to-be bar that
now sells souvenirs. The ceiling here was also painted by all of the boys and
has silver stars on a black background. On the far wall is a silver silhouette
of John that his first wife Cynthia painted when they were dating during
the Quarrymen days.
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| Paul's rainbow ceiling |
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| John's first attempt at leaving his mark |
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| John's second attempt |
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| Rory Best showing us the piano bar where quite a few of his drunken, youthful nights began. |
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| Me on the stage in the Spider Room |
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| Cynthia's silhouette of John |
Cavern Club
Our final stop before being dropped off at the bus station
was the Cavern Club, which honestly was the least interesting part of the tour.
Not only was there not a single Liverpudlian there except perhaps the
bartenders, but the whole club was a reconstruction since the original had been
razed. Although some photos and huge statues of the four Beatles’ faces were
cool, the space was more interesting as an Across
the Universe filming location than as a Beatles spot.
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| Random woman leaving the Cavern Club |
I am definitely now a Beatles fan, and not just because I refuse to spend $150 and not get something major our of it; I actually really enjoy their music. Going on the tour as a stranger to the fab four was an interesting way to get to know them. I explored their bedrooms, traced their brush strokes in the Casbah Club and saw the places that meant enough to them that they were immortalized in song. As a result, I was interested in them as people first, and was more interested in their music afterward than I might have been if I had heard more of it before the tour.
Other Photos
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| Wooden crosses with messages and poppies outside of St. Peter's Parish Church |
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| The plaque on the building where Paul first met John |
RLO - suffix-ies
British people like to add -ies to things. For instance, bad
guys are baddies, good guys are goodies, villains are villies, relatives are
rellies, presents are pressies, and so on. The first few times I noticed this I
was confused. As far as I know, baby talk is usually only accepted when talking
to small children and animals at home, but even still, we don’t usually
make such liberal use of the suffix -ies even when using baby talk. Before too
long I realized most of the British people I encountered did this on a regular
basis.
I can’t exactly say I don't ever add -ies myself though, since my friend
recently pointed out that the sugary breakfast cereal is actually called Mini Wheats, not Mini Wheaties as I have been calling it my entire life. Many boxes in many stores have since confirmed this
and, yep, my world is a little bit shattered.
Londonisms
Pot noodle - cup o’ noodle
Hosepipe - hose
Garden hose - another word for a hose
Holiday - vacation
Slag - slut
Duvet - quilt
Chin - punch (i.e. I chinned him.)
Stag Party - Bachelor Party
Hen Party / Hen do - Bachelorette Party
