Beatles (30 page)

Friday 29th June 1962

TOWER BALLROOM, NEW BRIGHTON

Neil will call for you between 6.45 and 7.00 p.m. in order to arrive at the Tower at 7.30 p.m. This is a Leach night for which he has given you excellent publicity as stars of the Bill. With this point in mind and the fact that he has been fairly co-operative over several matters recently, I would like you to give him one of your great performances. And as it’s the night before Sam’s wedding! It should be a big audience
which will be mainly paying to see The Beatles. Programme, continuity, suits, white shirts, ties, etc., etc. One hour spot
.

N.B. In the attached copy of ‘Mersey Beat’ the name ‘THE BEATLES’ on a rough count has been mentioned 15 times. On the 10 pages of ‘Mersey Beat’ ‘THE BEATLES’ appears on 6 pages. There has been a lot of publicity and there will be more and in this connection it will be of vital importance to live up to the publicity. Note that on ALL the above engagements during the performances, smoking, eating, chewing and drinking is STRICTLY PROHIBITED, prohibited
.

Brian was trying all this time to get them dates farther afield than Merseyside, but with little luck. During that summer he did manage to get them a date in Peterborough, but it was a complete failure. Nobody knew them and nobody liked them. ‘The audience sat on their hands,’ says Arthur Howes, the promoter who put them on.

All this time they were waiting anxiously to hear from George Martin. He’d said he’d let them know when they could come down and do a proper recording.

Brian eventually heard from George Martin at the end of July. He wanted them to sign a contract with Parlophone records. He was now trying to think of what songs they might record. Brian, as well as John, Paul and George, were ecstatic.

They didn’t tell Pete Best.

‘We were playing on the Wednesday evening, 15 August, at the Cavern,’ says Pete Best. ‘We were due to go the next evening to Chester and I was supposed to be taking John. As we were leaving the Cavern, I asked John what time he wanted me to pick him up for Chester. He said, oh no, he would go on his own. I said, what’s up? But he was off. His face looked scared. Then Brian rang, asking to see me and Neil at his office next morning.

‘Neil drove me down the next day. Brian looked very shaky, not his usual happy self. He always showed his feelings and
it was obvious there was something up. He was fidgeting all the time.

‘He said “I’ve got some bad news for you. The boys want you out and Ringo in.” It was a complete bombshell. I was stunned. I couldn’t say anything for two minutes.

‘I started asking him why and I couldn’t get any definite reasons. He said George Martin wasn’t too pleased with my playing. He said the boys thought I didn’t fit in. But there didn’t seem anything definite.

‘At last I said if that’s the way it is, then that’s it. I went out and told Neil who was waiting outside. I must have looked white. I told him I’d been booted out after two years with them. I didn’t know why. I said I couldn’t get a direct answer.

‘Brian came out and spoke to both of us. He asked me if I could stay on till the end of the week, playing on Thursday and Friday, till Ringo could come. I said yeh.

‘I just walked around, had a few pints. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I don’t know how the news came out. I didn’t tell anyone.’

The news did get out, almost immediately, and there was pandemonium in Liverpool.
Mersey Beat
announced it in their 23 August edition: ‘Mersey Beat Exclusive. Beatles Change Drummer.’ They didn’t give any reasons. They said it was all amicable. But they finished the story by saying that the Beatles were flying to London on 4 September for a recording session at EMI.

Pete Best fans, although they were nowhere as numerous as Paul McCartney fans, were furious. Their idol had been chucked out just at the Beatles’ moment of glory. They paraded through the streets, hung around NEMS with placards, picketed outside the Cavern and shouted slogans at all concerts.

John, Paul and George were attacked by Pete Best fans but Brian Epstein became their number one enemy.

‘The sacking of Pete Best left me in an appalling position. This was the first real problem I’d had. Overnight I became the most disliked man on the beat scene. For two nights I didn’t dare
go near the Cavern because of the crowds shouting “Pete for Ever, Ringo Never”, or “Pete is Best.” I couldn’t stay away for long, so Ray McFall laid on a bodyguard for me.’

Pete Best fans tried to get at the Beatles to hit or scratch them, while John, Paul and George fans tried to keep them off. Ringo fans just kept out of it. In all the fights some girls got hurt, but only George of the Beatles was injured. He got a black eye.

There were scores of rumours round Liverpool. Mal Evans, then a bouncer at the Cavern, says he heard people saying it was because Pete wouldn’t smile. Others said it was because he wouldn’t change his hairstyle. There seems little doubt that Brian didn’t want to do it.

‘I knew how popular Pete was. He was incredibly good-looking with a big following. I had got on well with him. In fact, he’d been the first one I’d got to know. I thought the way through was through Pete because he was the easiest to get to know, the simplest.

‘So I was very upset when the three of them came to me one night and said they didn’t want him. They wanted Ringo. It had been on the cards for a long time, but I’d hoped it wouldn’t happen.’

Because Brian was so loath to do it, he dragged in other excuses, like George Martin not liking his drumming, which was half true, but wasn’t a main reason for the sacking.

‘I did offer to keep Pete on in another group. I was a bit annoyed he didn’t turn up at Chester in the evening, when he said he would. I expected him. I hadn’t realized he couldn’t face meeting the boys again.’

‘How could I?’ says Pete. ‘What was the point, as they didn’t want me any more? I just sat at home for two weeks. Not knowing what to do. Birds came to the door all the time. They were camping in the garden and shouting for me.’

Neil thinks it was George who was most to blame. He thinks John really was fairly close to Pete, and Paul would never have done anything like that on his own. Neil says they all agreed to
it, but it was George who gave Brian the final push, as George was the one who was the biggest admirer of Ringo. George’s punch in the eye, says Neil, proves that theory.

Mrs Best has the simplest theory of all. ‘Pete’s beat had made them. They were jealous and they wanted him out. Pete hadn’t realized what a following he had till he left. He was always so very shy and quiet, never shot his mouth off, like some people I could mention.

‘He’d been their manager before Brian arrived, did the bookings and collected the money. I’d looked upon them as friends. I’d helped them so much, got them bookings, lending them money. I fed them when they were hungry. I was far more interested in them than their own parents.’

There is some justification for a little of Mrs Best’s anger. The sacking of Pete Best is one of the few murky incidents in the Beatles’ history. There was something sneaky about the way it was done. Admittedly, most people would have done the same and got the manager to do the dirty work. But all of them, especially John, had always been so honest and truthful with everyone.

It’s also true what Mrs Best says about Pete having served them well for so long. But it’s not true, and far from it, that they were simply producing the Pete Best sound, although Pete’s drumming played a part in their success.

‘When we came back from Germany,’ says Pete, ‘I was playing using my bass drum very loud and laying down a very solid beat. This was unheard of at the time in Liverpool as all the groups were playing the Shadows style. Even Ringo in Rory Storm’s group copied our beat and it wasn’t long before most drummers in Liverpool were playing the same style. This way of drumming had a great deal to do with the big sound we were producing.’

The others say that the main reason for keeping Pete so long was not his sound but that their permanent problem for so long had been a drummer. They wanted any good drummer, because the lack of one had hindered their progress. When a reasonable one came along, they stuck to him. Not necessarily because he was great, but because they knew what it was like not having one.

‘But if I wasn’t that great, why was I kept on for two and a half years? When we first returned to Liverpool, why didn’t they get another drummer then? There was plenty of them. Why wasn’t Ringo asked then, instead of two years later, on the eve of success?’

What makes or doesn’t make a good drummer is hard to define, but as a personality there is some evidence to suggest that Pete had not fitted in, as Astrid and Klaus had noticed in Hamburg, although Pete himself seems to have been unaware of it. Stu, unlike Pete, had realized from the beginning when he was being got at. Pete presumed he was a proper part of the group, after so long, and was naturally very surprised when the end came.

But for the sake of Pete’s career, whatever happened to the Beatles afterwards, the handling, and especially the announcing, of the sacking might have been done more neatly and cleanly. He could have been fixed up with a job in another group before the news was announced.

It’s easy of course to say all this now. Nobody knew how well the Beatles were going to do and what Pete was going to miss. The Beatles themselves did feel a bit guilty, but they say that it was a joint decision, not George’s. They’d never felt that Pete was one of them and it was only a matter of time.

‘We were cowards when we sacked him,’ says John. ‘We made Brian do it. But if we’d told Pete to his face, that would have been much nastier than getting Brian to do it. It would probably have ended in a fight if we’d told him.’

Pete left and lost his chance of show-business fame. But the affair had one happy outcome for the Beatles. Ringo Starr.

Richard Starkey, or Ringo, is the oldest of the Beatles. He would have been called Parkin today if his grandfather hadn’t decided to change his name. When this grandfather’s mother remarried and changed her name, from Parkin to Starkey, Ringo’s grandfather also changed his name to Starkey. This caused great confusion when at one time Ringo tried to trace his family back. The name Starkey is originally supposed to have come from the Shetland Isles.

Ringo’s mother, Elsie Gleave, married his father, Richard Starkey, in 1936. They met when they were both working at the same Liverpool bakery. She is short, stocky and blonde and looks today very much like Mrs Harrison.

When they got married they moved in with the Starkeys, Ringo’s father’s parents, in the Dingle. After Scotland Road, the Dingle is known as the roughest area of Liverpool. It’s in the centre, not far from the docks, far less salubrious than the slightly more airy new suburbs, where John, Paul and George were all brought up.

‘There’s a lot of tenements in the Dingle,’ says Ringo. ‘A lot of people in little boxes all trying to get out. You’d say you were from the Dingle and other people in Liverpool would say to you, oh aye, he’s bound to be a hard case, which of course wasn’t true with most people.’

Elsie and Richard Starkey got themselves a little house of
their own just before Ringo was born. This was not in a tenement, but in Madryn Street, a dismal row of low two-storeyed terrace houses. Their house was bigger than most, three up and three down, as opposed to the usual two rooms up and two rooms down. Their rent in 1940 was 14s. 10d. a week.

‘We’ve always been just ordinary, poor working-class on both sides of the family,’ says Ringo, ‘though there’s a rumour in the family that me great-grandmother was fairly well off. She had chromium railings round her house. Well, they were very shiny anyway. Perhaps I just made that up. You know what it’s like, you dream things, or your mother tells you things so you come to believe you actually saw them.

But me mother’s mother really was very poor. She had 14 kids.’

Ringo was born just after midnight on the morning of 7 July 1940, at Number 9 Madryn Street. He was a week late. He was delivered by forceps and weighed ten pounds. He arrived with his eyes open and looking all round the place. His mother told all the neighbours that she was sure he must have been here before.

His mother Elsie was then 26 and his father Richard 28. They christened their first, and only, baby, Richard. It is a working-class tradition to always call the first son after the father. They also called him by the pet name of Ritchie, just as his father was called and as they are both called by their families today.

Mrs Starkey, Ringo’s mother, remembers lying in bed, still recovering from the birth, when she heard the first sirens of the war. The bombing of Liverpool had begun.

They hadn’t yet got round to installing shelters in the Dingle. The first really serious bombing raids occurred a few weeks later. The Starkeys, along with two neighbours who’d been chatting in the house, all rushed to take shelter in the coalhole under the stairs. Ritchie started screaming. His mother discovered that in the rush and crush she had put him over her shoulder upside down. She put him the right way up and he slept right through the raid. This was another story which she soon told the neighbours, and still does.

When Ritchie was just over three years old, his parents parted. Except on three occasions later, Ritchie has not seen his father since.

There was none of the drama or hysteria of John’s parents when they parted. It appears to have been settled quietly. Elsie took the baby and they were eventually divorced.

Ringo and his mother stayed on alone in Madryn Street for some time, but the rent soon became too expensive and they moved round the corner to Number 10 Admiral Grove. This house has only four rooms, two up and two down. The rent in 1940 was 10s. a week.

Ringo’s earliest memory dates from this removal. He thinks he must have been about five at the time. ‘I can remember sitting on the back flap of the removal van taking our things round to Admiral Grove.’

He has no memory of his parents’ parting. He can only remember meeting his father twice as a very young child, and once later as an early teenager.