The
Morgue Skiffle Cellar
"Balgownie"
25 Oak
Hill Park,
Broadgreen,
L13
Historically
part of Lancashire, Broad Green is a small, primarily residential district on
the eastern edge of Liverpool, covering an area of just over a square mile and
today close to the start of the M62 Motorway. It is bordered by Old Swan to the
north west, Knotty Ash to the north east, Childwall to the south and, further
east, Bowring Park where I grew up.
Despite
its size it is home to both Broad Green Hospital and Broad Green International
School and is served by its own railway station where regular trains depart for
Liverpool City centre, Manchester, Wigan and St. Helens. Along with some other
stations on the same line, Broad Green is the joint oldest used railway station
site in the world being a part of the original 1830 Liverpool and Manchester
passenger railway.
Map
showing position of the villas in Oak Hill Park 1906
In 1904
there were some 25 villas in this area owned by well to do merchants and other
businessmen. Whilst the majority have since been demolished to make way for
modern flats and houses a few examples of some very fine properties remain.
Three
of the large houses remaining have been occupied by religious orders. Temperley (no. 84) is now called Bon
Secours and was taken over by a Catholic Order of Sisters of that name in
1957. Spekelands was, until 1991, the premises of the Convent of the
Daughters of the Heart Mary who took over the property in 1949.
St.
Martins nursing home presently occupies the site of Grange House, in 1904 the home of Peter Carroll and Owen Traynor,
proprietors of a firm of oyster merchants. Grange House was subsequently taken
over by the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition who had used it as a
postulate house. Since moving from Manchester in 1932 they had been established
in the adjacent house called Roseyln
next door. However, war damage and deterioration to the latter property led to
the Sisters buying a third house, Thornwood which is now in use as a convent
with the former site of Roseyln now
occupied by a residential home.
With
regards to the quality of the former villas in Oak Hill Park the author Eddie
Barker writes: One cannot fail to be impressed by the large rooms, the many
bedrooms, splendid marble or mahogany fireplaces....many of them would have had
a billiard room where the gentlemen would retire to have a cigar and a game on
the foolside table.
Fern Lea, well hidden from the road by trees
and bushes is privately owned. The property still has some of the old stables
and an original cobbled area.
Directly opposite Fern Lea at 25a Oak Hill park is the former site of
Balgownie. The house was demolished in
the 1960s and St. Agnes Secondary Modern School for Girls (latterly the St.
Agnes Wing of the Broughton High School) was built on the site as seen above.
The school too has now been demolished and today the land is occupied by a
private house. I'd made several unsuccessful visits trying to find the site
until a friend told me he'd noticed that the gates were still in situ whilst
walking his dog around Oak Hill
So,
what’s the connection to the fabulous foursome then?
Rory
Storm was born Alan Caldwell and lived at 54 Broad Green Road near to the
southern entrance to Oak Hill Park. He was an "extrovert entertainer"
despite his serious stammer (which disappeared as soon as he started singing)
and at the start of the 1960s his group The Hurricanes were considered to be
one of the best in Liverpool, performing regularly in the Cavern and elsewhere.
Ringo Starr would join the Hurricanes in late 1958.
Al’s
sister Iris found her first boyfriend when she was thirteen, a fourteen year
old lad from Speke called George Harrison. She met him after agreeing to
accompany her friend, Ann Harvey on a double date at the Palace Ice Rink on
Prescot Road in Kensington. Ann’s boyfriend was Arthur Kelly and he brought his
friend George with him.
Palace
Ice Rink, Prescot Road, Kensington
George
definitely saw her as his first girlfriend, but was unsure how she saw the
relationship. "My first girlfriend
was Rory Storm's sister, Iris Caldwell. She was really nice and had cotton wool
in her bra. She probably didn't ever think she was my girlfriend. You never
know when you're young; you just fancy somebody, or someone's in the same room
as you, and you end up thinking they're your girlfriend. I'd met Iris a
couple of times and went round to her house and hung out".
George
went on a couple more dates with Iris before being invited to her home in Broad
Green Road to meet her parents, beginning a friendship with them that would
last longer than his brief teenage romance with their daughter. Their mother,
Vi Caldwell recalled that "George used to come and watch TV three times a
week. He and Iris used to sit there holding hands. It was the first time either
of them had ever taken any interest in someone of the opposite sex. At Iris'
fourteenth birthday party, I remember George turned up in a brand new
Italian-style suit covered with buttons. As in most teenage parties, they kept
on playing kissing games and somehow or other, George and Iris always ended up
together."
During
the course of his visits to the Caldwells, George became aware of the music
club Al and his friend Johnny Byrne were planning to open. George later
recalled that "they had a little basement that they were trying to turn
into a coffee club. That seemed to be the craze in the Fifties". It was
the second such venue in Liverpool. Two and a half miles away Lowlands, a
similar club in the cellar of a large Victorian House opened a week earlier in
Hayman's Green, West Derby.
The
club, which they decided to call the Morgue Skiffle Cellar was in the cellar of
Balgownie a big house six doors along from where Johnny Byrne lived and just
around the corner from Alan. It was a nurses' home, owned by Mrs Thompson and
it was she who allowed her nephew Alan and his friends to use the cellar as a
teenagers’ music venue, to the delight of the area's excitable teenagers. They promptly painted the club entirely in
black and with the help of a couple of girls from the art college added some
luminous skeletons which glowed in the light of an ultra-violet bulb. Hung over
the entrance was a sign THE MORGUE which gave visitors the impression of a
crypt.
The
club was open for business twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. As
the boys never obtained a license the Morgue was illegal. Mindful of this they
didn't provide the club's address in the Evening Express advertisement for the
opening session on 13 March 1958 which meant that few, if any, knew where it
was.
Advertising
handbills typed on coloured paper were handed out to local teenagers,
individually signed by the clubs manager (a certain Al Caldwell) who also had
his own skiffle group.
Formed
around January 1957 the Alan Caldwell Skiffle Group comprised of the eponymous
vocalist and acoustic guitar player, John “Johnny” Byrne on vocals and guitar,
Reginald “Reg” Hales on washboard and Jim Turner on tea-chest bass. A year on and co-inciding with the opening of
the Morgue, Al decided to rename his group the Texans.
Keen to
join them was fourteen going on fifteen years old George Harrison,
demonstrating his not unsubstantial talents on the guitar in Al’s presence
whenever the opportunity presented itself. Caldwell remained unimpressed.
Perhaps put off by their age difference, he advised George to “Come back in a
few years, son”.
George
never bothered because shortly afterwards Paul got him into the Quarry Men.
Some
years before he passed away, Johnny Byrne handed former Mersey Beat editor Bill
Harry the diaries he had kept for the years 1958 to 1963, together with
permission for Bill to use them in a planned Mersey Beat project. As Bill
writes on his website, the diaries provide an intriguing insight into the
everyday life of a teenage musician growing up in Liverpool during the birth of
the Mersey Sound and a mine of information for authors and historians of this
particular era.
Using
Johnny’s diary for 1958 we know that the club was active on the following
Tuesday/Thursday nights:
March
13, 1958. As noted in the entry for Stanley Abattoir, Broad Green was miles
away from where the Quarrymen lived in South Liverpool but they heard about the
club through George and secured an engagement on this, the opening night,
performing on the makeshift stage in rotation with Al Caldwell’s Texans. Whatever fee they received was collected by
passing an old metal teapot around the club in which the patrons would deposit
coins.
March
20, 1958
March
25, 1958
March
27, 1958 – with the Bluegenes (later the Swinging Blue Jeans)
Ray
Ennis of the Bluegenes: “The Morgue was
just round the corner from Rory’s house. There was a mother and her daughter
and she had persuaded her mother to let Rory and Johnny have a club there. They
couldn’t charge for entry but they did pass a teapot round and collected
donations in it. I doubt if there were more than 30 there when we played.”
It is
uncertain who performed alongside the Texans on the other nights as we are
relying on Byrne’s diary and he doesn’t always list the second group. The
Quarrymen are likely to have performed several times, reportedly once as a trio
of guitarists and at least once with Colin Hanton on drums. When they weren’t
playing, John and Paul accompanied George to the Morgue, (after all, it was
full of nurses) and they too struck up a lasting friendship with the
Caldwell’s, especially Vi, mother of Al and Iris. Remarkably they were at the Morgue on March
20 rather than at the Philharmonic Hall where Buddy Holly and the Crickets were
performing. Why the Quarrymen, Holly fanatics all, chose not to go will never
be explained.
Clearly
Al was looking to improve the club because for the entry April 2, Byrne writes
“bought new neck (?) for cellar. Alan’s dad broke it” followed a day later with
“Bought fan for cellar, £9. Alan removed boards. Leaves more room”
By
April word of mouth had spread the news of the club and on April 8, the next
time the Morgue was open Alan’s alterations enabled 100 to squeeze in. Another good crowd were dying to get in on
April 15. By buying a bottle of Coca-Cola at the door you gained entrance.
Unfortunately
the more people turned up at the club, the more unwelcome attention it
attracted from the Oak Hill residents, to the point that on April 17, Mrs
Thompson announced that they would have to close for five weeks.
The
club was open for a further two nights, on April 19 and 22 1958 at which point
the pressure from the neighbours had led to talk of closing the cellar until 19
June. It was all over for good the following night, Byrne writing on April 23,
that "Mr Brown and Co came round to Mrs Thompson's to say that the cellar
must end.” Apparently Brown was unhappy with teenagers “frolicking”and chucking
empty coke bottles in his garden.
George’s
memory of cotton wool probably stems from the night Al decided to embarrass
Iris. She recalls that "they had the Beatles on there for 30 bob (£1.50),
but George Harrison wasn’t with them then. George was my boyfriend: we were
kids but we were seeing each other. I was 13 and desperately wanted to go and
Rory did let me go one night. I was not well developed and so I got a lot of
cotton wool and shoved it down my bra and thought I looked older and off I
went. Just as big brothers do, Rory announced that Iris was at the back and had
cotton wool down her bra, and that broke my heart. I ran out of there sobbing
and George chased me right round Oak Hill Park and gave me my very first kiss
when he caught me. The only thing between us was cotton wool.”
Their
brief teenage romance was not to last but all of the Caldwells remained very
friendly with George, who loved Vi like a second Mum. This was something he
would have in common with a lot of Iris’s boyfriends including Paul McCartney
whom she dated in 1961 when she was (just) seventeen. "They were a great
family and were very friendly to all of us. Later - after we'd come back from
Hamburg and done loads of gigs in Liverpool and the North of England - we used
Rory's house as a place to hang out when we got back to town after shows. His
mother Vi would make endless pots of tea and toast for us all." (George
Harrison – Anthology)
 |
Alan
Caldwell - Rory Storm, and his mother Vi with Iris pictured on the wall
Tragically
Al's father died in 1972. Later that year Al died of an accident overdose and his mother Vi
committed suicide. It must have been a terribly sad time for Iris who was
living in a house opposite "Balgownie" at the time.
Having
dated two Beatles, Iris Caldwell went on to marry Bernard Jewry, known in the
sixties as Shane Fenton but probably better known now as seventies superstar
Alvin Stardust.
|
Note:
Some
Beatles Books state that George auditioned for the Quarry Men either at the
Morgue or on the top deck of a bus after a night at the club. Whilst the
timescales are about right, two facts puncture this myth: One, a week before
the Morgue opened Mike McCartney had taken a photograph of George playing with
John and Paul on Saturday 8 March 1958, and two, with Broad Green being so far
from where John and Paul lived it's very unlikely they would have even known
about the club, never mind played on the opening night had they not had
George's insider information.
Sources:
Web:
http://sentstarr.tripod.com/beatgirls/caldwell.html
You
could spend hours in Billy Harry's Merseybeat site:
http://www.triumphpc.com/mersey-beat/a-z/johnnyguitar-diaries.shtml
Book:
"In
And Around Broad Green, Liverpool" by Eddie Barker (1991)
"Tune
In" by Mark Lewisohn
"Anthology"
- The Beatles
Photos:
"John,
Paul, George and Dennis" (the colour photo of the Quarrymen used above) by
Mike McCartney
"Rory
Storm" by Astrid Kirchherr.
