A
lecture by Beatles' biographer Mark Lewisohn, followed
by a walk around Shaw Street and Salisbury Street
It was
a pleasure to attend Mark's talk at Liverpool Hope University Campus with my
friend Jean Catharell and meet with him afterwards where he was kind enough to
sign not only my copy of "Tune In" but also his first book "The
Beatles Live!". I told him that he'd got off lightly because if my bag had
been bigger I would have brought his "Recording Sessions" and
"Chronicle" books to sign as well!
Mark's
presentation, as the advertisement above accurately describes was NOT just for
Beatles fans but anyone who loves or is interested in the city, and was
intended to put this most phenomenal global history back on to the streets and
inside the houses of everyone's Liverpool.
I told him afterwards that in my
opinion he got the balance absolutely right, as he had with “Tune In”. As I realised when I first started this blog,
this is not just the story of four families in Liverpool whose children became
the Beatles. This is the tale of how life was for my parents growing up in the
1940s in Wavertree, Woolton and Childwall and my grandparents before them – how
their lives were affected by migration, poverty, two World Wars, unemployment,
and the advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll in a city which was slow to rebuild and recover
after 1945. During the question and answer session at the end with the
predominantly local audience it was clear how intertwined our own histories are
- there was the lady in the audience who grew up in the Sir Thomas White
Gardens tenements, another who had lived in Fishguard Street and a man who had
been delivered by midwife Mary McCartney whilst living in Speke. Familar faces
in the audience included musician Pete Wylie and Radio Merseyside presenter and
author Spencer Leigh, together with some old friends of mine, Dave Glover and
Dave Ravenscroft.
As
always I was impressed, but not surprised given my familiarity with his
previous work, at the lengths to which Mark went to ensure his book is
accurate, and amused at some of the documents he uncovered during his research.
John Lennon's ancestors were living on Walton Breck Road, a couple of doors
down from the Flat Iron Pub. Once Mark
had discovered that the landlord's surname was Jagger he began researching
Mick's family history to try and make the connection (alas he couldn't!).
In the
same vicinity, a generation later, Mark found that Jim and Mary McCartney's
neighbours in Sunbury Road were, yes, Lennons! Again no direct link could be
found here but there are instances of the Beatles family histories crossing at
several points in the story. Some co-incidences were even more bizarre. Whilst
researching the Harrisons former home in Abyssinia Street, Wavertree, he was
amused to discover that the next road to them was called, inexplicably, ONO
street.
Potential tenants queue for a vacant property on Ono Street
Over
the years Mark has spent hours walking the city and photographing Beatles
related sites and other important and interesting buildings (sounds like a fine
pastime) and he said he may exhibit them all one day. He has a particular
passion for old cinemas and feels strongly that we must protect them from
developers, singling out the three under threat on Lime Street, in particular
the Forum/ABC which he said was worthy of renovation following the Capital of
Culture in 2008 but overlooked by our City planners.
There
are a lot of former cinema buildings in Liverpool that have been left to rot
and some are being needlessly demolished – two of the aforementioned cinemas in
Lime Street look set to go, as does the lovely art-deco Curzon in Old Swan. I
will post as many as I can so at least we can see what we still have...and
what we look likely to lose.
Hope
University Campus is in a part of Liverpool I am not overly familiar with and
so following Mark's talk I took the opportunity to have a look at the
surrounding streets, some I'd only seen previously in photographs, and look for
the Beatle connections.
Facing
the University on Shaw Street is the former Liverpool Collegiate, founded in
1839, the first of the great Victorian Schools.
A striking Grade II listed building in red sandstone quarried in Woolton
and designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, the architect of St. George's Hall. The
School’s founders had set an architectural competition for the design of the
school which they had decided in advance should be built in “the Tudor style”.
Submissions for the design were made anonymously so clearly Elmes, only 26
years old at the time, was on something of a roll. Having already won competitions
for St. George’s Hall and the Assize Courts his vision for the Collegiate
completed the hat-trick.
The
attractive grassed area facing the Collegiate has been developed since I took
the above photograph in 2008.
The
Shaw Street site was chosen because of its proximity to the fashionable housing
area of Everton which in the mid-1800s contained some of the town’s finest
mansions. The Collegiate was opened on 6 January 1843, originally as a
fee-paying school for boys of middle class parents.
This
was the school where Harry Epstein, the father of Brian would receive his
education before running the family business. Other notable former pupils
include Radio Merseyside DJ Billy Butler, Frankie Goes to Hollywood frontman
Holly Johnson, actors Sam Kelly ("Porridge", "Allo Allo!"),
and Leonard Rossiter ("Rising Damp"), comedian Ted Ray and the
Beatles’ drummer, Pete Best.
Randolph
Peter Best was born in Madras, India on 24 November 1941 to Alice Mona Shaw and
Donald Peter Scanland. It is not known
whether they married or what ultimately became of Scanland but in 1944 Mona
married the man Pete would call Father, Johnny Best, a well known boxing
promoter in Liverpool who had been posted to India at the outbreak of the war
as an Army physical training instructor. Mona, Indian born and working for the
Red Cross at the time of her marriage, gave birth to Johnny's son, and Pete's
half brother, Rory in January 1945.
The
Bests returned to Liverpool around Christmas 1945, and Johnny resumed his
boxing promotions. The family lived in various properties before settling at 8
Hayman's Green, West Derby in the late 1950s. With the change of addresses Pete
had attended several schools, passing the eleven plus exam at Blackmoor Park
primary before winning a scholarship for the Liverpool Collegiate.
Pete Best, back row, second from left, with the Collegiate football team
Quiet,
but sporty, 17 years of age and with five 'O' Levels, Pete was half way through
his A-level course with dreams of becoming a teacher when his mother, Mona
decided to open a coffee club in the cellar of their house in West Derby.
Initially intended simply as a place where Pete could hang out with his friends
after school and listen to records, 'Mo' then had the brainwave: Why not turn
the cellar into a coffee bar type of club, perhaps featuring live music, like
the ones she had read about in Soho, London?
The
Casbah Club was born and at its peak membership would reach 2,000. A regular
visitor to the new club was Chas Newby, another Collegiate pupil and friend of
Best. Newby would join Best in the Beatles and play several engagements with
them following their return from Hamburg at the end of 1960.
Shaw Street, 1952. The turrets of the Collegiate are visible on the left.
The
Collegiate is clearly visible in the top centre of the photograph taken during
the 1930s. Below it and slightly to the
left is SFX church on Salisbury Street, running left to right. The vast
majority of these buildings have now gone, some, including the church to the
left of the Collegiate, destroyed during the Blitz, the remainder through the
massive slum clearances in the 1960s.
Collegiate turret detail
The
school closed in 1987, and sadly was left to rot, falling victim to looters,
vandals and several fires, the last in 1994 causing so much damage that the
building was considered beyond saving. However, a number of regeneration
proposals were put forward and in 1998 the facade which had thankfully remained
intact, sides, and interior entrance hallway of the building were restored and
today front designer apartments which opened in 2000.
Whitley
Gardens 1958
Alongside
the school on Shaw Street is the entrance to Whitley Gardens, which must be one
of, if not the, smallest parks in the city. No doubt popular with pupils from
the School next door I have to confess I’d never heard of it until recently
when I was doing some research on War Memorials.
Despite
the diminutive nature of the park there is a huge Celtic Cross here, a monument
to soldiers of the 8th battalion of the Kings Regiment who lost their lives
during the Indian Mutiny in 1857-58. This is the third site for this memorial
which was originally erected in Portsmouth in 1863, moved to Chelsea in 1877
and then sent north to Everton in 1911.
Whitley
Gardens / Shaw Street (1959)
Shaw
Street, like most of the surrounding area was terribly run down by the 1960s,
the mansions were long gone and the rows of early 19th century houses with
their fine doorways and iron balconies fell into decades of neglect and
dereliction. Today, the Collegiate end of Shaw Street has seen some renovation,
and those buildings closest to the former school and dating from the 1830s have
now been successfully regenerated as modern apartments, including the former
Baptist Chapel dating from 1847 and now grade II listed.
Continuing
my walk I then turned left down William Henry Street, long cleared of the
original housing, the north side still undeveloped, and headed towards the
junction with Salisbury Street.
George
Ernest Stanley, John Lennon’s maternal grandfather, and known to his grandson
as "Pop", was born at 120 Salisbury Street on 22 August 1874. His
father, William Henry Stanley was book-keeping in a local office at the time.
Cleared
as early as 1963, Salisbury Street is today an unremarkable estate of modern
housing, dominated by the spire of Saint Francis Xavier's Church. The massive
influx of Roman Catholic Irish arriving in Liverpool at the time of the Great
Famine and the lack of suitable places of worship led to the appointment of
architect Joseph John Scoles by the members of the Society of St Francis Xavier
who had decided a new Church was needed. The foundation stone was laid in 1842
and opened six years later on 4 December 1848. The spire was not added until
1883.
Scoles had designed the church to hold 1,000 people but even this was insufficient for the swollen congregation. In 1888 an additional chapel, the Edmund Kirby designed Sodality Chapel was opened and the wall dividing it from the main part of the church was demolished in 1898. At the outbreak of the Second World War the church had the largest Roman Catholic parish in England, with over 13,000 Catholics but within 20 years this had rapidly decreased as the slum housing around Salisbury Street was cleared and the residents re-housed elsewhere.
Looking down Salisbury Street, the birthplace of John Lennon's grandfather
I
walked towards the end of Salisbury Street in the direction of Islington. At
Carver Street I turned left to head back towards where I'd parked my car in the
Campus building on Shaw Steet, pausing on the corner of what is officially
named Islington Square.
Anyone
who has read Oliver Twist will be aware that Victorian Britain in the late 19th
century was a time of social deprivation and great hardship for those children
who were born into poverty, and there were many.
Children
were often forced to work long hours in hazardous occupations in factories,
down mines and up chimneys and this coupled with poor diet, a lack of
healthcare, and overcrowded dwellings with little sanitation meant disease was
rife and mortality high. Large numbers of children were also orphaned and ended
up living on the streets.
That
the priorities of those in charge were confused to say the least was raised in
a letter of concern from The Reverend George Staite to the Liverpool Mercury
newspaper in 1881 in which he pleaded “…whilst we have a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, can we not do something to prevent cruelty to
children?”
That
same year during a trip to New York, a Liverpool Banker named Thomas Agnew paid
a visit to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He
was so impressed by the charity, that on his return he set up a similar venture
in Liverpool in 1883, the 'Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children'.
The
first premises of the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children was based here in Islington Square and still stands today.
I was
pleased to see that a new use had been found for an old building with such a
worthwhile past, especially as most of the neighbourhood had fallen to the
wrecking ball, - a vaccination centre for Yellow Fever.
Source:
Books:
Tune In
(Mark Lewisohn)
Beatle!
(Pete Best and Patrick Doncaster)