Oglet Shorts (part 3!)
Speke
Speke
Liverpool 24
This very blog received a mention in today's Liverpool Echo as it ran a story on the Oglet shore photo that may, or may not include a young Paul and Mike McCartney in the background:
This very blog received a mention in today's Liverpool Echo as it ran a story on the Oglet shore photo that may, or may not include a young Paul and Mike McCartney in the background:
Self-confessed
"Beatles anorak" Peter Hodgson, from Kirkby, says: “I came across the photo in an archived
story on the ECHO website about Oglet Shore receiving money to tidy it up. The
ECHO story said that the McCartneys and George Harrison had often visited the
shore as children, so I decided to enlarge the photo and examine it".
A few
days before he had been reading my post about Stanley Park in which I'd
reproduced two family photos of Paul and Mike in the park circa 1947. The
McCartney family moved to Speke that same year. Peter thought the boys on the
beach looked remarkably similar.
"A couple of days previously, I had been
on the blog of my friend, Mark Ashworth, and it featured childhood photos of
Paul and Mike – and they were wearing braced up shorts".
The
more Peter studied the photo the more convinced he was it was them.
“There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that
it’s them. Although they are not the focus of the photograph, Paul is facing
the photographer – no doubt practising for what his destiny would bring – while
Mike is looking out to the Mersey.
“What clinched it for me was the girl
standing with Paul and Mike – she is wearing a white dress and has a white
ribbon in her hair. I immediately remembered seeing a photograph of a young
Paul sitting in his backyard in Speke, and next to him was a girl wearing a
white dress and with a white ribbon in her hair. It’s got to be the girl on the
beach with Paul and Mike!”
Peter
decided to go to the Echo and try and get to the bottom of it. I told him that
I'd first seen the photo in Ken Pye’s 2008 book Discover Liverpool, a Trinity
Mirror publication so Peter duly informed his contact at the Echo who asked Ken
what he thought. Ken replied “I can’t say whether it is Paul and Mike towards
the back of the photograph, but I think that’s the charm of the story!”
Amazingly,
the Echo decided that the only way they could solve the mystery was by asking
one of the McCartney brothers for their opinion.
We
showed the photograph to Mike McCartney, who told us: “I couldn’t say it is definitely us, but it might well be!
Mike
also agreed to a filmed interview by the Echo's Paddy Shennan who had taken
copies of the photo over to Mike's house on the Wirral. You can watch the video
on the Echo's website - see the link at the foot of this post. In the meantime,
this is what Mike had to say:
Mike: Here we are in our house and you won't
believe this but Paddy and Carl have come all the way from Liverpool for the
Liverpool Echo....echo...echo..... to ask me a question. What is that question
Paddy Shennan?
Paddy
Shennan: These two young boys in the
picture we've shown you, could they be you, and your kid?
Mike:
(looking at the photo) I don't know, I
don't know. It's Oglet shore, Oggie shore, where we used to play, it's summer,
it's absolute magic there.... we're in the background, somebody else is taking
the picture so we're just photo-bombing and er... it's very.. we used to wear
trousers like that. We used to have hair like that, there's a little girl next
door (when we ) used to live in 72 Western Avenue that looked like that, (I've)
gotta picture of her, so it could actually be us.
Mike:
(smiling) I don't know. What we should do
is ask the people of Liverpool (if) anyone (is) on this fab pic and go forward
and see if they remember.. but it's lovely, what is great is seeing the picture
in the beautiful clean river Mersey when we had something called summer.
Off
camera Mike said “I’d say there is a
50/50 chance it’s us. We did walk down to Oggie Shore a lot and, as for the
clothes, my mum was a very proud woman and if those shorts with braces attached
were worn by the young royals, then we should wear them! Our hair did look like
that. And the height difference between the two boys looks right as our kid is
18 months older than me. There was a girl, whose name I can’t remember – she
was our next door neighbour in Western Avenue, Speke (we were number 72, so she
would have been 70 or 74). She was more our kid’s age, and she did look like
the girl standing next to the boy in the photo who could be Paul. If it is us,
then it must be one of the oldest photographs of us together that is in the
public domain. But it is clear that we are not the focus of it – we’re in the
background, so we’re very early photobombers!
It’s a
fascinating story!”
It
certainly is Mike.
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