#you know its queue that i love
George Harrison and Paul McCartney hitchhiking, summer of 1957
“One year, Paul and I decided to go hitchhiking. It’s something nobody would ever dream of these days. Firstly, you’d probably be mugged before you got through the Mersey Tunnel, and secondly everybody’s got cars and is already stuck in a traffic jam. I’d often gone with my family down South to Devon, to Exmouth, so Paul and I decided to go there first.
We didn’t have much money. We found bed-and-breakfast places to stay. We got to one town, and we were walking down a street and it was getting dark. We saw a woman and said, ‘Excuse me, do you know if there’s somewhere we could stay?’ She felt sorry for us and said, ‘My boy’s away, come and stay at my house.’ So she took us to hers - where we beat her, tied her up and robbed her of all her money! Only joking; she let us stay in her boy’s room and the next morning cooked us breakfast. She was really nice. I don’t know who she was - the Lone Ranger?
We continued along the South coast, towards Exmouth. Along the way we talked to a drunk in a pub who told us his name was Oxo Whitney. (He later appears in ‘A Spaniard in the Works.’ After we’d told John that story, he used the name. So much of John’s books is from funny things people told him.) Then we went on to Paignton. We still had hardly any money. We had a little stove, virtually just a tin with a lid. You poured a little meths into the bottom of it and it just about burned, not with any velocity. We had that, and little backpacks, and we’d stop at grocery shops. We’d buy Smedley’s spaghetti bolognese or spaghetti milanese. They were in striped tins: milanese was red stripes, bolognese was dark blue stripes. And Ambrosia creamed rice. We’d open a can, bend back the lid and hold the can over the stove to warm it up. That was what we lived on.
We got to Paignton with no money to spare so we slept on the beach for the night. Somewhere we’d met two Salvation Army girls and they stayed with us and kept us warm for a while. But later it became cold and damp, and I remember being thankful when we decided that was enough and got up in the morning and started walking again. We went up through North Devon and got a ferry boat across to South Wales, because Paul had a relative who was a redcoat at Butlins at Pwllheli, so we thought we’d go there.
At Chepstow, we went to the police station and asked to stay in a cell. They said, ‘No, bugger off. You can go in the football grandstand, and tell the cocky watchman that we said it was OK.’ So we went and slept on a hard board bench. Bloody cold. We left there and hitchhiked on. Going north through Wales we got a ride on a truck. The trucks didn’t have a passenger seat in those days so I sat on the engine cover. Paul was sitting on the battery. He had on jeans with zippers on the back pockets and after a while he suddenly leapt up screaming. His zipper had connected the positive and negative end in the battery, got red hot and burnt a zipper mark across his arse.” - George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology
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John Lennon backstage, 1963. Photo © Pictorial Press Limited.
“It’s still weird to even say, ‘before he died.’ I still can’t come to terms with it. I still don’t believe. It’s like, you know, these dreams you have, where he’s still alive; then you wake up and… 'Oh.’” - Paul McCartney
Q: “George, what do you miss most about John Lennon?”
George Harrison: “John Lennon.” - Yahoo web chat, 15 February 2001 [x]“John was the kindest person I ever knew. he was the only one of the four of us who would give you his soul… And I loved the man dearly.” - Ringo Starr [x]
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The Beatles reading fan mail, Green Street, London, 9 October 1963. Photo © The Beatles Book.
“I’d like to say thank you to all the Beatle people who have written to me during the year and everybody who sent gifts and cards for my birthday, which I’m trying to forget, in October. I’d love to reply personally to everybody but I just haven’t enough pens.” - John Lennon, The Beatles Christmas Record (1963)
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“Although there were four of us, there was one of us. All our hearts were beating at the same time.”
- Ringo Starr
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Scan - The Beatles celebrating Ringo Starr’s 24th birthday, 1964. Scanned from The Beatles Forever.
“We started hanging out with them [Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, at the Kaiserkeller, Hamburg]. I think we’d met Ringo once before, in England. I know we all had the same impression about him: ‘You’d better be careful of him, he looks like trouble.’
[…] They would do their show and Ringo was the cocky one at the back; and with the way he looked, with that grey streak in his hair and half a grey eyebrow and a big nose, he looked a real tough guy. But it probably only took half an hour to realise it was actually… Ringo!” - George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology
“I was still a Teddy boy and I only found out later from John that they were a bit scared of me. John told me, ‘We used to be a bit frightened of you - this drunk, demanding slow songs, dressed like a Teddy boy.’” - Ringo Starr, The Beatles Anthology
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Scan - Ringo, John and Paul, India, 1966, photograph by George
Photo: George Harrison
Scanned from Living in the Material World
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“John mentioned (probably with a groan) that people were always asking what it meant and how they’d thought of it, and Bill replied - with Mersey Beat in mind - ‘Why don’t you tell them?’
So John wrote the history of the Beatles, and because he and George were knocking around together, he was on hand to contribute. John had been happy to let Paul help him write a comic piece or two in 1958, notably ‘On Safari With Whide Hunter’, now he allowed George to get involved in what became known as 'Being A Short Diversion On The Dubious Origins Of Beatles’.” - From The Beatles - All These Years: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn
Screen shots of George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr from The Beatles Anthology Special Features “Recollections,” Friar Park, June 1994:
Ringo: “It’s been really beautiful and moving. I like hanging out with you guys.”
Paul: “Little choochie face!”
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