Authors: Hunter Davies
‘He came once to see me in hospital with a little notebook and asked me what I wanted.
‘Then I saw him once later at me Grandma Starkey’s. He offered me money, but I wouldn’t speak to him. I suppose me mother filled me up with all the things about him. But I suppose if it had been the other way round, if I’d gone with me dad, I’d have thought the opposite.’
It seems likely that Ringo saw more of his father as a child, after they’d parted, than he remembers, as he spent a lot of time at his Grandma Starkey’s. It was some time before his father, still working in a bakehouse, moved away from Liverpool, and remarried.
His mother doesn’t remember Ringo being upset in any way by the parting or even later asking any questions about what had happened.
‘Sometimes he used to wish there was more than just the two of us. When it was raining he used to look out of the window and say, “I wish I had brothers and sisters. There’s nobody to talk to when it’s raining.”’
Ritchie went to Sunday School at four and primary school at five. This was St Silas’s Primary School, just 300 yards’ walk from his home. It’s a faded red Victorian building, one of the National Schools, erected in 1870.
Elsie got a maintenance allowance from his father of 30 bob a week, but this wasn’t enough to live on, so she had to go out to work. She’d done lots of different jobs before her marriage, including working as a barmaid, so she went back to that. She’d always enjoyed it, being jolly and sociable and fond of company, and the hours suited her.
She went back to work again as a barmaid before Ringo started school, doing mornings and lunchtimes for 18s. a week, leaving Ringo with Grandma Starkey, or with neighbours.
‘I never thought of putting Ritchie away in a home. He was my child. With the bar job, I was just able to manage. There was a lot of work to be done in bars, with the war on.’
At six years of age, after hardly a year at school, Ritchie developed appendicitis. The appendix burst and became peritonitis. He was taken to Myrtle Street Children’s Hospital and had two operations.
‘I remember being taken bad and going out of the house on a stretcher to the ambulance. In hospital this nurse started smashing me stomach. That’s how it felt anyway. She probably just touched it.
‘I was wheeled in for the operation and I asked for a cup of tea. They said not before the operation, but I’d get one when I came round. I went into a coma and didn’t come round for ten weeks.’
He was in hospital in all for just over twelve months. He was on the way to recovering at one stage, but fell out of his cot while showing a present to the boy in the next cot during a birthday party.
Parents were not allowed to visit their children. It was thought it might disturb them too much. But Ritchie was so seriously ill at one time that they let his mother peep at him in his cot, late at night, when she’d finished working in the bar.
He came out when he was seven and went back to St Silas’s. He was never very quick at lessons, but with the year in hospital he was completely behind and unable to read or write. Without Marie Maguire he thinks he might never ever have learned. Her mother and Ritchie’s mother were lifelong friends. They went out together and left Marie in charge of Ritchie.
‘I was very bossy with him,’ she says, ‘being four years older. He was so much part of our family that people used to come and knock at our door and say “Your Ritchie’s doing so and so.” When he had meals with us and we were having scouse, I always had to pick the onions out for him. He hates onions. I was always cursing him.
‘My very first memory of him was when he must have been about three. There was a terrible thunderstorm and I looked across to his house and I saw him and his mother both huddling in the hall.
‘I started teaching him to read and write when he came out of hospital. He wasn’t stupid. He’d just missed a lot. We had it properly organized. Twice a week I used to give him lessons, and his mother would give me pocket money for doing it. I bought Chambers’s
Primary Readers
and we used to sit up at his kitchen table and read them.
‘I would look after him on Saturday nights at our house while our mothers were out. They would leave us bottles of lemonade and sweets. He once took his shirt off and I painted all his back with paints. Sounds very primitive, now I think about it. He once brought his girlfriend to see me. He insisted she was called Jellatine.
‘I always liked him. He was just so happy and easy-going, just like his mother. He had lovely big blue eyes. I never ever noticed he had a big nose. It wasn’t till the press pointed it out years later that I realized he had.’
Marie was his closest friend for many years, but he also spent a lot of time at his two grandmothers, when his mother was out working.
‘My Grandmother Gleave, my mother’s mother, lived on her own, but she had this friend called Mr Lester who used to come and play the mouth organ to her. They were both about 60. “Oh aye,” we used to say. “We know what you’re up to, playing the mouth organ to her in the dark.” But she wouldn’t marry him. In the end Mr Lester went off and married someone else.
‘I used to love going to my Grandad Starkey’s when he’d lost a lot of money on the horses. He’d go off his head. They were a great couple. They used to have real fights. He was a boilerman at the docks, a real tough docker, but he used to make me lovely things. He once made me a big train with real fire inside. It caused a riot going down our street. I used to boil apples inside it.’
Ringo has few memories of St Silas’s Primary School, except playing truant or holding up kids in the playground and taking pennies off them. ‘We used to steal bits and pieces from Woolworths. Just silly plastic things you could slip in your pocket.’ Another time his Aunt Nancy found a pearl necklace missing. Ritchie turned up outside a pub in Park Street, offering it for sale for 6s.
At 11 years of age Ringo went to Dingle Vale Secondary Modern School. He didn’t sit the Eleven Plus. He failed the Review, which was an exam to see if you were good enough to sit the Eleven Plus.
‘He liked it in spasms,’ says his mother. ‘Then he’d play truant. He and some others would hang around outside before school till the final bell went and they just wouldn’t go in. They’d maintain they’d been locked out. They would go and spend the afternoon playing in Sefton Park.’
When Ritchie was just over 11 years old, his mother started going out with a Liverpool Corporation painter and decorator called Harry Graves. He was a Londoner, from the Romford area. He’d been ill and his doctor had suggested a change of air. For some inexplicable reason, he decided to try the Liverpool air. He still can’t remember why. He met Elsie through mutual friends, the Maguires. He got on well with Ritchie from the
beginning. They went together to the pictures two or three times a week.
‘I told Ritchie that Harry wanted to marry me. If he’d said no, I wouldn’t have done. But he said, “You get married, Mam. I won’t always be little. You don’t want to end up like me grandma.”’ She was the one who hadn’t married Mr Lester and his mouth organ.
Harry Graves and Elsie Starkey were married on 17 April 1953, when Ritchie was coming up for 13. She stopped work soon after. Harry says that he and Ritchie had never had a wrong word between them. Elsie says he was awful. When she used to tell her husband that Ritchie had been giving her cheek he just used to smile and do nothing.
At 13, Ritchie suffered his second major illness. He got a cold, which turned to pleurisy, which in turn affected his lung. He went to Myrtle Street again and then the Heswall Children’s Hospital.
Just to cheer him up and give him an interest, Harry put him in the Arsenal Supporters Club. Again, he can’t quite remember why. Harry himself didn’t think much of Arsenal. He was, and still is, a fanatical supporter of West Ham. ‘But Arsenal had a sort of glamour in them days. I thought the boy would like it.’
While Ritchie was in hospital, Tom Whittaker, then manager of Arsenal, happened to be in Liverpool. Harry wrote to him, saying what a nice gesture it would be if he could visit one of his keenest young supporters who was lying ill in hospital. Mr Whittaker couldn’t make it, but he did write back a nice letter, which Ritchie treasured very much, so Harry says. Ritchie himself can’t remember anything at all about any letter, or ever being in the Arsenal Supporters Club.
But Ritchie had good memories of Harry himself, right from the beginning. ‘He used to bring me lots of Yankee comics. He was great. I did used to take his side if he and me mum had any rows. I thought she was being bossy and felt sorry for Harry. I learned gentleness from Harry. There’s never any need for violence.’
Ritchie was in hospital almost two years this time, from the age of 13 to 15. ‘I was given lots of things to keep my mind occupied, like knitting. I made a big island out of papier-mâché and a farm full of animals. I had a fight in the hospital with another lad. He went berserk and brought a huge tray down on me, just missed smashing me fingers.’
He came out of hospital at 15 which meant that he’d officially finished his school days, though he’d hardly been at school. He had to go back to Dingle Vale Secondary Modern for a report, so that he could use it as a reference for a job. He says that nobody could remember him, he’d been away so long.
He had to stay at home, recuperating, till he was well enough to start thinking about taking jobs. His mother was very worried about what sort of job he could get. She knew he wasn’t strong enough to lift anything heavy and he hadn’t had the education to do anything too clever.
Through the youth employment officer, he eventually secured a job as messenger boy for British Railways at 50 bob a week.
‘I went for me uniform, but all they gave me was the hat. I thought, what a lousy job. You have to be there 20 years before you get the full uniform. I left after six weeks. It wasn’t just not getting the uniform. You have to pass a medical exam and I failed.
‘Then I spent six weeks on board a boat, going back and forward to North Wales as a barman. I went to an all-night party and got drunk and went straight on to work. I gave cheek to the boss and he said, “Get your cards, son.”’
After that he got a job at H. Hunt and Son through friends of Harry. ‘I went to be a joiner. But all I did for two months was go out on me bike taking orders. I’d by this time turned 17 and was getting fed up with not starting my apprenticeship. So I went to see them and they said there were no vacancies as a joiner, would I like to be a fitter, so I said OK. It was a trade. Everyone always said, if you’ve got a trade, you’ll be OK.’
Nobody else thought he was necessarily going to be OK. He was small, weak-looking and undernourished with very, very little schooling.
‘He’d had a difficult childhood,’ says Marie Maguire, the girl who’d taught him to read. ‘With a broken home and two long illnesses. I just hoped he’d be happy. Not successful or anything. Just happy.’
The two long illnesses must have had a big effect on him, making it very difficult to adjust to school and to work and to ordinary life. Today he can’t remember any of his schoolmasters’ names, but he does remember two of the nurses who looked after him – Sister Clark and Nurse Edgington.
But he himself never remembers being unhappy. He thinks he had a good childhood.
It was ironic that when he went back to Dingle Vale Secondary Modern that time for a reference, no one could remember him. Just a few years later, on an open day, they brought out a desk which Ringo Starr was supposed to have used. They charged people sixpence a time to sit in it and have their photographs taken.
Ringo showed no musical interest and learned no instrument as a boy. ‘We did have a ward band in the hospital. There were four kids on cymbals and two on triangles. I would never play unless I had a drum.’
It was when he started to work, as an apprentice fitter, that the skiffle craze arrived. He helped to form a group called the Eddie Clayton Skiffle, which played to the rest of the apprentices in the dinner hour.
His first drums were a second-hand set bought by his stepfather when he was down home in Romford. They cost £10. ‘I brought them up from London in the guard’s van,’ says Harry. ‘I was waiting for a taxi home at Lime Street when I saw Joe Loss walking over. I thought, if he asks me if I can play them, I’ll have to say no. But he walked right past me.’
His first new set of drums cost £100. He went to his grandad for the £50 deposit.
‘If his grandad even refused him a shilling, he’d do a war dance,’ says his mother. ‘This time his grandad came to see me. “Hey, do you know what that bloody noddler of yours wants?” He always called him the Noddler. But he gave him the money. Ritchie paid it back faithfully, a pound a week out of wages.’
His mother was a bit worried about the group taking up too much of his time, as he was supposed to be going to classes at Riverdale Technical College, catching up on some of the schooling he’d missed.
But Harry, his stepfather, was quite interested in the skiffle group. It gave the boy an interest. One night Harry met a bloke in a bar who said he was in a band. The man agreed to give Ritchie a go and Harry made a date for him. Ritchie went along and came back furious. It turned out to be a Prize Silver Band. They wanted to give him a huge drum, strap it on his front, then make him march along the street going bang, bang, in time to a military march.
Not that he was doing much better in the Eddie Clayton group. Not that there was an Eddie Clayton, come to that. Eddie Miles, who was really the leader of the group, had changed his name – for professional purposes – to Eddie Clayton, the minute the group had begun. Just as Paul, George and John had changed their names when they went to Scotland.
But eventually, after going through the same sort of skiffle competitions and parties and little dance halls that the Beatles had, Ritchie joined Rory Storm’s group. When they were offered a season at Butlins, Ringo had to make the decision whether to leave work. He was then 20, with just one more year of his apprenticeship to go. ‘Everybody said I shouldn’t leave, and I suppose they were right. But I just felt I wanted to. I was getting by then £6 a week at Hunt’s, and about £8 by playing at nights. Butlins was offering me £20 a week in all, £16 when they took off the money for the chalet.’