Ringo at last passed his driving test, after failing three times and driving without a licence for two years. He now has three cars, a Mini Cooper, a Land Rover and a Facel Vega. ‘Don’t ask me how you spell it. I was away from school when they had spelling.’
Apart from his parents, he has helped other relations and friends, loaning them money to buy their own house.
‘I do have a load of rubbish. I leap out and buy something, then it doesn’t last a week. Camera stuff, I’m always getting it. I want something better or extra, so I’m changing cameras all the time. I don’t know how much I’m worth. If I said give us my money tomorrow, I want it in me hand, I’ve no idea what it would come to.’
He doesn’t carry cash around with him. ‘Tell me, what do those pound-note thingies look like? And do they still make those cute-like half-crowns? Maureen does the shopping, but she just uses a card that says, this is money.’
When they sign a bill in a shop it is sent on to their accountant’s office. He sends it back to them, for their confirmation, before he pays it. ‘Mine comes to about £1,000 a month. Last month it was £1,600, but I’d bought a new lens.
‘I’ve only been caught once. We were at Brian’s and me and Maureen decided to come home early. We’d come in someone else’s car, so Peter (Brown) gave us his car to drive home.
‘Halfway home, on the dual carriageway, miles from anywhere, in the middle of a Sunday night, we ran out of petrol. There was no garage and even if there had been, I had no money.
‘I flagged a car down and told him I’d run out of petrol. I said could he lend us five bob so I could buy a gallon to get us home. He said are you Ringo? I said yeh. He said it would be no use loaning me money as there was no garage open anywhere around, but he’d drive us home in his car, which he did. It was great. He only turned out to be a journalist, from the Daily Telegraph. Well, it’s those sort of unimportant things that are always getting in the papers that you don’t want in. I took him into the house and gave him an LP. He never wrote about it.’
They were all given cheque books at one stage several years ago, to help in emergencies, but they never use them. ‘I’ve never signed a cheque in my life,’ says Ringo. ‘I don’t know how to. I lost my cheque book the minute I got it.
‘I’ve never been refused in a shop yet, when I’ve asked to sign the bill, even in shops I haven’t been in before. No one’s asked me yet to prove that I really am Ringo.’
He doesn’t feel any urge or necessity to give money to charity and doesn’t see why they should. ‘Brian gave stuff now and again, on behalf of us. John did Oxfam a Christmas card, didn’t he? That made them a lot of money.
‘I don’t fancy it, really. Most of the people running charities are not nice people. What good did the Aberfan Fund do, except for all the lawyers? They gave each person £5,000 for losing a child. Ridiculous. Five million quid doesn’t equal losing a child. I think a lot of people are making money out of charities. No, they’re not for me.
‘The government’s taking over 90 per cent of all our money anyway — we’re left with 1s. 9d. in the pound. The government spends it on helping people, doesn’t it? That’s like helping charities.
‘Not that the governments are any good. They can’t make anything work. Buses, trains. None of them works. I was in the car yesterday going to town and I passed five number 7 buses, one lined up behind the other, all with just two people on. Why couldn’t they all be on one bus?
‘The government takes too much in taxes. There’s no initiative, you get taxed right through life. When they’ve left nobody rich, no one will have any money to give the government.
‘Everything the Government does turns to crap, not gold. The railways made profits when they were private firms, didn’t they? It’s like Victorian England, our government. Outdated.
‘All governments are the same, Labour or Tory. Neither of them offers me anything. All they do is oppose each other. One says one thing, and the other has to say something different. They both do it. That’s all they do. Why can’t they all get together and work for the country?’
They all say that Ringo is the sentimental one, although they all have bits of Ringo in them. One of the things Ringo is sentimental about is preferring England, which is something they say they don’t care about. When the Greek island and other foreign ideas were being discussed, Ringo was the only one who wasn’t very keen. He would have liked living all together on a hundred-acre site in Devon, but he doesn’t fancy going away for a long time to a foreign country. The others say they could do it easily.
‘I couldn’t live anywhere but England. That’s where I’m from. That’s where my family is. England’s no better than anywhere else, I know that. It’s just that I’m comfortable here.’
He does take holidays abroad and he likes to be with the others, usually John. He and Maureen wouldn’t go off alone to California on a whim the way George and Pattie did. Like John, he prefers going places with his Beatles buddies. ‘It’s nice to be together.’
He’s lost none of the old-fashioned Northern idea of marriage, of the man being the master at home. ‘That’s how it is. My grandfather (Starkey) always had his seat in his house, which only he sat in. I’m the same I suppose.’ Both he and John have a bit of Andy Capp in them. Paul and George are much more middle class in their domestic setting.
But Ringo is a bit alarmed that he appears more of the lord and master than he thinks he is. ‘Maureen was telling me the other day that the cleaning woman fears me. I don’t plan or expect it. I think it’s just Maureen rushing around saying we must get this ready or that done for me coming in.’
When they’re out, he squires Maureen in the traditional working-class way. Some years ago they once went out for dinner at Woburn Abbey, the home of the Duke of Bedford. Ringo had been friendly with his son, Rudolph, a keen pop fan. ‘I thought it would be a good laugh, to see how the others lived, that’s why I went.’
He was sat down at the baronial dining table, miles away from his wife Maureen, in the middle-and-upper-class way, much to his alarm.
‘I said oh no. Come over here, luv. They were trying to make us sit apart. Very funny people.
‘I don’t think women like to be equal. They like to be protected, and, in turn, they like looking after men. That’s how it is.’
They gave up London some time ago and rarely go out at nights. ‘Swinging London was OK before it became swinging London. When we were just becoming famous it was nice to go around and see people knowing you, which is how all famous show-biz people are supposed to do. But it was a drag.’
They don’t entertain people in any formal sense at their home. He has one or two friends, like Roy Trafford, from his early Liverpool days. John is the main person who pops in, then sits down for tea or whatever’s going.
Maureen prefers the quiet life, although her life is really Ringo’s. Anything he wants to do, she wants to do. They are very happy.
She is the only Beatle wife who stays up for her husband and waits for him, no matter how late or in what condition he’s likely to arrive.
‘When he’s recording I often stay up till 4.30 in the morning. He’s usually got up late the day before and perhaps not had a proper meal before going out. So I try to have something for him when he comes home, however late. Then I know at least he’s got a meal inside him. They all just peck at things when they’re working.
‘If it turns out he has eaten a proper meal at work, or with the boys, then it doesn’t matter. I can easily use up the potatoes. Nothing’s wasted. But I usually give him a meal. He might eat it quickly, as he’s tired, but he does like something when he comes home.