‘One day George came home and said he’d got an audition, at the British Legion Club in Speke,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘I told him he must be daft. He hadn’t even got a group. He said don’t worry, he’d get one.’
George did get a group for his big night at the Speke British Legion. He got his brother Peter on guitar, his friend Arthur Kelly on guitar and two others, one on a tea chest and another on a mouth organ. He himself was on guitar. They all left the house one by one, ducking down behind the hedge. George didn’t want all the nosy neighbours to know what they were doing.
They got to the hall and found that the real artists hadn’t turned up. They had to go straight on and play all night as there was no one else there.
‘They were so excited when they came home, all shouting together,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘I couldn’t make out at first what happened. Then they showed me the ten bob they’d got each, their first professional engagement. The poor boy on the tea chest looked awful. His fingers were bleeding from playing. The blood was all over the tea chest. They called themselves The Rebels for that night. They had it painted on in red.’
George didn’t play in a proper group, although he did odd nights sitting in with other groups, until through Paul he joined the Quarrymen.
He first got talking to Paul shortly after he had started at the Institute. They used to meet on the same bus journey. George remembers the day his mother paid his and Paul’s fare. When the skiffle phase arrived and they both had guitars, they became closer friends.
‘Paul came round to my house one evening to look at the guitar manual I had, which I could never work out. It was still in the cupboard. We learned a couple of chords from it and managed to play “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy O”, with two chords. We just used to play on our own, not in any group, just listening to each other and pinching anything from any other lad who could do better.’
They began to spend most of their spare time together, even during the holidays. This started long before Paul had met John and the Quarrymen.
Paul appears to have been with the Quarrymen for at least a year before George joined them, probably not until early 1958. No one remembers the exact date, but the joining probably didn’t happen immediately. George, after all, was very young, even though he was getting better all the time as a guitarist and getting numerous stand-in dates.
‘I first saw the Quarrymen when they were playing at the Wilson Hall at Garston. Paul was playing with them and said I should come and see them. I’d probably have gone anyway, just for the night out and to see if I could get in any groups. With knowing Paul, I got introduced to John.
‘There was this other guitarist in another group that night, Eddie Clayton. He was great. John said if I could play like that, I could join them. I played “Raunchy” for them and John said I could join. I was always playing “Raunchy” for them. We’d be going somewhere on the top of a bus with our guitars and John would shout out, “Give us ‘Raunchy’, George.”’
‘But George never thought he was any good,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He was always saying that, telling me about all the people who were so much better than he was. I told him he could be, if he stuck in.’
John remembers that it was George’s youth that made him take some time before asking him to join.
‘It was too much, too much. George was just too young. I didn’t want to know at first. He was doing a delivery round and just seemed a kid. He came round once and asked me to go to the pictures with him but I pretended I was busy. I didn’t dig him on first sight, till I got to know him.
‘Mimi always said he had a low Liverpool voice, a real whacker. She said, “You always seem to like lower-class types, don’t you, John?”
‘We asked George to join us because he knew more chords, a lot more than we knew. So we got a lot from him. Every time we learned a new chord, we’d write a song round it.
‘We used to sag off school and go to George’s house for the afternoon. George looked even younger than Paul and Paul looked about ten, with his baby face.’
George says he probably did deliberately hang round John a lot. John was by this time about to start at Art College, but was as deliberately aggressive and working class as ever, despite all Mimi’s upbringing.
‘I was very impressed by John,’ says George. ‘Probably more than Paul, or I showed it more. I loved John’s blue jeans and lilac shirt and sidies. But I suppose I was impressed by all the Art College crowd. John was very sarcastic, always trying to bring you down, but I either took no notice or gave him the same back, and it worked.’
‘Meeting Paul was just like two people meeting,’ says John. ‘Not falling in love or anything. Just us. It went on. It worked. Now there were three of us who thought the same.’
There were still other members of the Quarrymen who came and went, either because they couldn’t put up with John’s tongue or got bored. They needed other people, when they got their occasional dates, as three guitars don’t make a group, even in those days. They desperately needed a drummer but no one they picked up, however useless, ever seemed to stay.
They were moving out of the skiffle era as a group. Tea chests and washboards were just a bit amateurish. All of them anyway preferred rock’n’roll and Elvis in particular and this was the style they were trying to copy, listening to new records on the radio and trying to reproduce the same chords or sounds at home.
John, as the leader, tried to get bookings from all the little one-man managements who were cashing in on the group craze. But he was finding it very difficult to get regular bookings. There were so many groups, and most of them were far better than the Quarrymen.
But they now had two homes to go to — George’s almost any time they liked, and Paul’s, especially when his dad was out — where they could practise, write music or just draw and mess around. But Mimi was certainly not going to have any Teddy Boys from a rock group coming to her house.
‘Paul used to come to my front door,’ says Mimi. ‘He’d lean his bike against the fence and look over at me with his sheep eyes and say “Hello, Mimi. Can I come in?” “No, you certainly cannot,” I’d say.’
Mimi wasn’t very keen on George, when she first heard about him.
‘John used to go on and on about George, what a nice boy he was and how I’d like him. He went to great lengths to impress me with George. “Give you anything, George,” he’d say.
‘I eventually said he could come in one day. He arrived with a crew cut and a pink shirt. Well, it wasn’t done. I might have been a bit old-fashioned, but schoolboys dressing like that. Up till John was 16 I always made sure he wore his regulation school blazer and shirt.’
So a lot of the practising was done at George’s house in Upton Green. The Harrisons came in one day to find George in the tightest pair of jeans they’d ever seen.
‘Harold went spare,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘When he saw them, he went over the moon. George said John had just given them to him. Then he jumped up and pranced round the room. “How can I do my ballet without tight jeans?” he said, dancing all over the place. We had to laugh at him in the end. George never gave any cheek, but he always got round us.’
The first time Mrs Harrison met John Lennon she was in the kitchen when George brought him home. ‘“Here’s John,” George shouted. “Hello, Mrs Harrison,” John said, coming forward to shake my hand. Well, I don’t know what happened next. He somehow fell and as he did so, he fell on top of me and we both landed on the settee. Dad came in at that moment. You should have seen his face when he saw John on top of me! “What the devil’s going on here?” George said, “It’s OK, Dad. It’s only John.”