This is the basis of the disagreement, as Mrs Best and Pete Best remember it. The others can’t. Anyway, after the row over the money, Ken Brown left the Quarrymen and not long after the Quarrymen themselves started to move farther afield.
Pete Best had by this time started banging away at an old snare drum, seeing how well the Quarrymen were doing, but mainly to amuse himself in odd moments at the club. When Ken Brown left, it was decided that he and Pete should form a new group. They got two others, and called themselves the Blackjacks, aided and abetted by Mrs Best.
‘They were very good,’ says Mrs Best. ‘I remember Rory Storm, who was very big in those days, issuing a challenge to see who could get the biggest crowd. Rory got 390 but the Blackjacks got 450, the most we ever had.’
The Quarrymen went to Scotland and became the Silver Beatles but did occasional return engagements at the Casbah, when nothing else turned up. The Blackjacks, with Pete Best on drums, had now become the Casbah’s resident group. They got better during the following year and Pete Best decided he did want to go into show business.
‘I’d been thinking by then of going to a teachers’ training college. My five O levels would have got me in. But I got fed up and left before sitting A levels.’
He left school in the summer term of 1960. The Casbah was still a big success and there was enough for him to do there, but then his group began to disintegrate. Ken Brown moved south and the two others went away on courses connected with their full-time work. Pete had left school for a career in show business, but was now left with nothing to do.
But in August 1960, five weeks after he had left school, Paul McCartney rang him.
‘Paul said had I still got my drums,’ says Pete. ‘I told him I’d just got a complete new kit. I was very proud of that. He said they’d got a job in Hamburg and was I interested in being their drummer? I said yes. I’d always liked them very much. They said I’d get £15 a week, which was a lot. Much better than going to a training college.
‘I went down to Allan Williams’s club, the Jackaranda. I met Stu for the first time. I had an audition. I blasted off a few numbers and they all said fine, you can come to Hamburg with us.’
As Mrs Best had got in on the beat group scene at the teenage coffee club end, Allan Williams, as an experienced nightclub man, had got on to it slightly higher up the scale. He was not only putting on the groups in his own nightclubs, but also finding groups for other people and acting as a sort of agent-cum-manager for groups looking for work. It was he who had helped the Beatles to get their Larry Parnes audition. The Beatles’ money for their Scottish tour, though paid for by Larry Parnes, had come through Allan Williams who had acted for them in getting the tour.
The reasons why Allan Williams, a small-time Liverpool nightclub owner, came to be exporting groups to Hamburg are rather complicated. The first contact had been established when a German seaman had heard a West Indian steel band in the Jackaranda Club and had told people in Hamburg how good they were. This had led to them being engaged by a Hamburg night club. Allan Williams had followed them over, hoping to interest Hamburg club owners in other Liverpool groups. He went to the Kaiserkeller, which seemed to be the only rock and roll club, and met Bruno Koschmeider. ‘I kidded him on that all the best British rock groups came from Liverpool.’
Koschmeider came to Britain to see for himself but instead went to London where he soon found that nobody had heard of the Liverpool groups. He went to the Two I’s in Soho, then the centre for British rock (Tommy Steele had played there), and signed Tony Sheridan and his group. He was a big success in Hamburg and Koschmeider came back to London to look for more groups. By a coincidence, Allan Williams happened to be in the Two I’s the same evening Koschmeider was looking for another group. Allan Williams was with a Liverpool group called Derry and the Seniors, trying to get them work. He fixed them up to go to Hamburg, the first Liverpool beat group to go there.
Derry and the Seniors were a success and Allan Williams was asked for another Liverpool group. He thought of Rory Storm, but they were going to Butlins holiday camp. So he asked the Beatles. But the Hamburg contract was for a five-piece group and the Beatles didn’t have a drummer. They’d had an occasional drummer, a middle-aged man with a family, but he turned down the chance of Hamburg as his wife was against it. This was when they thought of asking Pete Best. When he agreed, everything was ready.
In the Harrison household there was no great excitement — apart of course from George. But his mother at least never tried to stop him going. She was worried about him being only 17 and going abroad for the first time, especially Hamburg. She’d heard things about Hamburg. ‘But it was what he wanted to do. They were going to get properly paid for once. I knew they were good and were bound to do well. All I’d heard up till then was “Heh, Mum, we’ve got a booking, lend’s the bus fare, eh, and I’ll pay you back when I’m famous.”’
So Mrs Harrison got George ready. She made him promise to write and gave him a tin of homemade scones.
George, despite his great youth, was at least a working man. But Paul and John were still ostensibly studying. Going to Hamburg was going to ruin their great careers once and for all.
Jim McCartney was naturally all against Paul going to Hamburg. Paul had just sat his A levels — Art and English — and they were all waiting to hear if he’d got through them so that they would then definitely know if he’d got a place at a teachers’ training college.
Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, says that Paul, as ever, arranged everything very cleverly. ‘I remember coming home from school with Paul the day he told me they’d been invited to Hamburg. He let it out, just casually. I said, Wow! But Paul said he didn’t know if he should, pretending he was all undecided. I said it was fantastic! He was going to be a big star, wow! He said, do you think Dad will let me? That was very smart. I was then on his side in persuading Dad. He let me get all excited, so that I was desperately wanting him to go.’
Paul says that he was of course very excited. ‘We hadn’t seemed to have done anything for weeks, just hanging around. It was the long summer holidays and I didn’t want to go back to school, or college. But there wasn’t much alternative, until suddenly Hamburg came up. That meant I definitely didn’t need to go back to school. There was now something else to do.’
There was still Jim to persuade. Paul got Allan Williams to come home, to help soften up Jim. ‘Allan Williams never got our names right, though,’ says Paul. ‘He would call me John.’ However, Allan Williams managed to tell Jim how well organized it was all going to be and what a lovely respectable place Hamburg was.
‘I think, basically. Dad was quite pleased,’ says Michael, ‘though he said he wasn’t at the time.’
‘I knew they were well liked at what they were doing,’ says Jim. ‘It was their first big engagement and they were determined to go. Paul was just 18. He’d just had four weeks of his school holidays. He went on a student passport. I gave him a pep talk, you know, about being a good lad. What else could I do?
‘I was worried all the time that he wouldn’t get enough to eat in Germany. He did send postcards, saying “I’m eating plenty. We had this, that and the other this evening.” That satisfied me, I suppose.’
Jim was slightly satisfied when just after Paul had gone, the results of the GCE A levels came through. Paul had failed Art but passed in English, though by that time even Jim realized it didn’t matter any more.