It’s easy of course to say all this now. Nobody knew how well the Beatles were going to do and what Pete was going to miss. The Beatles themselves did feel a bit guilty, but they say that it was a joint decision, not George’s. They’d never felt that Pete was one of them and it was only a matter of time.
‘We were cowards when we sacked him,’ says John. ‘We made Brian do it. But if we’d told Pete to his face, that would have been much nastier than getting Brian to do it. It would probably have ended in a fight if we’d told him.’
Pete left and lost his chance of show-business fame. But the affair had one happy outcome for the Beatles. Ringo Starr.
18 ringo
Richard Starkey, or Ringo, is the oldest of the Beatles. He would have been called Parkin today if his grandfather hadn’t decided to change his name. When this grandfather’s mother remarried and changed her name, from Parkin to Starkey, Ringo’s grandfather also changed his name to Starkey. This caused great confusion when at one time Ringo tried to trace his family back. The name Starkey is originally supposed to have come from the Shetland Isles.
Ringo’s mother, Elsie Gleave, married his father, Richard Starkey, in 1936. They met when they were both working at the same Liverpool bakery. She is short, stocky and blonde and looks today very much like Mrs Harrison.
When they got married they moved in with the Starkeys, Ringo’s father’s parents, in the Dingle. After Scotland Road, the Dingle is known as the roughest area of Liverpool. It’s in the centre, not far from the docks, far less salubrious than the slightly more airy new suburbs, where John, Paul and George were all brought up.
‘There’s a lot of tenements in the Dingle,’ says Ringo. ‘A lot of people in little boxes all trying to get out. You’d say you were from the Dingle and other people in Liverpool would say to you, oh aye, he’s bound to be a hard case, which of course wasn’t true with most people.’
Elsie and Richard Starkey got themselves a little house of their own just before Ringo was born. This was not in a tenement, but in Madryn Street, a dismal row of low two-storeyed terrace houses. Their house was bigger than most, three up and three down, as opposed to the usual two rooms up and two rooms down. Their rent in 1940 was 14s. 10d. a week.
‘We’ve always been just ordinary, poor working-class on both sides of the family,’ says Ringo, ‘though there’s a rumour in the family that me great-grandmother was fairly well off. She had chromium railings round her house. Well, they were very shiny anyway. Perhaps I just made that up. You know what it’s like, you dream things, or your mother tells you things so you come to believe you actually saw them.
But me mother’s mother really was very poor. She had 14 kids.’
Ringo was born just after midnight on the morning of 7 July 1940, at Number 9 Madryn Street. He was a week late. He was delivered by forceps and weighed ten pounds. He arrived with his eyes open and looking all round the place. His mother told all the neighbours that she was sure he must have been here before.
His mother Elsie was then 26 and his father Richard 28. They christened their first, and only, baby, Richard. It is a working-class tradition to always call the first son after the father. They also called him by the pet name of Ritchie, just as his father was called and as they are both called by their families today.
Mrs Starkey, Ringo’s mother, remembers lying in bed, still recovering from the birth, when she heard the first sirens of the war. The bombing of Liverpool had begun.
They hadn’t yet got round to installing shelters in the Dingle. The first really serious bombing raids occurred a few weeks later. The Starkeys, along with two neighbours who’d been chatting in the house, all rushed to take shelter in the coalhole under the stairs. Ritchie started screaming. His mother discovered that in the rush and crush she had put him over her shoulder upside down. She put him the right way up and he slept right through the raid. This was another story which she soon told the neighbours, and still does.
When Ritchie was just over three years old, his parents parted. Except on three occasions later, Ritchie has not seen his father since.
There was none of the drama or hysteria of John’s parents when they parted. It appears to have been settled quietly. Elsie took the baby and they were eventually divorced.
Ringo and his mother stayed on alone in Madryn Street for some time, but the rent soon became too expensive and they moved round the corner to Number 10 Admiral Grove. This house has only four rooms, two up and two down. The rent in 1940 was 10s. a week.
Ringo’s earliest memory dates from this removal. He thinks he must have been about five at the time. ‘I can remember sitting on the back flap of the removal van taking our things round to Admiral Grove.’
He has no memory of his parents’ parting. He can only remember meeting his father twice as a very young child, and once later as an early teenager.
‘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.