Pound-wise England : Embracing the Beatles in Liverpool

The first time I visited this seaport, nine years ago, I expected to find a city proud to be the home of the Beatles. Instead, my teen-age son Richard and I found only one small shop of Beatles memorabilia--the Cavern Mecca on Mathew Street, owned by a couple who were part of what seemed like only a handful of Liverpudlians who wanted to help the city remember its famous sons.

We also found a short walking tour of Beatles historic sites that we shared with just four other people on that cold, blustery April day in 1982.

The tour took us past the Liverpool Institute, the public high school that George Harrison and Paul McCartney both attended; past the hospital where John Lennon was born; past Grapes Pub, where George, Paul, John and Ringo Starr often met and talked, and past a parking lot on Mathew Street where, the guide said, the Cavern Club--the intimate nightspot where the Beatles’ road to fame really began and where the group performed a total of 292 times--lay buried, like an Egyptian tomb.

Most Liverpudlians, we were told, were still a bit resentful that the four hometown boys had become famous and abandoned this working-class city.

Expecting to find much the same, but curious nevertheless, Richard, now 24, and I returned to Liverpool last summer--and, surprisingly, found just the opposite.

Liverpool today is a city in the process of revitalization, part of which consists of embracing its Beatles heritage. There are sculptures of the Beatles and the mythical figure of John and Paul’s song, “Eleanor Rigby”; a small shopping area, Cavern Walks, named for the nearby Cavern Club; an excellent two-hour guided bus tour, The Beatles Magical History Tour, and a newly opened multimedia exhibit called “The Beatles Story” at the city’s renovated Albert Dock area.

Our most recent Beatles experience began as we crossed Lime Street beyond the train station. Light rain was falling and we couldn’t remember the way to Mathew Street, the heart of Beatle lore and home of the Cavern Club, so I asked a woman for directions as we waited for a traffic light to change.

“Oh, come along with me. I’m going that way,” she replied, to my surprise, with great friendliness. And so we walked down the wet, shiny brick streets and talked about the changes in Liverpool.

The woman then pointed out Mathew Street, and pointed us in the direction of the statue of Eleanor Rigby on a nearby corner.

Before reaching the brick, alley-like Mathew Street, we walked half a block to the site of a bronze figure huddled on a stone bench, wearing a scarf and clutching a bag--a dark, plaintive lady sculpted for one penny by British entertainer and amateur sculptor Tommy Steele. Next to her was a plaque that read: “Dedicated to all the lonely people.”

On Mathew Street we learned that the Cavern Mecca shop no longer exists. In its place at No. 31 is a new store, The Beatles Shop. Above the entrance was a waist-to-head sculpture of the Fab Four, and below it a quote: “I was dreaming of the past and my heart was beating fast,” John Lennon, 1971.

Inside, we found a room full of memorabilia, including post cards, posters (one of which is a tree of life of all the works created by each Beatle), T-shirts, mugs and sweaters (including a blue and white one with one word, Imagine, printed on it). In addition, there are all the Beatles’ sheet music, CDs, records and books, including “Growing Up With the Beatles” (1976) and “The Beatles: A Day in the Life” (1981).

We walked up the steps and back onto Mathew Street toward the new shopping area a few steps away. Cavern Walks includes shops and various eateries--a pub called Abbey Road and a cafe called Lucy in the Sky--as well as a life-size sculpture of the Beatles.

Next to Cavern Walks is the renovated (and unearthed) Cavern Club, --once again full of life and music of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Inside the entrance and down the spiraling flights of stairs, a mural depicts the long lines or queues that snaked along these stairs and out into the street on the days in the early ‘60s when the Beatles played here.

The club is all brick inside. Originally, it was the cellar of a fruit warehouse, then became a bomb shelter during World War II.

Tiny green lights accented the brick arches, and the stage was set up as it always was--a small platform in front of rows of folding seats. But it was quiet that afternoon; a bartender was serving and talking to one customer. That night, however, it would come alive.

Outside, on one side of the brick-walled club, are chiseled the words from “In My Life,” by John and Paul: “There are places I’ll remember all my life, Though some have changed, Some forever, not for better, Some have gone and Some remain. . . .”

We headed toward the waterfront only a few blocks away and came to Albert Dock, Liverpool’s restored dockside at Liverpool Bay. These Victorian warehouse buildings are full of boutiques, restaurants and pubs, as well as the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the new Tate Gallery Liverpool, a branch of the Tate Gallery in London.

The dock area is also home, since May of 1990, of a permanent multimedia attraction called “The Beatles Story,” located in a converted warehouse.

The exhibit is a blend of high-tech and personal touch, sights and sounds. It weaves together artifacts and room-size re-creations of important events in the band’s history, with videos, photos and brief written descriptions. Each room, about a dozen in all, reveals a different aspect of Beatle lore, like chapters in a book.

The first room features a 20-minute video describing the evolution of what was to become the identifiable Liverpool sound, known as the Merseybeat. Liverpudlians were heavily influenced by music brought over by American GIs during World War II, when the Beatles were born (from 1940-43). It was the music of performers such as Bill Haley and the Comets and Chuck Berry that helped shape the Merseybeat. About 400 musical groups worked in Liverpool in the ‘60s, one of which was the Beatles.

Another room re-creates the club in Hamburg, Germany, where the Beatles had their first major success away from Liverpool.

Still another depicts the days at Abbey Road Studios in London where 191 Beatles songs were recorded. The Beatles’ last album (“Abbey Road,” 1969) was named in honor of the studio that had done so much for the group. I thought back to two days before in London when Richard and I had come upon Abbey Road. He wanted to walk the famous crosswalk. To our surprise, the next morning a London newspaper published a photo of Margaret Thatcher doing the very same thing. She had been there the same day, and the article said that she was a great Beatles fan.

Then there is the life-size mock-up of the album cover of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band,” plus a yellow submarine that you can actually enter.

Near the end of the exhibit is an area that details the facts and speculation leading up to the April, 1971, breakup of the most popular musical group of all time.

The last “chapter” in the story tells about the Beatles today, with information about current creative works and individual accomplishments.

A separate hallway leads to more about John. The walkway ends as visitors enter an all-white room with three French windows opening out toward a reproduction of a green lawn and sky of white clouds. A white piano sits in the middle of the room. On top of the piano is a photo of John and a pair of his wire-rimmed glasses. An accompanying sign explains that John wrote songs in an all-white room like this one at his estate in Tittenhurst Park in Ascot after the Beatles broke up.

On one wall is a framed Lennon poem, the last lines of which read: “This is my story, both humble and true. Take it to pieces and mend it with glue.” The year: 1969. A recording of “Imagine” fills the air.

By this time it was almost 2:30, time to head back to the tourist office near the train station for the Beatles’ bus tour.

Nine years later, the guided tour was now done from a plush new bus. And instead of six people straggling down dirty streets, the bus was almost full of people of all ages--young, middle-aged and gray-haired. And the bus was filled with Beatles music.

The tour began with Ringo Starr’s birthplace at 9 Madryn Street, in one of the city’s most depressed neighborhoods. The guide told of Ringo’s difficult childhood, the fact that he was brought up by foster families, and of the years he spent in hospitals with serious illnesses as a child.

Then we drove to George’s birthplace and childhood home at 12 Arnold Grove, a one-story brick row house in a cul-de-sac bounded by a high brick wall, rimmed with broken glass. While we stood near the house, the door opened and a little girl ran out and down the street, glancing back at all the onlookers. As we walked back to the bus, teen-age boys with worn Levis, leather jackets and studs in their ears leaned near the wall and glanced at the mud around their boots. The harshness of the neighborhood hadn’t changed much, it seemed.

Next came Paul’s house at 20 Forthlin Row, a middle-class row house. This was the eighth house in Liverpool where Paul and his family lived, a step up from the poorer neighborhoods they had lived in earlier. The house was something that his mother, Mary, a midwife, had worked toward for years. But Mary died of cancer the year after the family moved there, in 1956.

Paul and his brother, Mike, were than raised by their dad, Jim, a musician in a jazz band. The then-14-year-old Paul bought his first guitar soon after his mother’s death, and poured his feelings into his songs. It was later that year that he met John, who had already formed a group called The Quarrymen.

The last place we drove to was a a pale and worn two-story house at 251 Menlove Ave. This was where John came to live at age 5, with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George. John’s father left when John was a baby, and his mother Julia--not feeling she could cope with raising her son--gave the boy to Mimi and George to raise.

Not far from the home is Strawberry Fields, where John often played as a child. It still serves as a Salvation Army children’s home. Our bus emptied here as one person after another posed for photos in front of the red wrought-iron gate.

The tour then went past the now-famous Penny Lane Roundabout, where six Liverpool streets meet. All the images in “Penny Lane” are really there--the fish and finger pie shop, the bus shelter, the banker, the barber “showing photographs of every head he’s had the pleasure to know.”

The road sign for Penny Lane has been stolen so often that it is no longer replaced. Instead, the sign has been painted on a brick wall. The ordinariness of the area struck me, contrasted with the lyricism and the music that grew from it.

The drama of the Beatles’ stories set in the atmosphere of Liverpool’s streets rushed through me. It was so clear that the constellation of experiences and places we’d just seen had given birth to the songs of longing and loneliness, as well as to the happy beat, the lyrical quest for joy and love.

The legacy does, after all, belong very much to this working-class city, whose people, schools and streets shaped the lads from Liverpool.

GUIDEBOOK: Touring With the Beatles

Getting there: Liverpool, in northwest England, can be easily reached via BritRail from London’s Euston Station. It’s a 2 1/2-hour ride and costs about $65 one way.

Daily tour: The Beatles Magical History Tour leaves at 2:30 p.m. daily from the tourism office near Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, returning at 4:30 p.m. Price of the guided bus tour is about $7.50. Two tours are offered daily during the summer.

Special events: Every August, during the MerseyBeatle Convention weekend, Liverpool becomes a city of celebration of Beatles music and ‘60s nostalgia. This year’s convention will be held Aug. 23-27. For more information on this and other Beatles events, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Cavern City Tours Ltd., 31 Mathew St., 4th Floor, Liverpool L2 6RE, England, or phone 011-44-51-236-9091 (from the United States).

For more information: Contact the Merseyside Tourism Board, 29 Lime St., Liverpool L1 1JG, England.