It was a sweltering Saturday afternoon in a field behind St Peter’s Church, Woolton, when 15-year-old Liverpool schoolboy Ivan Vaughan introduced his two guitar playing friends, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, to each other – a moment that changed the course of the 20th century.
The occasion was St Peter’s annual summer garden fete, which took place on 6 July 1957 in the field behind the church. Ivan had suggested Paul come along to hear his friends’ skiffle band, with whom he occasionally played tea-chest bass.
And besides, it was sure to be another glorious summer’s day, and there would be plenty of girls there. John was there in a more professional capacity, his band having been booked as part of the afternoon’s entertainment.
John, who had been friends with ‘Ivy’ since they were both very young, was a self-assured 16-year-old who lived with his Aunt Mimi in a large and comfortable 1930s semi-detached house evocatively named ‘Mendips’ after Somerset’s limestone hills.
The house boasted well-cared-for gardens at the front and rear, stained-glass bay windows and a small front porch, where John would be banished when his infernal guitar playing became too much for his well-heeled aunt. John didn’t mind; the acoustics were better in there anyway.
The walk from Mendips to St Peter’s was a short one, back along the wide and leafy Menlove Avenue, turning right past Strawberry Fields, the Salvation Army children’s home in whose gardens John and his pals played, and then right again onto Church Road.
St Peter’s is the archetypal northern Anglican church, its red stone hewn from the nearby quarry that also supplied Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, and gave its name to John’s school, Quarrybank Grammar School. It was with a perhaps ironic nod that John named his group The Quarry Men after the school he so hated.
Although Paul, who had recently turned 15, grew up just a short walk from John Lennon, his background was very different, and far more working class in comparison. The previous summer, Paul’s mother Mary had died from cancer. Paul’s first response was “What will we do without her money?”.
Her job as a midwife had earned them a small-but-neat house in one of the rows of terraced council houses on the other side of the golf course to Menlove Avenue. After Mary’s death, a succession of aunties would take shifts to come and care for Jim McCartney and his two teenage boys, Paul and Mike.
The skiffle craze that had swept Britain over the last 12 months was as yet showing no signs of slowing down. This down-home form of music encompassed elements of folk, blues and jazz, performed by amateurs on often-homemade instruments, such as a tea-chest bass, spoons and a washboard, accompanied by guitars or banjos.
John and Paul, like hundreds of other teenagers up and down the country, had become hooked on it, and both had immediately taken up the guitar. Although as would become evident this afternoon, Paul had made far greater strides than John in mastering the instrument.
Having overcome the initial obstacle of his left-handedness, Paul spent hours poring over his restrung guitar for hours. He and a younger school friend, George Harrison, painstakingly learned chords from George’s guitar manual. Paul soon picked out not only the chords but also riffs to the skiffle and rock’n’roll records he’d lost himself in since his mother’s untimely passing.
Although John hadn’t lived with his own mother since he was a toddler, she was still part of his life, and had not only bought him his first guitar via mail order, but was teaching him how to play it, albeit using banjo chords, which she knew.
The fete began in the traditional English way, a parade around the local streets, led by a brass band, heralding the Rose Queen’s procession to her crowning. As The Quarry Men gave their all from the makeshift stage, Paul McCartney was immediately struck by their leader.
John stood centre stage, his hair heaped on top of his head, the sleeves rolled up on his checked shirt as he pounded away on his Gallotone Champion guitar. Paul, who, despite the soaring heat wore his favourite white sports jacket with black drainpipe trousers, recognised John as a teddy boy he’d seen on the bus, and had maybe even chatted to once while out on his bike.
Paul was struck by the way John improvised the words to a relatively obscure song, beloved of Paul as much as John. "I thought it was amazing how he was making up the words," Paul later told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies.
"He was singing ‘Come Go With Me’ by The Dell-Vikings and he didn’t know one of the words. He was making up every one as he went along. I thought it was great." John clearly had something, and Paul wanted it.
After they’d played, Ivan introduced John and Paul. It’s difficult today to think of the meeting without the weight of history attached to it, but for those teenage boys, sweltering in the July heat, it was no different to any other coming together of teenage boys, loaded with the same tensions, suspicions and awkward wariness that teenage boys carry with them wherever they go.
Paul was never one to shy away for long from the opportunity to be the centre of attention, and his desire to show off proved too much. After the fete had finished, the boys hung out in the church hall, where The Quarry Men were booked to play as part of that evening’s dance.
With the dancers yet to arrive, Paul borrowed (and retuned) John’s guitar, before launching into his best Eddie Cochran routine. John was impressed that this relative kid could play ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ just like on the record – and even more that he knew all the words. "I half thought to myself 'He’s as good as me'," John recalled.
As Paul ran through a repertoire that included Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and most likely an Elvis Presley number or two, John struggled to disguise his admiration. When Paul rounded his performance off at the piano with his whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ Little Richard imitation, an impression had been indelibly left on John.
By chance, a recording of part of The Quarry Men’s performance that evening survives to this day, John’s inimitable delivery belting out ‘Putting On the Style’ and ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. After their performance, John, Paul, Ivan and a few other Quarry Men repaired to the pub, for some surreptitious underage drinks, reportedly scarpering as word arrived that a local gang was on the look-out for a scrap.
What happened next remains the subject of debate.
John later claimed that he invited Paul to join the band there and then, with Paul accepting the next day. John’s pal Pete Shotton says that it was around a week or so later that he bumped into Paul on his way to Ivan’s house and passed on a message from John that he could join if he wanted. Paul more or less concurs with Pete’s account.
Either way, that introduction on a hot sticky day in 1957, in a field at the back of a local church, changed the world forever.
A strange postscript to their meeting is that, at rest in the churchyard on that momentous afternoon was a woman by the name of Eleanor Rigby who had died a year and a day before John Lennon’s birth.
Paul insists that this is purely coincidental, that the song he would write about a woman of that name in a fictional churchyard almost a decade later has nothing to do with the name engraved on that Woolton grave stone.
Paul has explained that he saw the name Rigby on a shop in Bristol and paired it with Eleanor after the actress Eleanor Bron who co-starred in their 1965 movie Help!.
So perhaps, like two such seismic talents as Lennon and McCartney growing up so close to each other, it was nothing more than coincidence, the first of countless such unlikely-but-true stories in the tale of the most sensational musical partnership the world has ever seen.
All photos Getty Images
Top image A young Paul McCartney and John Lennon, composite of two separate photos, before The Beatles
