A Party:
10 Admiral Grove, Liverpool
8 July 1961
Ritchie Starkey spent his seventh birthday in a coma, having been rushed by ambulance to the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital. Doctors found he had a burst appendix, and was infected with peritonitis. As he was being wheeled into the operating theatre he asked the nurse for a cup of tea. ‘We’ll give you one when you come round,’ she replied sweetly. But Ritchie failed to come round for another ten weeks. Three times during that first night, doctors told his mother Elsie that they did not expect him to survive. He was to remain in hospital for a year.
Ritchie was back in the same hospital for his fourteenth birthday, in 1954. This time he was admitted with pleurisy, and then developed TB. Convalescing in a hospital in the Wirral, he was taught to knit, to make baskets and to construct a toy farm out of papier-mâché. Every fortnight a music teacher arrived at the ward with a selection of percussion instruments – tambourines, maracas, triangles, tiny drums – and the children were expected to join in, playing ‘Three Blind Mice’ and ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’. But Ritchie stubbornly refused to participate unless he could play a drum. When the teacher left, he would continue drumming on his bedside cabinet, in the absence of anything more drummable. This time he remained in hospital for two years.
But his twenty-first birthday is a much happier affair. Not only has he survived, but he has turned his percussive skills to advantage. He is now the drummer with Liverpool’s top band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and he even drives his own Ford Zodiac. Not long ago, he assumed the name Ringo Starr; his drum solos are billed as ‘Starr Time’.
Rory Storm and the Hurricanes are playing a season at Butlin’s holiday camp at Pwllheli in Wales, but they have one day a week off, so the day after his birthday Ringo drives home for a proper party. So many friends and family have packed into 10 Admiral Grove, his mother’s tiny two-up, two-down – Ringo counts sixty-four people in all – that there is a continuous queue to get in. Guests include the Hurricanes, the Dominoes, the Big Three and the Pacemakers, as well as the young Priscilla White, who sometimes takes to the Cavern stage as ‘Swinging Cilla’, and regularly styles Elsie’s hair in return for Spam and chips.1
Ringo is showered with presents, including two rings to add to the three he already wears, and a gold identity bracelet from Elsie, engraved with ‘Ritchie’ on one side and ‘21st birthday, love Mum’ on the other. From his Auntie Nancy he receives a gold St Christopher medal. It depicts the patron saint of travellers carrying the Christ child on his shoulders across a river. Ringo hangs it around his neck, to keep him safe wherever he goes.
1 Priscilla White is soon to become Cilla Black, and, under Brian Epstein’s guidance, a big star. ‘I always reckoned that if I wasn’t going to be a singer, I’d be a hairdresser. Elsie was a real character, a surrogate mum to Pat and me and to the other Beatles, and we were forever bumping into each other there. She would cook us all delicious Spam, home-made chips and beans for tea, and she never seemed to mind how often we came round for more or how loud we played the latest records. I thought I did Elsie’s hair really well, but, some thirty years later, Ritchie’s stepdad Harry told me otherwise: “We didn’t say anything at the time,” he muttered, “but you used to make a right bloody mess of poor Elsie’s hair!”’