82

Compared to the other three, John was Lord Snooty. In 1950s Liverpool, his family was regarded as posh by the teenage George and Paul. Unlike them, John lived in a privately-owned semi-detached house that had a name – ‘Mendips’ – not a number. As if this were not smart enough, it overlooked a golf course. John had an aunt not an auntie, and not just any old cat but a Siamese cat, as well as one relative who was a dentist in Edinburgh and another who worked for the BBC. He also had an uncle who taught Paul handwriting and English at the Liverpool Institute.

Paul was impressed. ‘John had an Aunt Harriet, and Harriet was not a name we came across, especially when they called her Harrie! We never knew women called Mimi, which is very sophisticated, very twenties and thirties, very jazz era. So it was Harriet and Mimi. I can imagine them with long cigarette-holders. It was like Richmal Crompton’s Just William books to me … So John was a particularly attractive character in that kind of world.’ Even now, when Paul speaks of John’s comparatively well-to-do childhood, there is a slight element – ‘So there!’ – of reverse snobbery about it. It is as if, after all these years, he still feels the need to counter John’s claims of poverty. ‘John lived just the other side of the golf course, literally and metaphorically. People don’t realise how middle-class he was. It’s a very fancy neighbourhood … In fact, John once told me that the family had once owned Woolton, the whole village.’ In The Beatles Anthology he goes a few steps further, saying, ‘To us, John was upper class … It’s ironic, he was always very “Fuck you!”, and he wrote the song “Working Class Hero” – in fact, he wasn’t at all working class.’

In an interview John gave shortly before his death, he acknowledged that he had never really been a Working-Class Hero: ‘I was a nice clean-cut suburban boy, and in the class system that was about half a niche higher-class than Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in council houses. We owned our own house, had our own garden, they didn’t have anything like that. So I was a bit of a fruit compared to them, in a way. Ringo was the only real city kid. I think he came from the lousiest area … I was always well dressed, well fed, well schooled, and brought up to be a nice lower-middle-class English boy, you know?’ In middle age he had come to think that it was being middle class, not working class, that had made the Beatles different. After all, George, Paul and John were all grammar-school boys. ‘Up until then all rock’n’rollers … had been black and poor: rural South, city slums. And the whites had been truckers, like Elvis. But the thing about the Beatles was that we were pretty well educated and not truckers. Paul could have gone to university. He was always a good boy. He passed his exams. He could have become, I don’t know – Dr McCartney. I could have done it myself if I had worked. I never worked.’

On first becoming famous, both Paul and John took care to overplay their Scouse accents. When Paul arrived home after the Beatles’ first TV appearance, his younger brother Michael asked him, ‘Why did you talk like that on the TV? It sounded like George gone wrong.’ Among his Liverpudlian contemporaries, Paul was teased for having risen a notch up the social scale by passing his 11-Plus and going to the Liverpool Institute. ‘There weren’t many other kids from the Institute living round our way. I was called “college pudding”. “Fucking college pudding” they said.’

This did little to staunch the flow of snobbery that greeted their early success. While the Beatles were away on a brief tour of Scandinavia in October 1963, the Lord Privy Seal, Edward Heath MP, was heard to say that he found it hard to recognise what they said as ‘the Queen’s English’.1 On their return to London, the group were asked to comment on this hoity-toity remark. John put on a theatrically posh accent: ‘Ay can’t understend Teddy saying thet et awl, reyaleh, I can’t understend Teddy!’ Then he smiled, looked at the camera and said, in a rather more menacing way, ‘I’m not going to vote for Ted.’

PAUL: Oooh!

Q: But you’re not going to change your accent for the Lord Privy Seal?

JOHN: (swinging into an exaggerated Scouse accent) Ah, no lak will keep lak the same kand of thing like, won’t we? Yeah thaz right.

PAUL: Oh, aye! Yes!

To another reporter, Paul said, ‘And I bet half the people who voted for him didn’t speak the Queen’s English either.’ Later, Heath tried to make amends, bafflingly hailing the group as ‘the saviours of the corduroy industry’. Who knows? Perhaps corduroy represented Mr Heath’s outer limit of modishness.

Dennis Oulds/Stringer

Six months later, the Beatles were filming A Hard Day’s Night. The American director Richard Lester, who had lived in England for a decade, was intrigued by their impact on the British class system. ‘I think they were the first to give a confidence to the youth of the country, which led to the disappearance of the Angry Young Man with a defensive mien,’ he told his biographer. ‘The Beatles sent the class thing sky-high; they laughed it out of existence and, I think, introduced a tone of equality more successfully than any other single factor I know. Eventually it became taken for granted that they were single-handedly breaking Britain’s class system without the benefit of an education or family background.’ Yet even he couldn’t resist adding a corrective: ‘They were, of course, much more middle-class than most people admitted.’

Filming Help! in the Bahamas in February 1965, Eleanor Bron went with the Beatles to a smart party in Nassau, ostensibly held in their honour.

She was put off by what she saw. The Beatles were, she felt, simultaneously patronised and scorned. The ‘swells of the island’ were ‘able to contain neither their curiosity nor their middle-aged spleen at seeing these four “uneducated”, “lower-class” youngsters (products of the Welfare State) succeed. Who knows what manoeuvres they must have gone through for the privilege of being able to assemble at this scandal of a dinner given in honour of these mere boys, just so that they could turn their noses up at them; or – if they could thrust themselves close enough – to insult them personally, down their noses, with snide remarks; requesting autographs for “demented” granddaughters. And if they could not get close, watching from afar with pouchy eyes for proofs of callowness, social solecisms and unacceptable accents, so that they could relay these to the world, and their sense that they have been cheated – the shockingness of what the world is coming to.’

Her fellow actor Victor Spinetti took a similar view. ‘We were driven to the home of the minister of finance. The guests, Government House officials and their wives, sipped at their drinks and milled about in a group, carefully preserving, I noticed, a gap between themselves and the Beatles. From their vantage point, they stared at the boys and talked, not to them but about them. “Which one is Ringo?” I heard a voice call out.

‘“I think it’s that one, the one with the big nose,” came a drawled answer as they all continued to stare. One of them, a woman, left the group and wandered across to George.

‘“Is that hair real?” she asked, and, without waiting for an invitation, tugged it. “Oh yes,” she said, turning in astonishment to the others. “It is.” These people were looking at the Beatles as if they were prize polo ponies, except that for them, prize polo ponies would have been more interesting.’

They were all led into dinner. Each place setting was laid with row upon row of gold cutlery and a variety of glasses. Ever mischievous, the Beatles played up to the roles assigned to them by the dignitaries. ‘Oooh, what are those?’ they asked. The po-faced wife of the governor turned to her husband and murmured, ‘They don’t know their knives and forks.’

Such was the all-pervasive nature of the British class system that there were booby traps even within the bosom of the family. Forty years after his mother’s death, Paul told Barry Miles of a moment in his childhood that continued to be ‘a strange little awkwardness for me’. He had, he said, once chastised his mother for saying the word ‘ask’ with a long ‘a’. ‘She pronounced it posh. And I made fun of her and it slightly embarrassed her. Years later I’ve never forgiven myself. It’s a terrible little thing. I wish I could go back and say, “I was only kidding, Mum.”’

As we have seen, John’s Aunt Mimi looked down on the young George Harrison for having what she referred to as a ‘low Liverpool voice’. ‘You always seem to like lower-class types, don’t you, John?’ she said. Once Ringo joined the group in 1962, he took over George’s place on the bottom rung. Not only had he been brought up in the poorest part of Liverpool, in a house with an outside toilet, but his father had left home when Ringo was three. ‘We were working class, and in Liverpool when your dad left you suddenly became lower working class.’

With the Beatles’ fame came status. They entered the celebrity class, which has long maintained a sort of non-aggression pact with the upper class. At the height of their success, George spoke proudly of what he had learned from his privately-educated wife, Pattie Boyd. ‘The natural thing when you get money is that you acquire taste,’ he told Maureen Cleave in 1966. ‘I’ve got a lot of taste off Pattie. You get taste in food as well. Instead of eggs and beans and steak you branch out into the avocado scene. I never dreamt I would like avocado pears. I thought it was like eating bits of wax – fake pears out of a bowl – when I saw people shoving it down.’

In their journey up the social ladder, the Beatles were sometimes obliged to learn the ropes. Looking back on her marriage, Pattie remembered that George’s family ‘held their knives like pens, and “tea” consisted of cold ham or pork pie, tomatoes cut in half, pickled beetroot and salad cream, with sliced white bread. They had it at six o’clock, and later in the evening there was tea and biscuits.’

Some credited the Beatles with fracturing the class system. In her novel A Word Child (1975), Iris Murdoch – a tremendous Beatles fan – pictured her narrator listening to four young men from disparate backgrounds chatting around a kitchen table. ‘Here at any rate class no longer existed,’ he reflects. ‘The Beatles, like Empedocles, had thrown all things about.’

The Beatles arrived on the scene after a series of plays and novels – Look Back in Anger (1956), Room at the Top (1957), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) – had focused on English working-class youth. But while these works portrayed young men stuck at the bottom of a merciless hierarchy, or forced to adapt if they want to rise, in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! the Beatles threw off any such shackles to create a world of their own; they are cheerful and self-confident, scorning any pressure to conform.

In both films they subvert expectations of how working-class lads should behave. One scene in Help! shows the four Beatles arriving at a traditional working-class terrace in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Two old dears, played by Dandy Nichols and Gretchen Franklin, wave at them from the other side of the street.

‘Lovely lads, and so natural. I mean, adoration hasn’t gone to their heads one jot, has it?’

‘Just so natural, and still the same as they was before they was.’

Each Beatle enters a different front door. The camera follows them inside, only to reveal not four little houses but one big luxurious pad, filled with all the fashionable accoutrements of the sixties high life – sliding bookshelves, fitted carpets, leather sofas, trendy lighting, even a Wurlitzer organ that rises from the ground. It’s a sweet joke, and one that gleefully subverts the dictum that the proper way to deal with success is to not let it change you. The Beatles stand for fun and enjoyment, for doing whatever you want, regardless of your background. Unlike Jimmy Porter and Joe Lampton, they are neither angry nor cowed: they are free.

1 The son of a Kent builder, Heath had altered his own accent, and was teased for his idiosyncratic vowels, not least by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, who released a spoof educational disc called ‘Teach Yourself Heath’.