Rod and Stu had found new accommodations at 3 Hillary Mansions, Gambier Terrace, a handsome Georgian-style block overlooking the unfinished Anglican cathedral. To share the spacious first-floor flat they enlisted three other college friends: Margaret Morris (known as Diz), Margaret Duxbury (known as Ducky) and John.
Aunt Mimi was informed of his decision to leave Mendips with typical bluntness. ‘He told me, “Mimi, all the others have flats on their own…and anyway, I don’t like your cooking,”’ she recalled. ‘He’d had it soft with me around to do all the cooking and washing for him. I knew even before he went that he couldn’t cope on his own. He didn’t even know how to light a gas-cooker, let alone cook a tin of beans. He told me he could live off “Chink food”. I said to myself, “We’ll see, John Lennon, we’ll see.”’
The flat consisted of three oversized bed-sitting-rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom with a Geyser water heater, lit by a flame that responded with a threatening Woomph! if anyone tried to light it. As signatory of the lease, Rod chose the best quarters, at the front, with the cathedral view and fancy iron balustrade; John and Stu took the barnlike room at the rear.
For John, the Gambier Terrace flat served two equally important purposes. It provided a place for him, Paul and George to rehearse with their new bass player, his new flatmate. And it allowed him to spend unrestricted nights with Cynthia, albeit in conditions even more rough-and-ready than at Percy Street. The room he shared with Stu was also a communal art studio for the other tenants, and so permanently littered with shabby easels, half-squeezed paint tubes, empty bottles, misappropriated traffic signs, old fish-andchips wrappings and cigarette ends. ‘The floor was filthy,’ Cynthia recalled. ‘Everything was covered with muck.’ On mornings when the Geyser failed and they had to wash in cold water, they would arrive at college ‘looking like a couple of chimney sweeps’.
But, as Mimi had predicted, it wasn’t long before John’s appetite for self-reliance waned and he began to miss the home comforts he had always taken for granted. ‘For about three weeks I didn’t hear from him. Then one night he arrived back on the doorstep looking very sorry for himself. I said to him, “I’m cooking dinner, do you want some?” but he was too proud to admit that he was hungry or that he couldn’t stand living away. He went away again that night, but about a week later he turned up again. This time I was cooking a steak pie, and I didn’t bother asking whether he wanted any or not. That got him mad. He could smell the food and yet he was too stubborn, too proud, typical John really, to let on that he was hungry or that he’d made a mistake.
‘In the end the smell got too much for him and he burst in on me, saying, “I’ll have you know, woman, I’m starving!” He wolfed his food down and then he decided it was getting late and that he wanted to stay in his room for the night. It was his way of coming back without admitting he was wrong to leave.’ From then on, he made regular trips home to get his washing done and fill up on Mimi’s cooking. But even the most succulent of her steak pies couldn’t lure him back permanently from Gambier Terrace, Rod, Diz, Ducky and Stu.
The idea had been that Stu would master the bass within a week or so, then take his place as an equal among John’s onstage brotherhood. Unfortunately, it was not as simple as that. Stu’s small hands, so quick and sure while painting, drawing or sculpting, showed none of the same deftness with his shiny new Hofner President. Even the most basic underlay patterns of rock ‘n’ roll were laborious for him to learn and troublesome to execute. He was angered and frustrated by his slow progress and would have given up altogether had not John sat with him for hours in their huge back room at Gambier Terrace, demonstrating the patterns time and again on the bass strings of his own Club 40. Just as Stu had made John believe in himself as an artist, so he was now determined Stu should believe in himself as a musician, whatever the evidence might be to the contrary.
He therefore insisted that Stu should join Paul, George and him onstage when still all too obviously the rawest of beginners. The principal object was to show off the Hofner President: as George later recalled, ‘Having a bass player who couldn’t play was better than not having a bass player at all.’ To hide his embarrassment, Stu would turn on his James Dean persona, wearing dark glasses and standing with his back half-turned to the audience as if lost in some mystic communion with his fretboard, rather than just lost.
Apart from getting Stu up to standard, the most urgent task was finding a name for the new lineup. Johnny and the Moondogs had been no more than a hasty improvisation for Carroll Levis and was now too much redolent of lost chances and premature homeward trains. Rather than the modish formula of such-and-such and the so-and-sos, Stu suggested they should revert to another plain collective noun, ideally one with the chirpy unpretentiousness of Buddy Holly’s Crickets. Pursuing this entomological theme, they came up with the Beetles, unaware that it had been Holly’s own original choice. (Contrary to myth, it had nothing to do the Beetles motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, which none of John’s circle had seen.) To avoid an off-putting image of crawly black bugs, John changed it to Beatals—not a pun on ‘beat’ music at this stage, but on beating all competition.
Stu also acted as their manager, insofar as there was anything to manage, and during March drafted a weightily worded and not overly truthful appeal for bookings to an unnamed promoter or club manager. ‘As it is your policy to present entertainment to the habitues of your establishment, I would like to draw your attention to the Quar [crossed out] “Beatals”. This is a promising group of young musicians who play music for all tastes, preferably rock and roll…’ But their gigs remained mostly stuck at the piffling level of student dances and socials, where they were usually known as ‘the college band’. Stu’s painting tutor, Austin Davis, had them to play at a party he gave at his Huskisson Street flat early in 1959. The event went on for about two days and was so riotous that Davis’s wife, the future novelist and Dame of the British Empire Beryl Bainbridge, had to remove their two young children from the premises. (Later, it would even be cited among the grounds for the couple’s divorce.)
Outside pub hours, John and Stu were generally to be found at a little coffee bar in Slater Street, on the fringes of Chinatown, called the Jacaranda. At night, its basement became a club, attracting crowds from all the surrounding black and Asian quarters, with dancing to a West Indian steel band and liberal consumption of spiked soft drinks and the substance still known, if at all, as Indian hemp. ‘The Jac’ was also a haunt of heavyweight local groups—Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Cass and the Cassanovas, and others—who would meet there after their night’s gigs around town.
To John, these were almost godlike figures, with their carefully blow-waved hair, matching Italian suits, flashy guitars and so-enviable drummers. Each group pumped out its American rock-’n’-roll repertoire with Liverpudlian eccentricity and flamboyance. Ted ‘Kingsize’ Taylor, a brawny apprentice butcher, kiss-curled and tartan-jacketed, combined the personae of Solomon Burke and the Big Bopper. ‘Cass’, aka Brian Casser, and his three sidemen wore shawl-collared tuxedos with Chicago gangster-style black shirts and white ties, and hung up their own special banner on the stage behind them. Most extrovert by far was blond, suntanned Rory Storm, aka Alan Caldwell, a mountaineer manqué who during his set would clamber up one side of the stage proscenium, not stopping until he clung precariously 40 or more feet above his audience. Even so, he was not selfish with the limelight, granting his drummer Ringo Starr a special solo spot billed as Starr Time.
The star groups’ foot soldiers often proved more approachable than their commanders. At the Jacaranda, John struck up a friendship with the Cassanovas’ bass guitarist, 19-year-old John Gustafson, aka Johnny Gus. Generous about sharing bass-playing tips, Gustafson also became a willing accomplice to John’s love of exhibitionistic sick humour. ‘When we walked round town,’ he remembers, ‘we’d pretend to be two old cripples, helping each other across the road.’ One day he went back to the Gambier Terrace flat with John and Stu to hear John play the latest Lennon-McCartney composition, ‘The One After 909’.
Johnny Gus’s friendliness was counterpointed by the Cassanovas’ hard-man drummer, Johnny Hutch, who intimidated even members of his own group, and made no secret of regarding musicians who were also art students and grammar-school boys as ‘a bunch of posers’. ‘John was always