THE ornate stained glass windows have been replaced, but St Peter’s Church Hall in Woolton looks much as it did in the 1950s. Back then, John Lennon was a member of the youth club here. It was also where he’d sometimes front his skiffle group, The Quarrymen.
“They used to have Saturday-night dances here,” explains ex-Quarrymen drummer Colin Hanton, guiding Uncut through the main door. “We played a few times. John was always asking the guy in charge to buy a microphone, but he was told it was too expensive. Eventually he got sick of shouting over the crowd and got banned for complaining.”
The original wooden stage, running the length of the far wall, is no longer here. Yet other pre-Beatles evidence remains. The near wall contains a photo montage from the Rose Queen garden fête, held on July 6, 1957, just over the road in the grounds of St Peter’s Church. Amid the pictures of carnival floats, military bands and suchlike is one of The Quarrymen on stage, a check-shirted Lennon strumming guitar. Outside, an oblong plaque commemorates the hall as the site of the first ever meeting between Lennon and 15-year-old Paul McCartney, later that same day.
The group had shifted their equipment over to the church hall for a repeat performance that evening, when McCartney made his entrance. “I remember Paul coming along and picking up someone’s guitar,” says The Quarrymen’s tea-chest bass player Len Garry. “He turned it upside down – I didn’t realise he was left-handed – and played a couple of things. Then he did some Little Richard on the piano at the back of the room. I think he was trying to audition for The Quarrymen.”
A fortnight later, McCartney was invited to join the band. “To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all,” writes McCartney in The Lyrics. “Would John and I have met some other way, if Ivan [Vaughan, friend] and I hadn’t gone to that fête?… I also happened to share a bus journey with George to school. All these small coincidences had to happen to make The Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic.”
By March the following year, George Harrison was also part of The Quarrymen. Skiffle had been swept asunder by rock’n’roll. Members dropped away, leaving Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Hanton as
