 HE WAS such a sickly little fellow, who teetered on the edge of death so many times, that on the few occasions he did turn up at school, the other children called him "Lazarus". But a few years later you could see the wide smile under the prominent hooter that became young Richie Starkey's hallmark. The other boys and girls had entered apprenticeships, drifted into shops, or bowed into dead-end office jobs, the way you did. And he was one of the most famous people on the planet, whose very presence in a place caused girls to swoon, scream, or rip at their hair because they liked him. In fact, they loved him and they kept his photograph clasped in their lockets. Nobody ever counted the millions of girls who fell asleep with his photograph over their beds. By then, Richie Starkey, whose mum Elsie had worked in the Empress pub in Liverpool's Dingle district, was Ringo Starr, drummer with the Beatles. Now a whole, 170,000-word encyclopaedia has been devoted to his life by Bill Harry. He is the former editor of Mersey Beat, the newspaper which chronicled the rivalries, the friendships, the breakups and makeups, of the groups behind the Liverpool sound - the Beatles, the Searchers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Fourmost, the Big Three, the Swinging Blue Jeans etc. In more recent times, Harry has become the unofficial historian of the Beatles, writing an encyclopaedia about each and another one about the group itself. This opus, which runs over many millions of words, has finished, significantly enough, with Ringo. It has always been this way. John, Paul and George, with Ringo being the little one at the back. But Harry, now 64, and living in London with his wife Virginia and their son Sean, does not agree. For him, Ringo was not only only a marvellous drummer but the most likeable Beatle, whose sense of humour and reality, made him the most popular of the Fab Four in America.
 Unlike Paul and George (Liverpool Collegiate) and John (Quarry Bank), Ringo did not go to grammar school. In so far as he had an education at all, it was at St Silas Infants, where Billy Fury was also a pupil, the Dingle Vale Secondary Modern and the school at the Heswall children's hospital, Wirral, where he was a patient between 1953 and 1955 being treated for lung complications arising from pleurisy. He was born in Madryn Street, Dingle, and stayed there for about three years. But his father, Richard Starkey, left home, and his mother had to move to a smaller home in Admiral Grove, where she worked in the pub to bolster the family income. In common with the others, though, Ringo was a fan of Lonnie Donegan and when, in about 1957, his stepfather, Harry Graves (or "the step-ladder" as Ringo preferred), bought him a drum kit, he began playing in skiffle combos. |
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