Mersey gran: "It's me on the side of The Beatles train!"

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Mersey gran: "It's me on the side of The Beatles train!"
June Duff from Huyton discovers she is pictured on Merseyrail carriage promoting The Beatles Story
By Helen Davies
May 25, 2014

A Merseyside gran whose picture was taken at the height of Beatlemania has seen her image go ‘here, there and everywhere’.

And now June Duff, from Huyton, has a ‘ticket to ride’ after she found she is on the side of a Merseyrail train, promoting The Beatles Story.

The 65-year-old said: “It’s been used everywhere. The picture was taken by a man from the Daily Express, a man called Brian Duff, which was strange because I got married and my name became Duff.

“They were serialising ‘The Mersey Sound’ in the Express – that’s why he’d taken it. It was also used in the 1970s in a domestic violence campaign which had this slogan ‘scream quietly or the neighbours might hear you’.

“It’s also in the Beatles museum. People think it’s hilarious. My daughters couldn’t believe it when they saw it. They said ‘oh my God, again?’. It just keeps popping up.”

The image captures June in 1961/2 listening to the Beatles in the original Cavern Club. Her niece, Wendy Bushell, spotted the image going through Aintree station on a Merseyrail train last Sunday (May 18)


June Duff holding photograph of her younger self watching The Beatles

But the former catering manager should not even have been at the Beatles gig that night because she was underage.

She said: “I was 14 or 15 at the time. We used to go to a friend’s house to get changed, black leather, we all wanted to look like Cynthia Lennon.

“It was at the height of Beatlemania. It was fantastic. It was fantastic to be among that and all the groups then from Liverpool, not just the Beatles, all the other groups as well. Some of them were better than the Beatles, the Merseybeats, The Searchers and a band called The Undertakers. They were all fabulous."

June had some scary moments in a crush as her idols performed on stage. She remembers a crowd surge at The Grafton in which her blouse got ripped.

“It was pandemonium,” June said. “But I ended up sitting on the edge of the stage. I remember Paul winked at me and I nearly fell off. I thought I’d be swept up and married by 12 o’clock!”

June now has four grandsons to tell her story to. And when they ask her who’s on the Merseyrail train picture she can tell them she’s ‘that girl’.


Merseyrail carriage promoting The Beatles Story