Ringo Starr's rise to fame battling illness and poverty as The Beatles drummer turns 80

www.mirror.co.uk
Ringo Starr's rise to fame battling illness and poverty as The Beatles drummer turns 80
EXCLUSIVE: Often the most overlooked of the Fab Four, Ringo arguably had the most fascinating rises to stardom of them all
By Matt Roper
 6 JUL 2020

Stepping out on to the balcony of Liverpool’s Town Hall to the sound of ear-piercing screams from 20,000 fans below, Ringo Starr, the normally happy-go-lucky Beatles drummer, was genuinely astonished.


The Beatles return to Liverpool for the northern premiere of the group's first film 'A Hard Day's Night.'

The year was 1964, Beatlemania was at its height, and the Fab Four – Ringo, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison – were back for a triumphant homecoming.

Returning from a world tour which had catapulted them to stratospheric levels of stardom, they had been given the keys to the city, and a police escort through streets lined with 200,000 hysterical fans.

From his vantage point high up on the balcony, Ringo, who celebrates his 80th birthday on Tuesday, saw more clearly than ever just how far he had come.

About a mile away was Myrtle Street, where he had spent a year in a children’s ward, the first of many hospital stays for the sickly child.

Ringo is turning 80 (Image: Reuters)

Not far from that were places where, just a few years earlier, he had worked dead-end jobs to get a start in life.

And in the distance, next to the docks under a thick cloud of coal smoke, were the terraced houses of Dingle, the working class area where he was born and grew up, and where his mother worked low-paid jobs to pay the bills.

10 Admiral Grove, a property in Dingle, Liverpool, England, is the house in which Ringo Starr lived for twenty years before he rose to fame with the Beatles.

Often overlooked by Beatles historians, the story of Ringo’s rise from poverty-blighted obscurity to one of the 20th century’s most celebrated people is the most remarkable of the Fab Four.

While he was regarded as the least important band member, the last to join and with only a few songs to his name, as he turns 80 many critics agree the drummer’s contribution to the quartet was, on the contrary, the key to its phenomenal success.

Yoko Ono, speaking at the 2015 ceremony which finally inducted Ringo into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – years later than the others – said: “No-one is probably going to believe it, but he was the most influential Beatle.”

Ringo battled illness as a child

Born Richard “Ritchie” Starkey on July 7, 1940 – just as the Battle of Britain began – his childhood was, as Beatles biographer Bob Spitz described it, “a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune”.

In the first few months of his life German bombs rained down on the docks and oil terminal near his home in Dingle, the poorest area of Liverpool.

Things got even harder when his dad Richard, known as “Big Ritchie”, walked out on the family when little Ritchie was three.

He rarely saw him after that.

Mum Elsie moved to an even smaller terraced house and took on a number of jobs to support herself and her son.

Ringo later recalled: “She did everything. Scrub steps, barmaid, she worked in a food shop. She had to earn a living.”

His first teacher, Enid Williams, remembered the young Ringo as “very quiet and rather delicate”.

She said: “He was an only child and rather coddled. He was kept out of school quite a lot, he had lots of colds and things.”

In fact, his health problems were severe.

Ringo was the last to join the Fab Four

Aged six, he was rushed to hospital with a ruptured appendix.

It developed into an internal infection, peritonitis, that left him in a coma for several days.

Elsie was told three times that her son would not make it through the night.

He spent a year in hospital, missing so much school that at the age of eight he still could not read or write.

A few months before his 13th birthday, Elsie married Harry Graves, a painter and decorator from London, who would become the father figure in Ringo’s life.

Ringo later said: “He was great. I learned gentleness from Harry.”

But just weeks after his mum’s marriage, Ringo caught tuberculosis.

He spent 10 weeks back at Myrtle Street hospital before being moved to the Heswall Sanatorium on the Wirral, where he would spend the next two years of his life, never returning to school.

It was during that stay in hospital that he found his love for the drums.

Many believe Ringo's contributions to the band were huge - and helped shape their career (Image: Mirrorpix)

Ringo recalled: “This woman would come in… and to keep us busy, she came in with percussive maracas, triangles, little drums and sticks, and she would point to the red dot and you’d hit the drum, and she’d point to the yellow dot, and you’d hit the triangle or the maraca.

“That’s when I fell in love with drums. And I only wanted to be a drummer from then on.

"I had to work on the railways, I had to work on the boats, and I had to work in a factory for several years before it all came true.”

When he left hospital, aged 15, he worked as a British Rail messenger boy then as a Mersey ferry barman before becoming an apprentice fitter at a joiners, where he stayed for four years.

But his pay never stretched to the full drum kit he dreamed of.

Instead, after buying a bass drum for 30 shillings, he cobbled a kit together from biscuit tins and firewood.

Then in 1956, stepdad Harry returned from a trip to London with an old drum kit he had bought for £25.

He was obsessed with drumming - and new it was what he wanted to do

Ringo, 16, set it up in his bedroom, Elsie and Harry constantly yelling at him to keep the noise down as the neighbours were complaining.

Within weeks Ringo had joined his neighbour Eddie Miles, who worked with him at the joiners, and two others from work, and the band began playing during lunch times in the firm’s canteen.

Called The Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, the band played at Liverpool’s Peel Street Labour Club in early 1957, before appearing at The Cavern many times over the next two years.

After the band folded, Ringo joined local rock ’n’ roll band Rory Storm and the Hurricanes in late 1959.

They soon became the hottest group in Liverpool, with Ritchie Starkey renowned as the best local drummer.

It was then that he changed his name, using Ringo, the nickname friends gave him because he wore multiple rings, and Starr, because the band always announced his drum solos as “Star time”.

Iris Fenton, sister of the band’s lead singer Rory, believes her brother helped turn Ringo into a confident showman.

Speaking to the Mirror, Iris, 75, says: “If it weren’t for Rory he wouldn’t have gone anywhere, he’s admitted that himself.

Ringo became known as Liverpool's best drummer as he performed with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes

“He was quite a shy boy, but Rory brought him out, he was the one who got him singing, and gave him the spotlight during shows with his drum solos, which let Rory to go off and change his outfit.

“The band knew he wasn’t well off so helped him with his drums and expenses. I have many memories of Ringo sitting on the stairs in my mum’s house, playing the snare drum with a cushion on top because the man next door kept banging on the wall telling us to shut up.”

Before long, the drummer had come to the attention of another local band, who had recently changed their name from The Quarrymen to The Beatles.

John, Paul and George had just got their first recording contract, but were unhappy with their drummer, Pete Best.

Paul later said: “We really started to think we needed the greatest drummer in Liverpool.

"That was Ringo Starr, who had changed his name before any of us, who had a beard and was grown up and was known to have a Zephyr Zodiac.”

They offered Ringo £25 a week, which was £5 more than another band’s offer and proved to be the deciding factor.

Iris, who dated both Paul McCartney and George Harrison and later married Alvin Stardust, remembers how Beatles manager Brian Epstein called Rory to tell him The Beatles wanted his drummer.

She says: “The band was doing a season at Butlin’s in Skegness and had three weeks left. Rory knew Ringo would be thrilled, but asked if he could stay to finish the season, and Epstein agreed.

“But as soon as he told Ringo, he started to pack.”

Ringo became a member of The Beatles after George, John and Paul became unhappy with their then drummer Pete Best

At first Beatles fans protested Pete’s sacking, but it was soon forgotten as the band released their first single, followed by their debut LP, and started to tour.

As they began to attract frenzied, screaming fans, the Daily Mirror dubbed it “Beatlemania”.

Back in Dingle, Ringo’s mum Elsie was having to cope with her son’s fame.

She remembered how girls “used to climb over the back yard wall, or sleep in the street for days. They were physical wrecks, most of them, but they were just too excited to rest or eat”.

She said: “They’d ask, ‘Which is his chair?’. They always wanted to see his bed as well. They’d lie on it, moaning.”

His “Ringoisms” inspired the titles of several songs, including Hard Day’s Night and Tomorrow Never Knows, and as the hysterical girls fainted at concerts and disabled people were brought backstage in the hope of being healed by the touch of a Beatle, it was often the funny, down-to-earth drummer who was the focus.

When, after falling ill, he joined an Australian tour a week late, he was greeted at Melbourne airport by 4,000 fans.

When The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, the screams were loudest for Ringo's name (Image: PA)

He received the most fan mail, and during The Beatles’ famous first appearance on the The Ed Sullivan Show in the US, the announcement of Ringo’s name got the loudest screams.

But he worried he would be rejected by his home town after hearing people accuse The Beatles of abandoning the city.

He even feared no-one would turn up to greet them for that 1964 homecoming.

How wrong he would be.