The group - still a trio - set off on a 208-mile trip to York for two shows at 6.40pm and 8.45pm, with tickets selling from 4/6 to 8/6, at the Rialto Theatre, where they had appeared only two weeks earlier. An ailing John showed up at Abbey Road to overdub his harmonica part on Thank You Girl. Forgetting his instrument, he borrowed engineer Malcolm Davies’ at the suggestion of Geoff Emerick, who was engineering the session. When he returned it, John told Davies that it “tasted like a sack of potatoes.”
On their arrival in York in pouring rain, they signed autographs at the stage door for hundreds of waiting fans for close to half an hour. Two fans left at the interval and went round to the stage door and shouted for the Beatles. George and Paul hung out of the top window and shouted, “What do you want?” to which the girls replied, “Come down.” They didn’t, but they did drop down signed photographs for them. The girls cried all the way home, later saying, “It was the best day of our lives.” They later wrote to Paul, through the fan club, and he wrote back to them. They took turns having the letter.
After the second house, manager Don McCallion put a stop to another autograph session when over eager fans tried to get through the stage door, an image captured by a Yorkshire Evening Press photographer. “I’ve had enough,” McCallion told the newspaper. “I warned them that if they didn’t behave and form orderly queues I’d stop the session. Well they wouldn’t play fair, so I’m having no more. I can’t spare the staff to control them.”
The Evening Press reporter Stacey Brewer wrote that “the boys struggled admirably with their hit number ‘Please Please Me’,” while “the rest of their programme was re-jigged for two-part singing.” After the show Brewer sat in the empty theatre with Paul and George chatting until the small hours. George told him that the group’s next single had been written as they travelled from York to Shrewsbury the last time they appeared at the Rialto. Theatre staff were gearing up for Cliff Richard’s concert on April 3rd. McCallion expected an all-night queue. “We have had more than 3,000 inquiries already.”
“My parents, Merrik and Muriel Bousfield, ran the Edinburgh Arms pub on Fishergate in York from 1958 to 1967. I was ten when we arrived there and had the excitement of many stars of the time staying with us when they were playing at the Rialto theatre opposite. Even if they weren’t staying, many would pop in for a drink before the show. I was a pupil at Queen Anne Grammar School for Girls, just off Bootham, and had been a fan of the Beatles from when I first heard ‘Love Me Do’ on the radio.
I was really excited when they were booked into the pub to stay in February 1963. I already had a ticket for the show - I recall the tickets going on sale at lunch time, and I had to miss school to stand in the queue, which was quite daring in those days! I have had polio since I was four and walked with a caliper, so I was lucky that we lived opposite the theatre and I didn’t have to walk very far. We were essentially a pub, with just four rooms for B and B, and didn’t have a reception, so we would invite guests into the living room to sign the guest book.
When the group arrived, we asked them to come through to sign the book and I asked them for their autographs. They were so friendly and asked me if I was going to the show. They were really lovely, they weren’t rude, they didn’t think they were better than anyone else, they were just like one of us, very down to earth. John was perhaps a bit more outspoken than the other three, but not in your face as he was later on.
I went to the show with my younger brother, Merrick. The Beatles were actually the bottom of the bill, which was headed by Helen Shapiro, but it was just that start of when girls started screaming at the stars. My brother kept putting his hand over my mouth to stop me screaming. It was frustrating to say the least - I wanted so badly to scream!
We had great seats, just three rows from the front. I recall the group had a full English breakfast the next morning, served by my brother - sadly I couldn’t carry meals upstairs, so I missed out there! They stayed in two of our twin rooms at the end of a corridor, George sharing with Paul, and John with Ringo. It was a three-storey building, with three guest bedrooms on the first floor, and one more on the second floor. The third bedroom on the first floor was also a family room, with a double bed and two singles.
When they came the following month they stayed at the White Swan Hotel. It seemed that security issues meant they couldn’t stay with us. But my Dad got a letter from them apologising for not staying with us. Unfortunately he didn’t keep the letter! I wasn’t a particular fan of Tommy Roe or Chris Montez, but I had an autograph book in which I collected autographs from all the stars who stayed with us or appeared at the Rialto.
Pubs in those days closed at either 10.30pm or 11.00pm, so when I had come back over to the pub after the show, my mother would head over across the road to the theatre and hand my treasured book to the manager, who we knew well, and he would get the autographs for me. That evening she managed to get both Tommy Roe and Chris Montez’s autographs. I can’t recall if she got the Beatles that evening, but I certainly have two or three sets from the different nights they played in York that year.
We were lucky enough to be friends with the manager of the Rialto, so on subsequent visits that year from the Beatles, he gave us tickets, as I would have been unable to queue overnight. I went to all of their shows in York that year, I wouldn’t have missed any of them. I had become an obsessive fan and belonged to the Beatles Fan Club, had Beatles posters, Beatles buttons, Beatles everything! I thought they were the most fantastic group ever. A lot of my friends moved on from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, but I never did. I didn’t like the Rolling Stones, although they also stayed with us in the early days.
Sadly my mother died in 1966 and my father and I tried to carry on running the pub together, but physically I just couldn’t manage it, so we moved on to run a B and B on Scarcroft Road. It was much harder in those days for disabled people to get around and sometimes I think people forget that. I left the B and B in 1970, and moved to Kent for three years, and to America for one, before returning to York, and have been here ever since. I still have the treasured autograph book and wouldn’t part with it for the world.”
GILL THOMPSON, HOTELIER, WOODTHORPE, NORTH YORKSHIRE