It did happen. The whole wonderful thing did happen, A long time ago, on the Mersey…
Derek Taylor notes toThe Beatles Anthology: 1
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… in 1959
(Patti Smith)
Within months of joining the group, Paul was linking his friend George Harrison into The Quarrymen. George had also attended Dovedale Road Infants and Junior School, a place so Dickensian that Dickens himself had once taught there, before going up to Liverpool Institute For Boys from 1954-1959. His bus from Speke estate to the ‘Big School’ took an hour – an hour there, and an hour back. And it was on the bus along Dovedale Road, near Penny Lane that he met Paul. Although he was a year older, Paul had stayed at school longer to get better qualified. They wore the same uniform and were travelling the same route. So they started hanging out together.
Around the same time, Derek was going through that different set of complicated social rituals known as ‘courting’. According to poet Philip Larkin, ‘sexual intercourse’ began in 1963, between the end of theLady Chatterley ban, and The Beatles’ first LP. He was wrong, of course. It happens in every life around the time raging hormones go into meltdown. And for Derek, it arrived a little earlier than Larkin’s estimation. Although ‘rationed by the purse’, Derek ‘drank only at weekends, strictly beer, and I made a lot of friends of all ages, felt more at home with girls, discovered the joys of pubs and pub people.’ It was at theRiverside Restaurant – a ‘raffish and quite smart hangout’ in New Brighton, that he met the ‘slim, tall and beautiful’ Joan Doughty, who would become his life-partner. It was 1956. She was a clerk at the Prudential Assurance Company office on North John Street, her hair immobilised by aerosol spray. In her words, ‘when I was seventeen, I fell in love, at first sight, with the man who became my husband.’
He was a twenty-three-year-old Wirral Reporter who had graduated by a ‘logical progression’ in January 1955 to theLiverpool Echo and Daily Post (circulation 350,000 a day), and doing well. The ‘wonderful rosy glow’ of good draught bitter lubricated his sociability in every sphere and his pleasurable consumption escalated. To Joan, ‘in the early years of our relationship, it was fun to be around him. He was full of good-humoured energy, and I enjoyed going to pubs and parties with him.’ She ensured that wherever they went together, his pockets were ‘bulging with a couple of hundred old pennies in readiness for my calls via old-fashioned coinbox telephone’ with last-minute stories to Welsh news editor W. Glyn Rees about ‘fires, lifeboat rescues, heads stuck in railings.’
Although she was still underage for drinking, by a few months, one of the places the couple discovered, ‘after trial and error in the lanes and byways of Drinker’s Liverpool,’ was theBasnett Bar. A ‘snug and slim… little jewel of a place’ in Liverpool’s Basnett Street, it was ‘an extremely pleasant pub, long and narrow with a marble counter’ downstairs, and a small restaurant above that served a decent plate of seafood or beef grills, chops or ham-and-eggs for a shilling or two. A special place with an Edwardian feel that fitted the couple like a glove, they soon became familiar figures to barmaids Ada and Barbara, sharing time there until it became their ‘second home’. Together they were earning £1,000 a year, and ‘heaven was theBasnett Bar with Joan on paynight.’ Frequented by pressmen, critics, show-offs and wits, oddly, there were other significant habitués. In fact, it was ‘a glue-pot for people whose lives would become inextricably intertwined.’ George Melly was a cheery visitor. Because it was ‘a stage-whisper away from the Liverpool Playhouse’, a dapper Brian Epstein called in ‘to hang out with young actors, to talk business or ple
