The Amazing Day We Met the Beatles

 The Amazing Day We Met The Beatles

Loughborough Echo

May 6, 2020

Written by Andy Rush

 

Sue Sharrock (70), says she has told the story in the past, but only once in public, to pupils during an English class that she taught.   Sue was 14 and living in Leicester at the time.   She later liked in Quorn for 33 years before moving to Whitlock 15 years ago. 

Her friend, Susan Taylor, who she met aged 10 now lives in Australia.  The two Susans didn’t actually attend the 1963 concert at Leicester but went a year later on October 10, 1964 and that’s where the story begins.

Sue, whose maiden name was Hands, told the Echo that her parents hadn’t allowed her to go to previous Fab Four concerts because they had always been on a Sunday. 

“But on one particular day in October 1964, they came on a Saturday evening so my parents allowed me to go, because we had to go to church normally every Sunday,” she said. 

“So my friend and I queued all night for tickets.  My parents came and brought coffee and soup and such like.”   She added that her parents actions were very great considering, “ They were very strict church goers; three times every Sunday.  But they were brilliant, absolutely.” 

“I think we must have cottoned on that if we wanted to get good tickets, we needed to be first, so we were first in queue.  We slept in our sleeping bags.  We got front row tickets, saw The Beatles and screamed our way through the concert.”

But that wasn’t the end of the pair’s Beatles adventure.

Not long after the concert a friend of theirs came to school bearing a Sunday Mirror news article that examined the behaviors of teenagers of the day and the role their parents played.  The double page spread included a photograph of Susan Taylor at the concert – midst Beatle frenzy – alongside a heading which stated, “Pop music with its hysteria and mass worship has partly filled the gap in young lives left by religion.”  The picture’s caption read, “the new worship – Beatles fan at a pop concert.”

A complaint was made to the newspaper over the way in which it was felt it had portrayed Susan.  Susan Sharrock takes up the story, “They (The Sunday Mirror) rang up and said, ‘We’re terribly sorry.  What can we do to make up for it?” 

“So my friend (Susan Taylor) who was listening in on the phone call said, ‘Oh, meet the Beatles.’”

“And they said, ‘That’s no problem.’”

“So she came running around to me and said, ‘I’ve got the most amazing news.  We’re going to meet the Beatles!’”

“I said, ‘Don’t be silly’ and she said, ‘We are – we are going to meet The Beatles!’”

A telegram from the Sunday Mirror duly arrived for the pair and their contact at the newspaper was none other than Derek Jameson, who later went on to edit The Mirror, The Daily Express and the Daily Star. 

Sue said, “We got a telegram saying that a car would pick us up on the Sunday, it was Remembrance Sunday and they picked us up at 1:00 and it was a Triumph 2000.

“We drove up to Liverpool and we were with the press.  We were meeting Derek Taylor, he was the press officer for The Beatles and we got out of the car and all the fans were there.   It was at the Liverpool Empire Theatre, and all the fans were there screaming their heads off.”

“We got out of this car and went through the doors, straight into a press conference.  We were introduced to all The Beatles and we were taken into a corridor and had photographs taken with them.   All the press were standing in like  horse shoe because they thought we were somebody important, which of course we weren’t, and all these national papers took photos of us. “

“We went into The Beatles dressing room before the concert.  I don’t know how long we spent with them -  probably almost an hour.  We got photos there in the dressing room with them and about a week later, we received copies of them. 

It’s a bit embarrassing because in one of them Paul McCartney’s got his arm round me and I’m looking into his eyes.”