Disqualified drunk driver 11 times limit
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 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 today celebrates his 80th birthday, 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.
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.
Often overlooked by Beatles historians, the story of Ringo’s rise from povertyblighted 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 Ringo in 1959 agree the drummer’s with an enormous quiff contribution to the quartet was, on the contrary, the key to their phenomenal success.
Yoko Ono, speaking at the 2015 ceremony which finally inducted Ringo into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – years after the others – said: “No one is probably going to believe it, but he was the most influential Beatle.”
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 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.
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.
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