Was Eleanor Rigby real?
QUESTION
Is it true the Beatles spotted Eleanor Rigby’s name on a gravestone? If so, what is known of her?
In THE churchyard of St Peter’s, Woolton, a Liverpool suburb, is a headstone bearing the name Eleanor Rigby. In 1957, John Lennon’s band the Quarrymen played at St Peter’s annual church fete.
It was here that he met Paul McCartney for the first time. Both would have been familiar with the churchyard as they lived in the Woolton vicinity.
McCartney says he borrowed the Christian name from actress Eleanor Bron, who starred with The Beatles in the film Help!, and that Rigby came from Rigby & Evens, Wine & Spirit Shippers, a store in Bristol he noticed while in town to see girlfriend Jane Asher on stage at the Bristol Old Vic.
He said in 1984: ‘I just liked the name. I was looking for a name that sounded natural. Eleanor Rigby sounded natural.’ He later conceded that using the name could have been a product of his subconscious.
David Marks, Orpington, Kent.
THE Eleanor Rigby commemorated on the gravestone at St Peter’s church was born on August 29, 1895, at 8 Vale Road in Woolton, which backed on to Menlove Avenue where John Lennon grew up.
She was born Eleanor Whitfield. Her father, a journeyman joiner called Arthur Whitfield, died when she was an infant, so her maternal grandfather John Rigby, a stone-mason, became the head of the household and gave her his surname.
Eleanor’s mother, Mary Elizabeth, remarried when Eleanor was 15 and that union produced two half-sisters for Eleanor —Edith and Hannah Heatley.
Eleanor worked with her mother as a laundress and, aged 35, married Thomas Woods, a railway foreman 17 years her senior. The marriage was childless and on October 10, 1939, a month after the outbreak of World War II, she died having suffered a brain haemorrhage.
Pauline Hood, Liverpool.
QUESTION
If Queen Victoria had died in her first pregnancy who would have succeeded her and who would be our present monarch?
VICTORIA would have been succeeded by her uncle, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland and Elector of Hanover (played by Peter Firth in the recent ITV series). He would have become King Ernest and would have reunited the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover under the same monarch.
The Kings of the UK had also ruled Hanover from 1714, when George I succeeded Queen Anne, until Victoria succeeded her uncle William IV. Women weren’t allowed to rule Hanover so Ernest, the next male heir, succeeded William IV.
Had Victoria died in childbirth but her baby survived, then the baby, Princess Victoria, would have become Queen Victoria II, with a regency established to govern for her until she was grown up.
There would probably have been a controversy over whether Prince Albert would have been allowed to head up the regency government.
He was her father and certainly intellectually capable, but, being a German, it’s unlikely that he would have been given the title of Prince Regent and allowed to play a role in government.
The reason why Queen Victoria was conceived in the first place was as a result of a similar fate befalling Princess Charlotte, the only child of George IV.
Her death in childbirth, with that of her baby, launched a desperate campaign among George IV’s bachelor brothers to marry and produce children, with the Duke of Kent becoming Victoria’s father.
It’s one of the curiosities of royal history that the 15 children of George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, produced so few legitimate children of their own that several of the brothers had so suddenly to launch themselves in their 50s as family men.
Margaret Barrett, Sevenoaks, Kent.
NEXT in line of succession would have been her Uncle Ernest, who was Duke of Cumberland. In 1837, he succeeded as King of Hanover because, as a woman, Victoria could not take the throne of Hanover. He died in 1851 and was succeeded by his son George.
George himself died in 1878, having been deposed as King of Hanover in 1866 by the Prussians. George’s son, Ernest, succeeded his father as Duke of Cumberland and survived until 1923. He died in Austria.
Ernest married Thyra, daughter of King Christian Ix of Denmark, who was the sister of our Queen Mary. Ernest was succeeded by his third son (the others having died), also called Ernest.
This Ernest married Victoria, the daughter of the Kaiser. Ernest died in 1953. Their eldest son, also called Ernest, was born in 1914 and died in 1987.
His eldest son Ernst August, born in 1954, is head of the House of Hanover. Had Salic Law (succession only through the male line) applied in the UK, he would have been our king.
Ernst August is married to his second wife, Princess Caroline of Monaco. His heir is his eldest son, Prince Ernst August.
Bob Carr, Gosport, Hants.
QUESTION
The Will Hay film Ask A Policeman (1939) and Francis Durbridge novel The Front Page Men (1940) both include a facetious reference to ‘courtesy cops’. Who were they?
I FULLY concur with the previous correspondent (Mail) that sometimes a verbal warning from a traffic policeman can be much more effective than an anonymous camera-generated ticket in the post.
More than 50 years ago, as a teenager, late returning my new boss’s car, I drove through a changing traffic light when I could have stopped.
A large PC jumped into the road and waved me down.
He said, and I quote: ‘If you had wiped as many f***ing bodies off f***ing crossroads as I f***ing have, you wouldn’t f***ing do it. now f*** off!’
I did, and hand on heart, have never jumped a red light since. That was good policing — and, no doubt, saved me from an accident somewhere along the line.
no officer would dare behave like that today, more’s the pity.
R. Strudwicke, Bourne End, Bucks.