by Bob Spitz
Richard and Elsie had met at Cooper’s, one of Liverpool’s larger commercial bakeries, where he worked near the ovens, methodically icing cakes. To him, Elsie was “the cherry on top,” an attractive, risible woman, with lovely, big, clear eyes and a wonderful singing voice. She had been raised in neighboring Toxteth Park, the youngest of fourteen children, and at an early age was bundled off to her grandmother’s, where she spent most of a happy, if somewhat alienated, childhood. Elsie Gleave learned early that a woman should be self-sufficient, that independence meant getting a job, that spare time was devoted to the piano, and that evenings were for going out on the town. “Dancing feet,” she would say, needed a regular workout.
Indeed, dancing was her only salvation from the hardscrabble Dingle life, and the fleet-footed Richard Starkey, who liked swing and seemed born to perform it, proved a kindred spirit. Most of the time, Elsie and Richard joined the crowds at Reece’s, a cafeteria-style restaurant where some of the strongest dancers capered into the early dawn hours. It was a raucous, ebullient scene. Vendors circled through the hall dispensing cheap, red wine they called plunk from jugs, and when Elsie felt especially gay, she would say, “Make it a big one—a plunk plunk.”
For three years, the Starkeys were a fixture on the ballroom circuit, but eventually Elsie’s thirst grew parched for other desires. Working-class tradition dictated that newlyweds have a baby within a year of marriage—if not sooner. Elsie tried everything necessary to conceive, but without results. “Elsie was nervous that she’d never have a child,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford. “She never asked for much, but that was all she really wanted.”
Just when Elsie got accustomed to the idea that children might not be in the cards, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, named Richard after his father, on July 7, 1940. There was much celebration on sleepy Madryn Street, whose houses were unusually dormant thanks to the escalating war with Germany. Relatives stopped by at all hours to gaze upon the baby “with the big, soulful eyes,” who everyone agreed was the “spitting image of his mum.” He had his mother’s long face and sensuous mouth, to say nothing of the thick, dark hair that would serve him handily twenty years hence. Ritchie, as he was called, bore hardly any resemblance to his father, who was “quite a handsome man, with curly hair and a thin, narrow smile.” This was Elsie’s boy, from head to toe, and she doted upon him to the point of preoccupation.
Richard Sr.—subsequently renamed Big Ritchie, to his great amusement—wasn’t used to sharing the spotlight. It didn’t suit his large personality, an ego that had blossomed under Elsie’s absorption. He was ill-prepared for fatherhood and even less willing to sacrifice for it, especially those wonderful nights on the town, which had dwindled to an occasional pub crawl. It wasn’t just the dancing that captivated Richard. “He liked going out,” says a Dingle acquaintance, and enjoyed the whole process, which began with getting dressed up and extended to the quick stares he drew as “one of the smartest,” best-groomed men on the scene. Those looks hadn’t impressed him so much during Elsie’s constant companionship, but on his own they began to take a toll.
Within months after Little Ritchie’s birth, things started to unravel for the Starkeys. Richard, supplanted by his son, withdrew further and further from the family. His attention began to drift. With most able-bodied men off fighting the war, this sharpie with a hot smile and the latest moves became a hot commodity at the dance halls, where lonely wives often congregated to escape an empty house. His nights on the town became more and more frequent, sometimes stretching on for days. No matter how Elsie pleaded, “he just put on his suit and went.” Sometimes, to avoid making a scene, he didn’t even bother coming home from work, instead heading straight to a pub and then off somewhere crowded, wherever the action happened to be.
Elsie Starkey didn’t surrender her husband without a fight, but by 1943 she realized it was a battle she was going to lose and consented, rather agreeably, when a separation was proposed. Richard moved out of the house, and in no time—no more than a year at the most—they were divorced. Some stories claim that Starkey left Liverpool and went to sea with one of the luxury passenger liners that berthed in Liverpool; some that he remarried and settled “over the water,” in the Wirral. But in all likelihood, he remained close to his work. Throughout the war, with staples growing ever more scarce, he supplied his parents with “bags of icing sugar,” which they, in turn, distributed to families on Madryn Street.
For his part, Ringo, who says he has “no real memories of dad,” always knew how to reach him, if he wanted to: his grandparents, John and Annie, remained just a few doors up the street and, to their credit, never stopped treating Elsie and Little Ritchie as members of their immediate family. But Ringo never made any attempt to locate his father. Elsie “filled me up with all the things about him,” he recalled, poisoning the waters, while Richard drifted in and out of the picture maybe five times in as many years, never making an attempt to care for, or even get to know, his son.
Elsie was resourceful enough to pull through. Richard provided support, but only a paltry thirty shillings a week, so she took a number of menial jobs, doing mostly housework—scrubbing floors and laundry—until discovering her calling as a barmaid. Pub work was easy to come by and the hours were suitable; she could work as much or as little as she wanted. Elsie, a gregarious woman by nature, enjoyed pubs and the people who came to them. There was a sense of community inside—it felt familiar to her, much the way it felt on Madryn Street—and for the next twelve years she was a well-liked fixture in some of Liverpool’s best public houses, beginning at the Wellington, in Garston, and concluding at Yates’s Wine Lodge, in city center, near Marks & Spencer.
No matter how much Elsie made, however, there wasn’t enough to cover the house on Madryn Street. While living in a three-up, three-down was comfortable, it was too big—and certainly extravagant—for just her and Ritchie. This was the situation she described to her friends Muriel and Jack Patterson one night as they sat outside on the sidewalk, getting some air. The Pattersons, who lived just behind Elsie, on Admiral Grove, grappled with their own housing problems. With three children, their two-bedroom terrace house was bursting at the seams; the trouble was, the housing market was tight; there were no bigger places available. It’s not clear who came up with the idea to swap houses, but before the night was out both families agreed it posed the perfect solution: the Pattersons reaped more space, Elsie got rent relief, whereas no one was forced to leave the neighborhood. A week later Elsie packed up the house and paid the Maguire boys to carry her belongings around the block. It was no more difficult than that.
Like most congested inner-city ghettos, the Dingle was dangerous terrain. There was a homey, community character to it, but under the gauzy facade lay an atmosphere bleak and treacherous. Any street was relatively safe—as long as you lived on it. Stray fifty yards in any direction, however, and your safety came to an abrupt end. The friendly faces gave way to glares and tough talk. Bullies, looking for a fight, made it impossible for anyone to walk away. Even Ringo, who always counted the Dingle as home, never underestimated its reputation for violence. As Ringo recalled: “You kept your head down, your eyes open, and you didn’t get in anybody’s way.” Or else.
As a result, Ritchie, like other Dingle boys, quickly developed intuitive street smarts. But that was small comfort to a mother who was off working during the day. “Elsie was always terrified that something dreadful would happen to him,” says Marie Maguire Crawford. “With Richard gone, Ritchie was her ‘all,’ as she called him, and as a result, she made sure there was always an extra set of eyes watching him.”
His grandparents did what they could to help out. Of the immediate family, John and Annie Starkey gave Ritchie the attention he craved. They “fussed over” him almost every morning. Then, about noon, Marie would collect Ritchie and bring him down the street to her house so that her mother could look after him until Elsie returned. Ritchie’s joyous hours with Marie o
ffset the traumatic uprooting he experienced by being shuffled from house to house. A pale, fair-haired little girl who was “born responsible,” Marie was put “in charge” of entertaining him. They spent most nice days outside in Prince’s Park or went roller-skating on High Park Street, whose surface was freshly paved and icy slick. As the days grew warmer, they crept “further and further afield.” Mrs. Maguire made sure they always had enough money to come home on the tram, but as it usually got spent on ice cream, Marie, who was four years older, often had to carry Ritchie back in her arms.
“Ritchie and I would play for hours on our own,” Marie recalls. They might camp out at Elsie’s piano and “belt away,” harmonizing to “You Are My Sunshine,” “Where Are You All,” “Bobby Shaftoe,” and “There’ll Always Be an England.” There were movies—children’s matinees at the Gaumont, or the Mayfair or the Rivoli in Aigburth Road—followed by a greasy treat at Eric’s Chip Shop. Or they’d simply walk. Liverpool was a great walking city in the days before two-car families and congested highways. Afterward, Marie would dutifully bathe him in a tin tub in front of a fire in the back room.
All this attention eased Elsie’s fears, but there was nothing that could safeguard Ritchie from the chance grip of illness. A few days before his seventh birthday, on July 3, 1947, Ritchie complained about an upset stomach, and later sharp pains in his side. Elsie fretted at dinnertime about what to do. Calling the doctor seemed like a fairly extreme step for a case of what she assumed was indigestion. But by bedtime, as the pains persisted and his temperature soared, she sent for an ambulance and bundled him off to Children’s Hospital. It was a “straightforward appendicitis, a little slit and it was out.” But in the aftermath, Ritchie developed peritonitis, the deadly inflammation of the membrane lining the abdomen, and lapsed into a coma. For three days, it was touch and go. Elsie, who had for years watched her son make the most out of life, was told by his doctors to prepare for the worst. Ritchie’s condition deteriorated, so much so that on July 7, Marie’s mother, Annie, accompanied Elsie to his hospital room, where both women resigned themselves to say their good-byes. As it turned out, Ritchie opened his eyes a few times—the first encouraging sign, they were told to great relief.
Ritchie “was very lucky to survive” the ordeal, which necessitated a long rehabilitation in a crowded hospital ward. As late as December, six months after being admitted, Ritchie was restless to go home. Convinced that his symptoms had more or less improved, the doctors planned to release him in time to spend Christmas with his family. But a relapse a week or two before the holidays forced him back to bed, where he remained, barely mobile, for another six months.
Back on Admiral Grove, Ritchie’s efforts to reintegrate at school were quickly undermined by his well-meaning but overprotective mother. Elsie, who “doted on him and was very lenient” to begin with, allowed him to sit out the rest of the year—for “convalescing”—which put him so far behind in his academic development that it became impossible for him to catch up. Now in the fourth grade, he couldn’t read or write; math was like a foreign language he didn’t speak. No one seemed to take an interest in tutoring him. School became a great and terrifying burden—he felt ostracized there—making it easier to simply stay away. So, each morning, after wedging a stack of books under his arm and saying good-bye to Elsie, he’d detour into the park and kill time, bumping around with other truants until it was time to return home.
All of this made Ritchie something of an outcast in his neighborhood. Families in the Dingle may have been dirt-poor and largely uneducated, but they placed a serious emphasis on self-improvement.
Until almost the end of his twelfth year, at his mother’s prodding, Ritchie was tutored by Marie Maguire in an effort to teach him the basics and to help him function. Twice a week Marie supervised classes at a table in the back room of Admiral Grove, where Ritchie, who resented such regimentation and attended against his will, struggled over the simple exercises—“the cat sat on the mat”—found in the little brown-backed editions of Chambers Primary Readers. Despite his intense objections, however, the results proved encouraging. “He made incredible progress,” Marie recalls. “It seemed like we were that close to bringing him up to proper school standards when he got sick again.”
It was a disastrous setback. This time, it was tuberculosis, and it came as no real surprise, considering the epidemic that raged through the filthy Dingle streets; everywhere one turned, people wheezed or hacked or coughed into their fists. Kids, especially, were susceptible, their tender immune systems unable to stand up to the infection.
This time, Elsie wasted no time in getting him to the hospital. Ritchie spent the first few days at Children’s, undergoing tests and observation, after which he was transferred to Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital, in Heswall, on the Wirral peninsula. “It was a huge old sanitarium off the main road, leading to the Welsh coast,” a frequent visitor recalls, “providing a much less polluted atmosphere, so the kids could begin to breathe in good health again.” The vaulted wards were packed with children in various stages of the disease, and most of them, terrified by the strangers in white coats who performed a battery of nonstop tests and treatments, cried and hollered throughout the beginning weeks of their long confinements.
A veteran of hospitals, Ritchie wasn’t fazed by the medical staff. He understood the procedure and swung right into the routine, making instant friends with the nurses who provided various therapies and, whenever possible, supervised classes throughout the day. Normally intimidated and socially awkward, Ritchie thrived. “He was like the mayor of the ward,” says a visitor, who marveled at the easy self-confidence he demonstrated. There were plenty of playmates to choose from, and girls in the next room. Over the weeks, then months, they organized games and informal social gatherings to help the kids pass the time. To keep their minds occupied, a wide assortment of therapeutic activities disguised as recreation helped spur recovery. Ritchie taught himself to weave and knit, but it was nothing compared with an activity that would ultimately change his life.
In a move intended to stimulate motor activity and soothe enduring bouts of anguish, young patients were encouraged to join the hospital band. Inside the ward, “instruments” were distributed so that participants, even those without a whiff of musical experience, could play along with prerecorded songs. You didn’t need chops to handle a triangle or tambourine or cymbal or any of the percussion instruments that made up the hospital band. Improvisation and free expression ensured that everyone participated. Ritchie played the drums, using “cotton bobbins to hit on the cabinet next to the bed.” It made a flat, dull sound, but there was an energy unleashed in his execution, an instinct for the intricate rhythms and dynamics that were essential to keeping a beat. Good coordination also allowed Ritchie control over these seemingly simple but exacting mechanics. There was something familiar in the process, a natural feel to the way he held his hands, the impact of the sticks on the wooden surface, and the colorful patterns that emerged. He didn’t just make noise; there was more to it than that, there was a complex range of sounds he could produce just by experimenting with his wrists. The more he played, the more he discovered—about cadence, syncopation, movement, drive, precision, none of which he could articulate, of course, or even attribute to traditional technique. But that didn’t interfere with his intense enjoyment. For him, the drumming process was organic. He relied on the pure kinetics of it, letting the energy take over. And somewhere in the thick of things, he’d stumbled on true love.
“That was all he talked about, so much interest in the drums,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford, who on a subsequent visit brought him a copy of “Bedtime for Drums,” a rather flashy, if overwrought, solo recording by veteran swingman Alyn Ainsworth. “Someday, I’m going to play just like that,” he bragged after listening to the record over and over again.
Following his recovery from tuberculosis, Ritchie returned home to the Dingle in the late fall of 1953, having “grown int
o a young man, but much frailer than other boys his age and somewhat disoriented.” Behind him was the painful memory of his debilitating illness; ahead, the dim prospect of returning to school, where he’d fallen even further behind. Another year of absence had left him woefully ill prepared; he was hopelessly lost in class, unfairly ostracized. As a result, “he played on his illness to avoid school,” says a friend, hatching a dozen excuses not to attend. Ultimately, he never went back to school, staying home instead, languishing in the back room of Admiral Grove, listening to music and rapping along on “biscuit tins” with a pair of sticks. There was also a new development there that knocked him slightly more off his stride: another man had become a fixture in what had always been a strong, matriarchal household.
For the past few years, Elsie had been dating Harry Graves, an unusually warm and even-tempered ex-Londoner who had “come to Liverpool for a change of air” when his first marriage had “gone wrong.” A conspicuous presence at the little gatherings that were customary in the Dingle homes, Harry was a gamer with a lovely voice who never hesitated to break into “Star Dust” or “That Old Black Magic”—his so-called party pieces—whenever someone was seated at a piano. In fact, Harry had been roaming the periphery for some time, dating Ritchie’s widowed aunt, Edie Starkey, while Elsie was romantically involved with a local man named Joe Taylor. For some time, the couples had been eyeing each other’s partners, trying to devise a way to make their restless feelings known. Finally, one night it all came tumbling out—everyone confessed—and without any awkwardness, they coordinated “a swap,” whereby both half-baked relationships now fell neatly into place.