by Hector Cook
“It was quite a bad fall,” Barry protested, “and probably the core reason my back is still bad to this day. I landed flat on my back from about 20 feet.”
Lesley Gibb remembered another incident in Manchester, which also contributed to his back problems. It was just before Christmas in 1955 and Barry “was going to have his first guitar for a present. I chased him into the road and he got hit by a car … I went to the house and was trying to think of a way to tell Mum what had happened.
“I stood on the doorstep for ages thinking of what to say and all the time Barry was lying in the road. I just said, ‘Mum, don’t be shocked but Barry’s been hit by a car.’ I can remember as they bundled him off to hospital, I just kept saying to him, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll bring your guitar to the hospital – that’s how Tommy Steele got started. He became a big star and you will too.’ ”
Tommy Steele, Britain’s first rock’n’rolling, guitar-playing singer, was Barry’s earliest hero, though compared to the hip-swivelling American Elvis Presley he was a lightweight impersonator whose real talent lay in straight showbiz. But Lesley also remembered that Barry had a talent for swivelling his hips, which suggests that Elvis, who was making inroads on the UK charts by the summer of 1956, might have had some influence as well.
The following Christmas was also filled with drama. “It was Christmas night and Mum and Dad had just taken some visitors home,” Lesley said. “I was playing with an Alsatian puppy I’d been given as a present, and he kept jumping up at the Christmas tree. I bent down and my nylon dress got sucked up the chimney and caught fire. I was running around the room in flames.
“All I can remember is seeing Maurice crying and then Barry yanked the back of my hair, pulled me down on the bed and rolled me over and over to squash the flames. Then he wrapped me up in a rug because the sparks kept starting up again and phoned for an ambulance. I can’t remember much. I know he ran to the next-door neighbours and asked them to go to the hospital with me. Someone phoned Mum and Dad … and they went straight to the hospital.”
Lesley had third degree burns and required skin grafting. She then contracted scarlet fever. Children weren’t allowed to visit in the ward, she said, so “Barry used to talk to me through a window. He just kept saying, ‘I’m the one that saved your life, and nobody will buy me a bike!’ ”
By now they had moved to 51 Keppel Road in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester. Keppel Road was a very close-knit community and the Gibbs got to know most of their neighbours very well. While the Gibbs occupied the ground floor at number 51, Joan and William Burton were upstairs in Flat 2, Walter and Rona Chew were in Flat 3, and Harold Hunt was in the attic flat. William “Billy” Burton fancied himself as a bit of a trumpet player, a view – particularly late at night – that the other occupants of the building didn’t always share.
Just across the road at number 50 were Alfred and Elizabeth Horrocks, who had a young son called Kenny about the same age as the Gibb twins, so it was only natural that a strong friendship would quickly form.
Down the road at number 23 were Denis and Florence Dilworth, and Kenneth and Hilda Haggett. It wasn’t until 1957 that they would move out to be replaced by Reginald and Betty Holdcroft, and William and Sarah Frost, together with their son Paul.
These neighbours in Manchester remembered the Gibb family as struggling to make ends meet. Hugh was working two jobs, mainly as manager of a TV shop but additionally employed as a refrigerator salesman. Barbara also worked to provide for the family.
Phyllis Cresswell, who lived two doors away said, “They were puny little rats – the twins in particular. They looked half-starved.”
Katherine Kulikowski, another Manchester neighbour, agreed. “The kids were very pale and fragile looking,” she said. “I used to give them sandwiches, biscuits and orange juice. They never refused food.”
The impoverishment of their family background is something that all three brothers have never tried to hide. “I think a lot of people tend to think that [because] we have had phenomenal success, that you always had phenomenal success, and that it was always like that for you.” Robin said. “That you’ve never had to work hard before that. They always have the idea that as children you had a silver spoon in your mouth and that you were living on beautiful manicured lawns of suburbs. I mean it was never like that for us, we had come from a very working-class background and we worked damned hard. So, everything we’ve done in our lives has been for the love of the art, of the music. We’ve never, as we started so early, we’ve never once thought it was gonna be for money. It has to be a by-product of what you do.”
Barry has laughingly said that, “Even though we were aged eight to 11, the Gibb name in Manchester was like the Krays in London.” It may be a slight exaggeration, but the boys did seem to have a knack for finding themselves in trouble in those days. “We were street kids. Our parents had no control over us. I had a great fear of the law, which … you did have in those times, but I was also very rebellious,” Barry admitted. “Life on the street became more fun, and we wouldn’t come home until 11 at night, 12 at night, because you know in the summers it didn’t get dark until 11 o’clock at night, so kids around my age didn’t go home. We’d be on the streets every night.”
Kenny Horrocks told reporter Malcolm J. Nicholl, “Barry was tough. He was small and wiry, but he would never back down from a fight and he nearly always won. Barry and Robin became friendly with a bad kid who’d been in trouble with the police before. They were breaking into houses.”
Their other main friend, Paul Frost, added, “I remember going to their house quite often at night, and the only light they had was candles. The power was cut off frequently because they couldn’t afford the bills.” Maurice has always claimed to be the “goody-two-shoes” of the group, saying his only crime in those days was once stealing a bottle of orange juice. Paul Frost had a slightly different memory of the orange juice incident, claiming that he and Maurice “once stole a dozen bottles of orange juice from the doorstep of an old lady’s house. Someone saw us and reported us to the police. The police came and interviewed us and gave us a half-hour’s bawling out. They never pressed charges, and my parents had to pay for the juice. We also stole from Woolworth’s on about half a dozen occasions. We used to head straight for the toy counters. We did it for the sake of doing it, not because we particularly wanted those things.”
Their sister Lesley also remembered other occasions when Maurice blatantly demonstrated his fondness for taking other people’s property. Apparently he thought it great fun to take away bikes and prams, especially when they were standing close to the nearby police station, and put them a couple of blocks further down the street. One time, he is even said to have moved a pram when a policeman was standing in front of a window with his back to it. Lesley didn’t mention whether the pram was occupied or not but noted that Maurice was proud of his success in this daring raid. Barry and Robin, on the other hand, merely spent that evening debating how many years Maurice would get in prison once discovered.
Barbara Gibb recalls another early theft by the twins. The dustbin man had brought his wife flowers, and Barbara complained to Hugh that, “ ‘You’ve never even bought me a bunch of flowers since we’ve been married. I never get flowers from anybody!’
“My mother used to come up to the house every afternoon for a cup of tea with me. We used to sit in the window watching the traffic go by. On the other side of the road was a cemetery. So we’re sitting in the window and my mother says, ‘Whatever is this coming down the road?’ All you could see were four little legs. And it was the twins. They were coming down the road with a big wreath they had pinched off a grave. It said ‘Rest In Peace’. They came in and said, ‘Here you are, Mummy. Now then, you’ve got your flowers.’ They were so pleased with themselves.”
Barbara recalled another time that … “Hugh left some money to pay the electrical bill, about £12 in pound notes, on the mantel shelf over the fireplace. After the children had go
ne off to school, I got ready to go out to pay the bill.” She went to the mantelpiece to find the money had “disagone,” to use one of Robin’s childhood words. Her only thought was that the little twins might have helped themselves so she dashed to their school. It was playtime when she arrived, and the children were all outdoors. “I called Maurice over and said, ‘Did you see some money on the mantelpiece this morning?’ ” Barbara recalled. A wide-eyed Maurice denied seeing any money, but told her, “Robin’s got some paper he found on the mantelpiece. He put it in his windjammer, but it’s gone now. He’s given it to everybody. Everybody got some.”
Barbara recalled that Maurice’s earliest career ambitions were to be a decorator and he always had his own supply of ready cash. “He used to keep paper money – bits of paper he’d made himself – and he’d keep them in his ‘office’,” she said. “He was always giving people a job. And he really believed this. He put you on the payroll for £20 a week.”
The twins had a way of melting their mother’s heart: “They always used to look at me so innocently,” she said, “[with their] great big eyes.”
Kenny Horrocks confirmed that Robin’s career as a junior arsonist continued into their time in Manchester. “Robin was crazy about fire. He was always playing with matches. He’d set fire to anything. A TV and radio shop went up in flames once. There were two or three fire engines on the scene. Nobody knew at the time, but that was Robin.”
Paul Frost agreed. “One time Robin and I went to play in a parking lot. There was an old car there and we set fire to it. The car was completely gutted within twenty minutes. Police were looking for the culprit but they never found us.”
Barbara and Hugh remained blissfully unaware of their sons’ activities for quite some time. “We took them for a drive one day and commented on the billboards at a train station,” Barbara remembered. “They had been burned down. I didn’t know until later that it was my kids who had done it.”
Barry remembered that occasion well. “We built a fire behind a set of billboards,” he confessed, “and it took the whole lot down into the main road. I remember us going to the baths to go swimming after we started the fire and watching the police and the fire brigade and the crowd all filing out on the road and watching. We just stood in the crowds as well and we were standing next to a policeman and we said, ‘What’s happening?’ and the policeman said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get ’em.’ ”
They escaped the law that time, but soon the police were on to the chief fire starter. “Robin burned down a shed at the back of a butcher’s shop. The police came and said, ‘Your boys set the fire. There’s quite a bit of damage,’ ” Barbara said.
Robin Gibb believes that music was ultimately their saviour. “I think it was the environment, especially in Manchester because there were a lot of young restless kids on the street, as there still are in inner cities,” he said. “I think we were sort of a very early product of that environment … but the fortunate thing with us is that we had something that we wanted to pursue even that early and that was our music. We didn’t have anybody on the outside saying, ‘Boys, you mustn’t do this’ or, ‘You mustn’t get into trouble.’ We actually did it instinctively from within ourselves. We’d act up occasionally and then we’d say, ‘Look, we don’t really want to do this, we want to make music.’ ”
Chat shows and tabloid newspapers often focus on the exploitation of children in show business, often castigating inappropriately assertive attitudes of parents with show business ambitions for their children, but all three brothers say that this was never the case with them.
“We weren’t that kind of family,” Robin insists. “Our father couldn’t quite understand where we were coming from at first because we weren’t taught anything. We suddenly ended up in the bedroom just harmonising together … Dad was never sort of a show business kind of father saying, ‘Now you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that, and you’re gonna sing, by God. We’re gonna have you on that stage …’ We were singing on street corners and cinemas before the film started – it was kind of a grass roots kind of thing, very natural. My parents were a bit worried at first because they didn’t know where it was going to end or whether they should encourage it …”
* * *
Robin and Maurice joined Oswald Road Junior School, starting on September 2, 1957. Barry had already left on July 27, 1957, when he moved to Chorlton Park School to begin his secondary education. His younger brothers would remain at Oswald Road Junior until the start of the Easter holidays on April 25, 1958.
Unfortunately, their ability to harmonise didn’t impress many at school, as Maurice recalled. “I remember the entrance [to the playground at Oswald Primary School] where we first stood by the wall and sang to the other kids,” he said. “They didn’t like us much, but we used to stand against the wall, tell jokes and sing. In fact, most choirs we were in at school, we were thrown out of so it is interesting that we ended up doing what we did. Most of the schools didn’t like us harmonising to ‘God Save The Queen’. We didn’t mean to. It’s just that we sang it that way, and naturally [they] said, ‘What are you doing? Get out of my class!’ ”
Their parents were somewhat more appreciative, if a little taken aback. “It was a shock to us when we heard them singing in harmony,” Barbara Gibb said, “but after that, Robin always laughingly says his father got dollar signs in his eyes when he heard them sing, but he didn’t. I mean, he just thought it was great, he just thought they could sing at parties and things like that. He used to play The Mills Brothers’ records to them.”
Although Hugh recalled that his sons “had an uncommon ability to sing in this unique harmony,” he didn’t take their ambition too seriously. “Bearing in mind that they were still school kids, and you know how some kids get ideas about being ballet dancers or … want to be train drivers at one time or another, but singing was the only thing the boys ever wanted to do. We just couldn’t stop them. Even in those early years their whole lives revolved around waiting to be discovered. Not that we ever put pressure on them. They’d stand on street corners singing songs like ‘Wake Up Little Susie’. They had to have an audience …”
“He didn’t push us,” Barry agreed. “We had natural harmony and we’d all sing together. We were constantly trying to call his attention to our singing, saying, ‘Please listen.’ We had a three part harmony going. At that age, it’s pretty ridiculous. We didn’t know then why we were doing it, but we knew we wouldn’t want to be doing anything else when we grew up. So our father wasn’t the main cause of our going into show business. He didn’t do anything about it until he heard us singing in the lounge. He was in another room, and he thought it was the radio. About two years after we started singing, he became involved in our careers.
“From the age of Maurice and Robin being about six and me being about nine years old, that was our objective in life … we knew that that’s where we were going. It’s drive and determination, because that creates talent if you’re determined enough and you love something enough. The ability to do it seems to come with that, it doesn’t come on its own. It’s the determination to succeed that creates talent.”
Hugh recalled that Barry tried his hand at crafting a musical instrument. “[He] got the bottom of an old cheese barrel, put a piece of wood on it, a piece of household fuse wire and made a guitar. Then, when I saw things were heading that way, I bought him one. Four quid for a second-hand guitar and that’s where it all started.”
“It was after hearing Elvis that I decided I wanted a guitar. My father got it for my ninth Christmas – it was on the bottom of my bed. I begged him for it basically,” Barry remembered. It was obviously better than the home-made effort he had been using up to that point which “turned out more like an obscure banjo!” he once conceded. “It was then that I wrote my first pop song. I didn’t know how to write music, but I managed to play the tune I wanted.”
“A serviceman who had been stationed in Hawaii lived across the road in
Keppel Road in Manchester,” Barry continued. “I was a friend of his younger brother and he took me inside and started showing me chords that he’d learnt in Hawaii, playing Hawaiian guitar. So basically, I play the guitar completely wrong. I play totally unconventionally, much more in a country music sense. If you watch Dolly Parton play the guitar, it’s the same as me. We bar all our chords – there’s very little fingering going on, it’s just all barring, which is basically steel guitar, open D or open E … A lot of country artists play the same way. So, I think when you’re a kid and you live up in the mountains in America, there’s no one to tell you how to tune a guitar so you do it by ear and you end up with that kind of tuning.”
Barry set the scene for their first public performance. “What was happening at the Gaumont Theatre in Manchester – it was probably happening in other theatres, too – where, between Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges and whatever, kids could get out of the audience and go on stage and mime to an Elvis Presley record, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, or a Tommy Steele record and we liked this,” he said. “We’d see this and look at each other and say, ‘Oh, we should try and do that – that’s fun.’
“I was on my bike going down Buckingham Road in Chorlton-cum-Hardy. A boy called Paul Frost, another called Kenny Horrocks and another called Nicholas were running after me with the twins. We were joking about kids miming to records at the local theatre before the matinee started on Saturday morning. The kids used to mime to Elvis Presley records with plastic guitars.”
“I suggested that we did this with an Everly Brothers disc. It was just nearing Christmas. We asked the cinema manager and he said okay. We decided to do it the week after Christmas.”
Memories of that fateful first performance vary. The brothers seem to agree that it was after Christmas, in either 1955 or 1956, but here their story becomes cloudy.
Barry has said that the first song they performed was Paul Anka’s ‘I Love You Baby’, which he remembered as the B-side of ‘Diana’ (it wasn’t), but in 1968 he remembered it as the Everly Brothers’ hit, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, which had been Lesley’s Christmas present from her parents.