gattino
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2003
- Messages
- 2,695
I wasnt sure which broad category to post this under. Fortean Travel? It Happened to ..er...Someone Else? Chat? General will do for now.
Basically it's about an unexpected little afternoon out yesterday with famous fortean links.
My very long stay guest -cum - housemate , R, is a devoted Liverpool FC fan. As I recently discovered where their beloved legendary manager Bill Shankley used to live , we went to see if we could find it the other day. And succeeded. So yesterday I thought why not complete the matched set by going to the grave of Shankly's even more successful successor. , Bob Paisley. It might not have been worth suggesting had I not discovered it's the same church graveyard (St Peter's in Woolton, Liverpool) where Lennon and McCartney first met and which contains the real grave of...well ..Eleanor Rigby.
You may or may not be aware of the mystery surrounding this grave but it's worth detailing.
The minutiae of the composition of each Beatles track is well documented. With Eleanor Rigby, according to McCartney, it started with nonsense verse, became "Miss Daisy Hawkins" but then searching for a more fitting name he took Eleanor from the actress Eleanor Bron. There was a delay in finding a suitable surname that fit the meter, and in the end a sign in Bristol for a wine merchants called Rigby fit the bill.
The other character in the song, Father McKenzie, was originally named McCartney but he wanted to change that for obvious reasons and did so by him and Lennon looking through the phone book for the next Mc name that fit. Hence McKenzie .
These are the concrete step by step piecemeal origins of the names from his definite adult recollection and knowledge. Yet in the mid 1980s , Beatles obsessives charting every detail of their lives discovered in the grave yard of the church in whose hall/fete they first met in 1957 is a grave containing one Eleanor Rigby. In the row in front of it is the resting place of a man called McKenzie.
Now McCartney was as fascinated and bewildered by this as anyone. Not only does he have no conscious awareness of ever noticing those graves he does have a conscious knowledge of how the names were arrived at. The two explanations are equally fortean. An almighty cosmic coincidence ...synchronicity in action. OR cryptamnesia of some kind. Eleanor at least registering only in his unconscious mind and working it's way out a decade or more later by convoluted means. McKenzie would be harder to include in the latter as the phone book lacks memories. So perhaps it's a combination of the two. When we throw in the obvious fact the song is set in a church and graveyard the idea there is no link at all is hard to accept.
Having now been there I can confirm this isn't a numbers game ...there was no likelihood of finding an ER there as it's a churchyard not a cemetery. There doesn't feel like more than a hundred graves there.
Anyhow...the day took an unexpected turn. . We found Eleanor's grave straight away but
struggling to spot Bob's , a local woman asked if we were tourists and tried to help us find it ...and wasnt in any hurry to leave us alone. She was a self appointed tour guide, telling us every Beatles related and other notable spot in Woolton and physically walking us to the church hall. As we finally started to leave a man who must care for the place was coming out. Who invited us in ...it was the room where Lennon and McCartney were introduced, the stage they first played on etc with a wall of photos and painting of the historic meeting. The sliding doors nature of their encounter and all that stemmed from it was emphasized.
Interesting to consider our pleasant little adventure was itself fated ...our bus has been several minutes late. Had it not been we wouldn't have encountered either of these kind and knowledgeable people
And a final plot twist. All this was yesterday. I've just noticed the name of the next guest to arrive tomorrow. I've never had one with her name before. Eleanor.
She haunts you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Basically it's about an unexpected little afternoon out yesterday with famous fortean links.
My very long stay guest -cum - housemate , R, is a devoted Liverpool FC fan. As I recently discovered where their beloved legendary manager Bill Shankley used to live , we went to see if we could find it the other day. And succeeded. So yesterday I thought why not complete the matched set by going to the grave of Shankly's even more successful successor. , Bob Paisley. It might not have been worth suggesting had I not discovered it's the same church graveyard (St Peter's in Woolton, Liverpool) where Lennon and McCartney first met and which contains the real grave of...well ..Eleanor Rigby.
You may or may not be aware of the mystery surrounding this grave but it's worth detailing.
The minutiae of the composition of each Beatles track is well documented. With Eleanor Rigby, according to McCartney, it started with nonsense verse, became "Miss Daisy Hawkins" but then searching for a more fitting name he took Eleanor from the actress Eleanor Bron. There was a delay in finding a suitable surname that fit the meter, and in the end a sign in Bristol for a wine merchants called Rigby fit the bill.
The other character in the song, Father McKenzie, was originally named McCartney but he wanted to change that for obvious reasons and did so by him and Lennon looking through the phone book for the next Mc name that fit. Hence McKenzie .
These are the concrete step by step piecemeal origins of the names from his definite adult recollection and knowledge. Yet in the mid 1980s , Beatles obsessives charting every detail of their lives discovered in the grave yard of the church in whose hall/fete they first met in 1957 is a grave containing one Eleanor Rigby. In the row in front of it is the resting place of a man called McKenzie.
Now McCartney was as fascinated and bewildered by this as anyone. Not only does he have no conscious awareness of ever noticing those graves he does have a conscious knowledge of how the names were arrived at. The two explanations are equally fortean. An almighty cosmic coincidence ...synchronicity in action. OR cryptamnesia of some kind. Eleanor at least registering only in his unconscious mind and working it's way out a decade or more later by convoluted means. McKenzie would be harder to include in the latter as the phone book lacks memories. So perhaps it's a combination of the two. When we throw in the obvious fact the song is set in a church and graveyard the idea there is no link at all is hard to accept.
Having now been there I can confirm this isn't a numbers game ...there was no likelihood of finding an ER there as it's a churchyard not a cemetery. There doesn't feel like more than a hundred graves there.
Anyhow...the day took an unexpected turn. . We found Eleanor's grave straight away but
struggling to spot Bob's , a local woman asked if we were tourists and tried to help us find it ...and wasnt in any hurry to leave us alone. She was a self appointed tour guide, telling us every Beatles related and other notable spot in Woolton and physically walking us to the church hall. As we finally started to leave a man who must care for the place was coming out. Who invited us in ...it was the room where Lennon and McCartney were introduced, the stage they first played on etc with a wall of photos and painting of the historic meeting. The sliding doors nature of their encounter and all that stemmed from it was emphasized.
Interesting to consider our pleasant little adventure was itself fated ...our bus has been several minutes late. Had it not been we wouldn't have encountered either of these kind and knowledgeable people
And a final plot twist. All this was yesterday. I've just noticed the name of the next guest to arrive tomorrow. I've never had one with her name before. Eleanor.
She haunts you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
