In August they played their first gig at the Cavern Club (minus McCartney, who was away at a Scout camp in the Peak District). Ivan Vaughan began the set on tea-chest bass, but when he left to finish his homework Garry took his place. The club’s jazz-loving owner Alan Sytner sent a note to them on stage telling them to “Cut out the bloody rock”, but got short shrift.
The following month it was back to school for Garry – in the Remove at Liverpool Institute alongside McCartney, who had been held back after failing his Latin O-level, and Neil Aspinall, who would become one of the Fab Fours’ right-hand men and the head of Apple Corps.
Homework, scout camp, Latin O levels……
All is not quite lost. One of mine recently did Latin GCSE, and did girl guiding for years before DofE took over.
OTOH…
….and I now pronounce you the duly elected Member of Parliament to represent the constituency of Gorton and Denton.
It’s a shame that Coventry City finally won the FA Cup.
I was only commenting yesterday that Coventry winning the FA cup has ruined that Monty Python sketch.
Not Fatcher?
Do beat combos still exist ?
If they do, I wonder how many still share a dressing room with a stripper when doing a Working Men’s Club Sunday lunchtime?
Mate of mine was tax adviser to strippers. He used to go and personally inspect their costumes and props to determine what was tax deductible and what qualified for capital allowances.
Yeah, the old “would you wear it in the street as normal day-to-day wear”. For some of our more exhibitionist diversity, none of would qualify as it would all be “yes”.
Only the popular ones.
Latin, eh? My pals and I almost all abandoned Latin the moment the ancient universities stopped demanding it for entry. Revealed preferences are just the thing.
My Latin master used to joke that national literacy would be improved and road deaths reduced by including a passage of unseen Latin in the driving test.
The ability to solve a quadratic would have the same effect though.
Mostly it’s an “are you thick” test.
And yes, I had two years of Latin in school.
I studied Latin for 2 years at school. When we had to choose our O level subjects the Lain teacher asked me to choose it, as I had grokked it. However it was up against Engineering Workshop Theory and Practice (yes, really), and that was no contest. Oxbridge wasn’t a consideration for me anyway.
I do appreciate having studied Latin though, it makes the spelling of lots of words obvious as English is half way to a Romance language anyway, courtesy of Guillaume le Bâtard.
A story for Boomers. Are there enough of us left to make such stories worthwhile?
I’m old enough to have had compulsory Latin (although not to O-level), but not old enough to know what the Remove was.
I’d thought it was for the group who had got a university place in advance (back in the days of unconditional offers) to wait until that started. But this sounds more like a remedial resit class.
It all sounds Berty Bunter stuff. I don’t think he was on the fast track to university.
“Billy”…
The R class at our school was definitely for resits, but it was enabled by the ‘A’ stream doing their O levels one year early, many of which failed and had to resit. Not a very useful experiment by the headmaster, I think.