Second Day in Liverpool: Beatles Tour, Walker Art Gallery, Drinks at The Cavern Club

 Second Day in Liverpool: Beatles Tour, Walker Art Gallery, Drinks at The Cavern Club

Liverpool

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

    Our second full day in Liverpool was just as fruitful as our first--and just as much fun! On the agenda were two items: The Beatles Tour and an exploration of the Walker Art Gallery. When we found ourselves with time to throw in a visit for drinks at the one and only Cavern Club on Matthew Street where The Beatles had their start (not included on the tour), it was a delightful and unforeseen bonus!

Getting Set for a Day of Sight-seeing:

    We awoke at our leisure today as there was, fortunately, no early train to catch. After a shower in our hotel room (the Ibis on the Albert Dock waterfront), we munched our chicken sandwiches (purchased clairvoyantly at Tesco's last night), brewed a cup of decaff coffee in our room, checked out of our hotel, stashed our bags in the storage room, and left to greet the day. Glorious sunshine flooded Liverpool this morning and we knew we had a great day in store.

The Beatles Tour:

    Right across the street from our hotel was the starting point for the Hop On, Hop Off bus that would take us on the Beatles Tour. We had tickets for the 10.30 am tour and when we arrived there at a little before 10.00am, we were amazed to find that 50% of the seats on the upper deck were taken already. The bus was full of baby boomers, everyone being 60 plus years of age. I guess although we all know that The Beatles are timeless and now have the third generation of fans, it is folks our age who are brimming with nostalgia when it comes to associating our whole lives with The Beatles. Most of the visitors were from the USA and Canada with a few from the UK. By the time the bus left at 10.30 am, the upper deck was full and there were even a few people downstairs. 

    The Beatles Tour does go quite rapidly through the city--it is not really a City Tour, but it does run past Matthew Street on which the famous Cavern Club is located: the one that gave The Beatles their start in the UK. However, it main purpose is to take visitors way out of the city and into the suburbs because that is actually where the Fab Four lived in their childhood and youth and the point of this tour was to see those homes and the places that feature in their songs because they featured in their life stories too. Throughout the tour, our guide Tony kept up a running commentary. As these Northerners have a strong Scouser accent, I have to say that I could not quite understand much of what he said. Also, they talk really fast as they try to cram so much into a single sentence before the bus moves away. This makes it particularly difficult for me to follow (although Llew fares much better than I do with accents). 

    The bus made two scheduled stops--one at Penny Lane where we could all actually get out and take pictures by the street sign posts and one at Strawberry Fields. The original sign post on Penny Lane, which used to be signed by every Beatles Fan when they arrived in Liverpool and which is signed by Paul McCartney too, is preserved under perspex as there is every reason to believe it will be stolen. Every aspect of Beatles' memorabilia has been stolen and there is scarcely anything original to be found. We took a picture of the original sign too--in a poor state of repair, I have to say, but still priceless.

    The bus sailed slowly down Penny Lane (with the song Penny Lane playing on the PA system to really evoke a sense of nostalgia in us all) and arrived at the traffic circle that has been immortalized in music. The Barber Shop at the corner still stands and evokes the lyrics with which the song begins:

Penny Lane, there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he's had the pleasure to know
And all the people that come and go

Stop and say, "Hello" ...

Also at the corner of the circle, the bank still stands...another reference to it is available in the song:

On the corner is a banker with a motorcar
And little children laugh at him behind his back
And the banker never wears a Mac in the pouring rain

Very strange

    In the circle today, around which the bus curves, is a bistro that calls itself The Sergeant Pepper Bistro (a reference, of course, to the album in which the Penny Lane single was released). In fact, this circle was where Lennon and McCartney used to stand and wait for their school bus as kids--in doing so, they used to see all these strange, down-home characters whose memory they incorporated into their song. It was in this traffic circle that they would see the nurse selling poppies as a fund-raiser from a tray in the days leading up to Remembrance Day (November 11):

Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout
A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
And though she feels as if she's in a play

She is anyway

    The only character from the song who is no longer in evidence at the Penny Lane traffic circle today is the fireman. If there was a fire station at this point, it has long since disappeared:

Penny Lane, there is a fireman with an hourglass
And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen
He likes to keep his fire engine clean

It's a clean machine

      There is a further reference in the song to all three characters in these lines:

Penny Lane, the barber shaves another customer
We see the banker sitting waiting for a trim
And then, the fireman rushes in from the pouring rain
Very strange

    Indeed, as we were told snippets of the lives of these singers and the people who populated their childhood, we kept listening to the song: 

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit and meanwhile back....

   I was tickled to see a public bus whose destination had Penny lane written on it! We were fortunate indeed to have blue skies as our bus sailed under the suburban skies of Liverpool that brought us to our next scheduled stop on the bus--Strawberry Fields. This site, of course, has been immortalized in the Beatles' song, "Strawberry Fields Forever", the lyrics of which run, as follows:

Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

    Tony, our guide explained that Strawberry Fields was the venue of a girl's orphanage that used to be run by the Salvation Army in Liverpool. John was always fascinated by the place which he could see from his bedroom window, just a block away. Although he had no personal associations with the place, it reminded him of his own sad childhood, separated from his own Mum and Dad and raised by an Aunt (Mimi). Every year, in the summer, there was a large fair that John used to enjoy going to with his Aunt--it was held in the nearby Caldershot Park which we also passed.

    Today, there is only the red-pink painted wrought-iron gates that proclaim the site of the Strawberry Fields orphanage. It is, in fact, a restaurant, today as the wild vegetation has been cleared up to create it. When I visited the place, a few years ago, there was nothing on the property. Today, Beatles' fans visit the site to pose by the gates--and that was what we did.

    After this stop, we were brought to the home of John Lennon on Menlove Avenue in the suburb of Woolton. After John died, his widow, the Japanese singer Yoko Ono bought the property and promptly donated it to the National Trust which also acquired Paul McCartney's home at Forthlin Street, not too far away. This gave Tony, our guide, the chance to talk to us in detail about the childhood of these two singers. Apparently, Lennon had a sad childhood. His mother Linda was left on her own with John and her two other children while her husband went out to sea. This caused her to take up with a boyfriend. When her husband returned, he called to take John out to Blackpool for the day and it was only because Linda's sister, Mimi, John's aunt, suspected something odd that she went to the port to find that John's father had purchased two one-way tickets to New Zealand with the aim of whisking his son away there. It was only Mimi's efforts that prevented this from happening. 

    Now, I have to say, that I do not know anything about the veracity of this story and I know, from experience, that one needs to take a lot of what these tour guides say with a bagful of salt! So I offer this story with reservations. However, what the guide also told us was that Lennon grew up very comfortably with his Aunt Mimi (who adopted him, in a sense, as his mother would not be able to give him a good life) and bought him his first guitar with the warning that although he could learn to play it and make music, he was unlikely to make a living out of it! John always looked upon her as his mother and bought her a home, as a gratitude gift, as soon as he could afford it.

    Anyway, today, the National Trust maintains both homes and has decorated them in a 1950's style to evoke the era in which the two premier Beatles grew up. To enter the house, you need to book another (very expensive tour)--it was almost 30 pounds each for the tour that runs twice a day. Unless you are a real die-hard Beatles' fan, I doubt you would actually receive your money's worth. That said, both tours for the next day were full and Llew and I could not get tickets.

    The bus then sallied forth towards Forthlin Street where Paul McCartney grew up. On a previous visit, my bus had actually stopped right outside the house and I was able to take pictures at the door. However, on this trip, our bus stopped at the end of the lane and the guide merely pointed out the house. It was too far away and made no sense to me. Tony said that the neighbors have begun to object to tour buses running by and ruining their privacy. 

    So that was it really. That was the Beatles tour. On the long way back, Tony entertained us with more Beatles stories and finished off with inviting us to sing the last bits of  "Hey Jude" as we waved our hands all over. So what did I think of the tour? It was fun and, if you do not have a car in Liverpool, it is the only way you can see the homes of the Beatles. Brief references were made to the homes of the other two, Ringo Staar and George Harrison--they also grew up in the Liverpool suburbs, but their homes are not sites of musical pilgrimage today. There were also references to Brian Epstein who made The Beatles what they became. 

    We were returned to Albert Dock on the last stop of our tour and Llew and I decided immediately to hop on to the City Tour (on the next bus) and get off at Museum Quarter as they next item on our agenda was the Walker Art Gallery. I knew that this gallery had a wide selection of works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose work I truly admire--and I was very keen to spend a lot of time there. So, that was what we did.

At the Walker Art Gallery--but first a detour to St. George Hall:

    I also knew that St. George Hall, which is right opposite the Walker Gallery, is worth visiting. On a previous visit to Liverpool, I had been privileged to see the inside of it. It is quite spectacular indeed, the floor and walls covered with 19th century tiles made in the Minton Ceramics factory in nearby Stoke-on-Trent. Hence, I suggested to Llew that we try to go there. 

    By this point, I was really hungry and badly needed some refreshment,. it was, after all, about 1.00 pm. When we skirted the stunning Neo-Classical exterior of St. George's Hall to try to find the door leading to it, we discovered that only the ground floor was open, the staggeringly gorgeous Main Hall was not--it was, in fact, being refurbished and, therefore, closed to everyone but workmen. However, we did find a lovely cafe called the HomeBaked Cafe in the basement nearby and it was the perfect place to get a coffee and a hot chocolate (for me) and some wonderful bacon and cheese rolls that did the trick. Fueled with our snack, we could devote unstinting time to the art gallery--and that was what we did.

    The Walker Art Gallery stands in another lovely Neo-Classical building. It has a small permanent collection which is open to the public for free.  Sadly, the Tudor section with its Renaissance paintings was closed to the public as the Gallery has a special exhibition on 'The Tudors' opening in a few days. What we could see, however, was absolutely wonderful as the Pre-Raphaelite section, the Victorian section and then the Modern section was certainly worth seeing.

    We lingered for a very long time over these galleries and took in the wonders of the Pre-Raphaelites of which a wide number are represented. I saw worked by Arthur Hughes, William Holman Hunt, Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rosetti--the founders of the movement. Later, they were joined by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones  (alumni of Exeter College, Oxford). These painters focussed on narrative paintings that told a story, either from mythology or the Bible. I took many pictures, of course. In the Victorian section, I was especially struck by the work of Lord Leighton whose home I have visited in London. He has huge canvases that dominate the space and take the viewer directly into his world of beautiful damsels and Greek myths. 

    I was also happy to find the work of L.S. Lowry, the Northern British painter of industrial life, who made human stick figures a distinctive part of his work. I have only previously found his work in pictures--with one or two of them in the Tate in London.  And so, it was with pleasure that I looked at his work and recognized the reason for his popularity. There is nothing puzzling or intellectual about Lowry's work--he is indeed a realistic artist in a childish vein. Other Modern works that I found really interesting were by Duncan Grant (of whose work I saw a lot at Charleston Farmhouse--this painting was of the farm), Roger Fry (another member of the Bloomsbury School) and the husband-wife team of Stanhope Alexander Forbes and his wife, Elizabeth (to which I was also introduced for the first time), They do beautifully appealing work that evokes a lost generation. I was thoroughly charmed by it.

Off to Relax at The Cavern Club:

    With our visit to the Walker Art Gallery done, we used our map to walk about twenty minutes to our next port of call--The Cavern Club. We had about two hours to kill before we needed to board our 7.00 pm train back to London. What better way to spend them than to listen to the music of The Beatles in the very place where they became known to the world? 

    On the way, at St. John's Square, a busy shopping area, I stopped inside a really large Boots to buy my stock of nail polish. And indeed stock up I did. Rimmel is a favorite as I love its brush--not to mention its lovely shades. 

    Back on the streets, we found Matthew Street and went down it to find The Cavern Club in a Hidden bend of the lane. When we discovered that there was a cover charge of just 5 pounds to get inside, stay as long as we wanted with drinks, dancing and live music, that's where we decided to go. 

    We had the best time for the next hour or so as we toured the lovely club--justifiably called a cavern as you had to go down several flights of stairs to get to the basement. The place is filled with musical memorabilia of various kinds--from signed photographs to signed guitars and any number of souvenirs that visitors can buy for a really great way to remember their times in this sentimental space dripping with nostalgia.  The average age of the clientele was 65 and everyone was sipping, swaying, rocking. A singer was in attendance and he kept the crowd grooving mightily with his rendition of superb songs from the 60s--not just Beatles' numbers but the Merseybeat in general. It was all quite thrilling indeed and Llew and I had the best time with our own drinks--a Cabernet for Llew and a swift half of Guinness for me.                      

    By the time we walked out, we had just enough time to find our hotel (using the map), to pick up our bags and find a bus from the nearby bus station that took us back to the Lime Street Station. '

 Early Dinner at Wetherspoon's:

    It was at Lime Street Station that we discovered we had more than an hour to kill before boarding out train. And so off we went in search of a sit-down dinner. Wetherspoon's had a pub at the station itself--a gigantic place with a warren of rooms and when we found a Manager's Special for 4.99 pounds, we jumped on it. It turned out to be a double cheese burger with chips and onion rings--so as you can well imagine, we put half of it into carry-away bags as I felt pretty sure we'd be hungry when we reached London.

    So, we truly enjoyed our burgers which were a far cry better than the one I'd had with Roz at the Wetherspoon's in London, about a week ago. These were juicy and meaty and flavorful, the chips were really filling and the onion rings crispy and delicious. We washed these down with more red wine and Guinness.

    And then it was time to board our train that left bang on time, speeded through the lush green countryside of the Wirral and brought us to Euston station exactly at 9.00 pm. The 205 bus then brought us directly outside our building in Paddington. Our friend Bande had left for his holiday and we had his flat entirely to ourselves for the next several days. It will make the perfect base from which to explore the rest of the city. I had a long catch-up call on the phone with my friend Bina whom I hope to see before I leave. 

    At just past 11.00 pm--now really hungry, as I had expected, Llew and I finished our lovely burgers that we heated in the microwave as Llew watched the last of the Football match in which the German team won. It was with much satisfaction that we pulled the curtain down on another lovely day in the UK.  

    Until tomorrow...cheerio.