November
Dates only

4. OPB

5. OPB, Sampson's.

8. Warrington.

10. Litherland

Several dates at Tower.

Editor's note: The Pauline Rainford v Eileen Manson saga continues.

There are fewer entries in the diary compared to previous years, although some interesting details of the Hurricanes appearance in France.

A young agent, Ted Easton, dropped into the Mersey Beat office one day and said he'd seen Mersey Beat and was amazed to read that there were such large numbers of groups in Liverpool. He mentioned that he was looking to book groups into American bases in France and took some advertising in Mersey Beat. He got a good response and a number of Mersey bands began appearing at the bases. One stipulation was that they had to have a female singer with them.

Johnny's diaries this time missed out on a lot of detail that might have given us some insight into the events of the year, such as Bobby Thompson and Ringo leaving the group, Ringo being replaced with Gibson Kemp and the events surrounding the changes.

There were reports that John and Paul turned up at the camp offering Ringo £25 a week to join them – which is £5 a week more than he had just been offered by Kingsize Taylor & the Dominoes. If he hadn’t joined the Beatles he would have left the Hurricanes anyway to join the Dominoes. It has also been reported that John Lennon and then Brian Epstein put a message across Butlin’s public address system, although this seems unlikely. Johnny himself was to say that John and Paul turned up one morning at ten o clock and knocked on their caravan doors saying they wanted Ringo to join them. Johnny did mention that Ringo left him to pay the rent on their shared caravan – however, Ringo was to make it up to them later on when he paid the Hurricanes tax bill!

The brevity of the entries leaves a few question marks: he doesn’t even mention the girl singer who they would have taken to France or explain why they were refused three months work in France.

The Tatler was one of two news cinemas in Liverpool city centre. These were cinemas which only screened news, cartoons and serials, but no feature movies. The cinema seems to have taken less of a role in Johnny’s life now, with only one cinema visit recorded during the entire year.

The OPB is the Orrell Park Ballroom, a prominent venue managed by Ralph Webster. Litherland is, of course, Litherland Town Hall where the gigs were promoted by Brian Kelly, and Sampson’s is Sampson & Barlow’s in London Road where various promotions took place held by different promoters. Knotty Ash refers to Knotty Ash Village Hall, one of numerous venues which haven’t been given much publicity in books about the Beatles and the Liverpool scene.

As the entries are now so brief, I’ve decided to include the 1963 diary here. When Johnny was writing them out for me he had trouble translating what he had written so many years before.

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