‍The Beatles in the bathroom of Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave 

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‍THE camera shutter clicked and whirred and captured Liverpool’s Fab Four as they had never been pictured before … in the London bathroom of the journalist they trusted more than any other, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard.

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‍She was at the height of her fame thanks to a door to the Swinging Sixties being kicked open by Standard Editor Charles Wintour. He had been impressed with his young graduate secretary who kept pestering him to produce a music page for his younger readers.

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‍Indian-born Maureen, who was rescued from a torpedoed passenger ship when she was just six, in 1940, always dreamed of being a journalist and Wintour gave her the chance.

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‍In 1961, he gave her a page in the paper and called it Disc Date, and it put the former 28-year-old former secretary on the road to a lifelong friendship with The Beatles that saw her words detonate one of their biggest scandals a few years later. John Lennon telling the world that the four mopped hair lads from Liverpool were more popular than Jesus.

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‍The result: As the band embarked on a 14-city tour, fans across America’s Bible belt thousands of religious protestors burned their records and mementoes on public bonfires; the Klu Klux Klan threatened them with death — and by the year’s end, they decided never to play in public again. 

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‍But how did they end up sitting on the edge of Maureen’s bath in Maida Vale in 1964?

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‍The setting was a witty reference to a comment by Ringo Starr, who noted that bathrooms were the only places they could find sanctuary from fans while on tour. The Standard snapped Maureen at home in her bathroom with the lads and it was used as a poster all over London.

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‍The Beatles would often turn up at her flat to get away from the crowds and as their friendship grew, Maureen went to their homes; concerts and interviewed them many times on tours.

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‍In 1963, she wrote the first notable newspaper feature about the four “fresh young jokers” from Merseyside with the headline: ‘Why the Beatles Create All That Frenzy’. It was the year they smashed the charts with Please Please Me; From Me to You, She Loves You, and I Want to Hold Your Hand.

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‍Three years later, her interview with John Lennon upset America when he told Maureen that the band had become more popular than Jesus. “I don’t know which will go first – rock’n’roll or Christianity,” he said.

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‍Maureen was quick to defend him. She said: “John was certainly not comparing the Beatles with Christ. He was simply observing that so weak was the state of Christianity that the Beatles were, to many people, better known. He was deploring, rather than approving, this.”

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‍She added that Lennon had intended to be ironic. The rock star went on to thank Jesus in a book by Yoko Ono in 1986: “If I hadn’t upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas,” he said.

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‍“Lennon was the most interesting of all the Beatles,” Maureen wrote, “imperious, unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, arrogant and very good at answering back.”

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‍And yet he also listened, she revealed.

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‍In 1964, he showed her some lines for A Hard Day’s Night scrawled down on a birthday card that had been sent from a fan to his son Julian:

‍It went: ‘When I get home to you; I find my tiredness is through.’

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‍“That’ s a feeble line about tiredness” Maureen told him. Lennon borrowed her pen and wrote instead: ‘“When I get home to you; I find the things that you do; Will make me feel all right.” The rest, as they say is history. Today Julian’s birthday card is in the British Library.

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‍But Maureen, who appeared on Juke Box Jury, wasn’t only close to the Beatles in her career … she befriended so many, from Gene Vincent to Little Richard, who talked of his childhood in Georgia where “the kids played in the dust on the ground. It was the colour of my skin, the dirt was the same colour as we were.”

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‍Wintour described her as one of his two “absolutely favourite writers”.

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‍Maureen married one of her university admirers, farmer Francis Nichols, and the Beatles sent them a telegram of congratulations. She had three children and died suffering from dementia in November 2021, aged 82.

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‍We can only hope that in her last few years she was able to enjoy her memories of being at the forefront of the wonderful Swinging Sixties.

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‍HOW THINGS CHANGE

‍Fancy That! In 1921 a national advertising campaign for Craven A cigarettes was launched in memory of the death of the 4th Earl of Craven killed in a yachting accident.

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‍Carried in newspapers and on billboards, it promoted the safety of the product because it had the first manufactured corked tip. It became a household name in 120 countries with the slogan ‘Will not affect your throat!’

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‍The amount spent on tobacco products in Britain in 1914 was £99 million per annum, but the figure rocketed to £158 million per annum by 1932, with £2million being spent every week on Imperial Tobacco Co. products alone. This was down to women doing traditionally masculine jobs and enjoying male pleasures while the lads were away at war or dead.

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‍National newspapers launched campaigns to collect cigarettes and tobacco in towns to send to troops, as they gave “comfort in times of stress.” But women decided they needed them too. Tobacco companies also aided in the feminisation of cigarettes by creating a link with children. On September 13, 1933, The Sketch published an advertisement(above) from Players showing a child playing with a packet of cigarettes. It convinced young mums to smoke.

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‍FAREWELL OLD SON: JAPAN SAYS
LAST GOODBYE TO LOYAL HACHIKO

‍Railway station staff in Tokyo say prayers for their old friend
Hachiko who had passed away

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‍I CAME across one of the saddest dog stories I have ever read last week and wondered how on earth I didn’t know about it, given the newspaper and movie coverage of this loving and sad best friend of man.

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‍It broke my heart to hear how Hachiko, a Japanese Akita, was spat at, kicked and had water thrown over him as he sat loyally waiting for his master to come home on his normal train … and never did. But Hachiko arrived at the train station every day, for 10 years, and died without ever seeing his master again.

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‍The story, which made world headlines and two movies, began when cream and white Hachiko was born in November 1923, in Japan’s Akita prefecture.

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‍In 1924, he was adopted by Hidesaburo Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the Tokyo Imperial University, who heaped love and affection on him.

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‍Each morning, Hachiko would accompany Professor Ueno to the Shibuya train station, where the professor would catch his train to work. Each evening, the dog would return to the station at the precise time the train was due, to greet his master home.

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‍This routine continued for over a year until, on May 21, 1925, Professor Ueno suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died suddenly at work. He never returned to the station, dying in hospital.

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‍And so began Hachiko’s long wait for his master. He continued to visit the station at the same time every day, standing upright, waiting for Ueno’s return. Many people found Hachiko irritating as he roamed the crowd looking for his master when the train came in. Some people kicked him out of the way and some poured buckets of water over him to try and make him go away. He was shouted at, sworn at and spat at. He never understood why. His master would never do these things.

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‍But Hachiko, known to all the station staff and passengers, persisted in his daily vigil for nearly 10 years, looking at each passenger to see if it was his master, until his own death on March 8, 1935. By then everyone loved and admired him.

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‍His newspaper story gained national attention after one of Ueno’s students, who was interested in the Akita breed, published several articles about Hachiko’s remarkable loyalty in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun in 1932. It turned Hachiko into a national sensation, and people began bringing him food and caring for him and explaining to others why he stood waiting.

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‍He became a powerful national symbol of loyalty and devotion in Japanese culture and a story taught to schoolchildren as an example of fidelity. The Akita is one of the country’s oldest and most popular breeds trained to hunt wild boar and elk. They are renown for being kind, gentle and loving to their masters.

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‍Today a bronze statue of Hachiko stands outside Shibuya Station in his honour and has become a popular meeting spot in Tokyo today. Every year a memorial service is held for him.

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‍HERO WHO LED PARAS IN A BOWLER HAT AND ARMED WITH HIS BROLLY

‍I ALWAYS thought that the eccentric British Major in the iconic war movie A Bridge Too Far, who marches alone over Arnhem’s Remagen Bridge towards the German tanks wearing a British bowler hat and using his umbrella as a walking stick, was a script writer’s poetic licence to add a light moment to the tense scene. But it’s true.

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‍Trawling through the Pegasus war archives and press reports of the Battle of Arnhem, for something else entirely, I discovered he was in fact, Major Allison Digby Taham-Warter. In the film, he was named Major Harry Carlyle and played by actor Christopher Good.

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‍Tatham-Warter was put in charge of A company, The Parachute Battalion and he carried the umbrella because he had difficulty remembering military passwords and figured that “only a bloody fool Englishman would carry an umbrella into battle against the Nazis,” making his nationality obvious.

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‍He was famously reported to have disabled a German armoured car by thrusting his rolled-up umbrella through an observation slit and poking the driver in the eye.

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‍At Arnhem. when the battalion chaplain, Father Egan, was pinned down by heavy mortar fire, Tatham-Warter went to his aid, opened the umbrella over them both, and said, “Don’t worry about the bullets, Padre; I’ve got an umbrella”.

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‍He was also famed for leading a bayonet charge against enemy infantry and tanks, pistol in one hand and the brolly in the other. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for his heroism. Wow!

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍19 January 2026

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