15 April 1963
Concert:
Riverside Dancing Club, Bridge Hotel, Teme Street, Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire
"They were hurtling towards number one in the pop charts and starting to generate the kind of hysteria that would make young girls and boys scream like jet planes.
It was at this moment that Tenbury Wells woman Pat Lambert sat down for supper with The Beatles.
The date was April 15, 1963, the day the Fab Four came to Tenbury and, as one of a group of friends who booked the band to play, town hairdresser Pat was one of the privileged few who shared a meal with John, Paul, George and Ringo before their show at the Bridge Hotel.
"The landlord put a supper on in the dining room, and so it was that I had supper with The Beatles," Pat remembers today.
"Me, my husband and some friends decided there was not much going on in Tenbury and we thought we would start a club, the Riverside Dancing Club. The room where they played is still there and I would think it has not changed much.
"I took my autograph book along and I asked them all to sign it, which they did, and I sold it about ten years ago at Christie's for £1,700.
"But if I had kept it longer it would have been worth more now."
Pat says The Beatles' behaviour was not quite what would have been expected in Tenbury Wells at the time, although she does describe George as "nice".
"We hadn't heard anything like it - they didn't care what they said."
Like what?
"I shouldn't say," says Pat. "We booked lots and lots of famous people to perform there - Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Johnny Kid and the Pirates, The Rocking Berries. But The Beatles were the most famous. People still remember that day even now."
The Fab Four were in town to fulfil a long-standing booking for which Pat and members of Riverside Dancing Club committee would pay the group the princely sum of £100 - peanuts considering their single From Me To You was riding high in the charts and bound for their first UK number one.
At the time Pat ran a hairdressers called Top Style in Tenbury Wells and remembers clearly four star-bound figures walking past the shop window as they roamed the town, taking in the sights before the show later that evening.
She says: "They came early in the afternoon and strolled around the town. Somebody shouted 'The Beatles are here' and some of our clients ran out of the salon halfway through their perms with their rollers still in."
The visit is now part of Tenbury history. On the wall of The Vaults pub, four fresh-faced chaps are frozen in time, staring out of a photograph taken that day in Teme Street.
The black-and-white photograph, which appears to have been taken outside a sweet shop, shows the boys in relaxed and happy mood and on the cusp of world fame. There they are, huddled against the cold. But ever the jester Ringo, is pictured enjoying an ice-cream.
Someone in the pub looks at the photograph and remembers John being so skint that he bummed fags off passers-by.
But later that evening, in a function room at the rear of the Bridge Hotel, these four skinny lads climbed on to a tiny stage and tore the place apart.
"It was just like the records," says Pat. "It was loud and raucous and all the girls were screaming. They were very good."
Pat's husband Tony had a special role that evening. "I was the compere that night and introduced them with a chap called Ernie Davies. So I went on stage with The Beatles!"
And so it was that Tony 'gave' The Beatles to an expectant Tenbury audience of a couple of hundred people just days [sic] before they went on the Ed Sullivan Show in the US and became a global phenomenon.
Revisiting the place of his youth, 71-year-old Jim Tompkins stands outside the building that was home to the Riverside Dancing Club and his memories of that day are as clear now as they were more than 45 years ago.
"I was in the bar of the Bridge Hotel talking to George Harrison and he bought me a pint," says Jim. "It was a pint of Wrekin bitter. I can remember we went to look for them earlier in The Crow pub and Jack Knowles, the landlord at the time, said 'I don't want any long-haired scruffy beggars in here!' and sent them to The Oak."
Back at the Bridge Hotel, Jim remembers The Beatles "watching a performance of theirs on a nine-inch black-and-white Echo TV".
Hairdresser Edwina Bishop, who runs the Femina salon in Tenbury, was a regular at the club and one of the lucky few to see the most famous pop group on the planet perform in the small but perfectly formed club.
"They had only just started to get known here and after that they became known around the world," she says.
"The room was packed and the atmosphere was great - but it always was at the Riverside Dancing Club. There was a queue formed outside by 7pm and bus loads of people came from Ludlow and Clee Hill. The music was very loud, but at that age any noise was good."
From Tenbury Wells to stardust - The Beatles set the world alight and Tenbury would never see the likes of them again."
Source: Shropshire Star, 18 September 2009
"I saw The Beatles play Tenbury Wells
by Pat Lambert
The story of how The Beatles - who'd just had their first number one - came to play a tiny club, in Worcestershire, from someone who was in the audience that night.
It was the early 60's that my husband and I, together with about ten like-minded people, got together to discuss what we could do to entertain the young people of Tenbury Wells on Saturday evenings.
We hit on the idea of forming a dancing club, where we would book acts from the pop charts, and backing groups to support them, which would also give local groups an airing too.
That was how the Riverside Dancing Club was born - we decided to use the largest ballroom in the town, which was at the Bridge Hotel.
The young people were delighted with the idea, so we had some membership cards printed and there was a small membership fee.
Jean Morton was on children's TV at the time, with two bears called Tingha and Tucker (password Woomerang Boomerang) - on the program she was known as Auntie Jean, and we asked her to come and open the club.
The committee met weekly to discuss the acts to be booked, and two of the members presented them to us, so we booked the acts the members wanted.
Joe Brown and the Bruvvers were particularly good, as were Johnny Kid and the Pirates, The Rocking Berries, Screaming Lord Such, Tommy (the gravel voice) Bruce and many more.
In 1963 we were asked by the members to book a group from Liverpool called The Beatles.
We had never heard of them, but their agent was duly contacted, and they were booked for the princely sum of £100.
By the time they came to Tenbury they were top of the Hit Parade with 'Please, Please Me.'
There was great excitement in our little town, and member's tickets of three shillings and six-pence were soon snapped up.
We made arrangements for a buffet supper in the Bridge dining room, for the committee to have the honour of a meal with the famous four.
The excitement in the town grew and grew, especially when they turned up in mid-afternoon and went for a stroll down the main street.
I myself had a hairdressing salon in Teme Street and we kept a look out for them.
Someone shouted "They've just come out of the café opposite!" and everyone in the salon got up and rushed outside, without a care in the world that their hair was in rollers and perming curlers!
Ringo I remember was eating an ice-cream cornet.
The evening came at last, with almost mass hysteria among the teenagers (and some old people!)
We finally got them to ourselves, in the locked dining room with people hammering on the door for their autographs.
I got their autographs in my book, which I sold at Christie's pop memorabilia about ten years ago.
They are worth even more now, as only Paul and Ringo are still living.
Looking back it was great that they did honour our booking, as by the time they came to Tenbury they were worth thousands.
P.S. We were asked to book a young vocalist called Cilla Black but we turned that idea down. What a lorra lorra bad luck!"
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/articles/2008/11/27/music_map_beatles_tenbury_pat_lambert_feature.shtml
"The Beatles, framed & glazed original album page mounted under a Black & White photograph of the group disembarking from BEA flight. The page is signed by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison & Ringo Starr, inscribed 'To Val love from the Beatles' by Paul McCartney. Approx size 19.5x13.5, these autographs were obtained at The Riverside Dancing Club, Bridge House Hotel, Tenbury Wells, Herefordshire. Monday 15th April 1963. They come with typed & signed letter by original recipient also with the rest of her autograph book where the page was removed from. Plus two original black & white photographs taken on the night of the concert"
Source: Cameo Music & Entertainment auction, 10 November 2009
"Which takes us, or at any rate took him, 20 minutes along a long and definitely winding road from Docklow to Tenbury Wells, a lovely little town straddling the river Teme. Once Mark [Lewisohn] had booked to spend Easter here, he checked The Complete Beatles Chronicle (author: M Lewisohn) and found, to his delight, that The Beatles had played the Riverside Dancing Club in the Bridge Hotel, Tenbury Wells, on Easter Monday 40 years earlier. He kindly gave me a copy of the notice in the Tenbury Wells Advertiser: on Easter Saturday at the Riverside in 1963, Erkie Grant and the Tonnets. On the Monday, The Beatles, supported by El Riot and the Rebels (3s/6d to members).
With his wife, Anita Epstein (regrettably, no relation to The Beatles' manager Brian), Mark found that the Bridge Hotel is not only still there but largely unchanged. He even spoke to Alec Cook, who had been on the door that night but proudly couldn't remember a thing about it, and his wife, Jean, who recalled booking The Beatles a few months earlier for £100."
Source: The Independent, 2 May 2003
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