The Dissenters Plaque at Ye Cracke, Liverpool

The Dissenters plaque is inside Ye Cracke, a pub at 13 Rice Street off Hope Street in Liverpool. Put up on 24 August 2003, it recalls a night in June 1960 when John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe, Bill Harry and Rod Murray, students at the nearby art college, met there and called themselves the Dissenters.

A band that never played

In June 1960 four students from Liverpool College of Art went to hear the poet Royston Ellis read at Liverpool University. Ellis, born in 1941, was younger than any of them, and during the visit he stayed at the Gambier Terrace flat with Lennon and Sutcliffe. Ellis wrote in the manner of the American Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg among them, and the four had been reading that kind of writing themselves. Lennon was the musician of the group, Bill Harry the writer, and Stuart Sutcliffe and Rod Murray were painters. None of them thought much of the reading. Afterwards, over drinks at Ye Cracke, Harry suggested they call themselves the Dissenters, and they agreed that each would make Liverpool known through his own work: Lennon with music, Sutcliffe and Murray with painting, Harry with writing.

Ye Cracke was the obvious place for it. Lennon and Sutcliffe drank there as students at the art college round the corner, and Lennon courted Cynthia Powell there.

Who kept the vow

Harry kept his part fastest. On 6 July 1961, about a year after the night at Ye Cracke, he launched the Mersey Beat newspaper, and its first 5,000 copies sold out. Lennon's part needs no telling. Sutcliffe died in 1962; his grave is at St Michael's Church, Huyton.

Unveiled by the two survivors in 2003

The plaque plays on the story. It calls the Dissenters John Lennon's other band and adds that it never played a note. Harry wrote that he and Rod Murray unveiled it in August 2003; Open Plaques gives the date as 24 August 2003, 43 years after the meeting, and records it as a black plaque. It is the only plaque to the Dissenters.

Don't look for it on the street wall. Photographs taken inside the pub in November 2019 and published on Wikimedia Commons show the original as small, above a doorway between two of the pub's rooms. A larger copy hangs on a wall in another room, and the same text is etched into a mirror.