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. 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, they agreed that each would make Liverpool known through his own work, and they took the name the Dissenters.

The plaque plays on this. It calls the Dissenters John Lennon's other band and adds that it never played a note. Sutcliffe's grave is at St Michael's Church, Huyton.

Finding it inside the pub

The plaque went up on 24 August 2003, more than 40 years after the meeting. Don't look for it on the street wall. The original is small and sits above a doorway between two of the rooms. A larger copy hangs on a wall in another room, and the same text is etched into a mirror.

The pub itself

Ye Cracke began as the Ruthin Castle; its nickname, a Liverpool word for an alleyway, later became its name. Lennon and Sutcliffe drank here as students, and Lennon courted Cynthia Powell here. CAMRA rates the interior as of very special national historic interest. The small snug called the War Office, closed off by a timber and glass screen, is named after drinkers' debates during the Boer War.