St Peter's Church, Woolton: Where John Lennon Met Paul McCartney

St Peter's Church stands on Church Road in Woolton, south Liverpool. On 6 July 1957 John Lennon's Quarrymen played its garden fete, and 15-year-old Paul McCartney met Lennon in the church hall. A plaque on the hall marks the meeting. The churchyard also holds the headstone of an Eleanor Rigby who died in 1939.

6 July 1957: a field, then a hall

Lennon had a local connection to the parish because he went to Sunday school at St Peter's. The fete that Saturday opened with a procession of lorries through the village, and the Quarrymen rode on the back of one. Their afternoon set was on a stage in a field behind the church. That evening they were booked to play a dance in the church hall across Church Road.

Ivan Vaughan, a friend of both boys, brought Paul McCartney along. The meeting happened in the hall, beside its stage, while the band waited to go on. McCartney played Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock". A few days later Lennon asked him to join the group.

That stage is no longer in the hall. It is now object MLL.2005.54 in the collection of National Museums Liverpool. A plaque on the outside wall of the hall records the meeting. The parish still marks the date each July and held events for the 40th, 50th, 60th and 65th anniversaries.

The Eleanor Rigby headstone

A headstone in the churchyard carries the name Eleanor Rigby. It was noticed in the 1980s, and a stone bearing the name McKenzie stands close by. The Beatles Story museum says she married a railway foreman, Thomas Woods, and died on 10 October 1939 at the age of 44. She shares the grave with her grandfather John Rigby and other relatives. OpenStreetMap puts the grave about 40 m from the church.

McCartney has never said the song came from this grave. He has said he often walked through the churchyard but did not remember seeing the stone, and that the name may have stayed in his subconscious. In 2008 he called the song's Eleanor Rigby a character he had made up. The Tommy Steele Eleanor Rigby statue on Stanley Street in the city centre is a different memorial, and the granite gravestone used in the 1995 "Free as a Bird" video is a prop now shown at The Beatles Story.

Other graves and the church itself

George Toogood Smith is buried in the churchyard. He was Lennon's uncle, and Lennon lived with him and Aunt Mimi as a child. Bob Paisley, the Liverpool FC manager, is buried there too.

Local architects Grayson and Ould designed the red sandstone church, which was finished in 1887. Its tower is 27 m (90 ft) tall. Wikipedia gives the church as Grade II* listed, and the lychgate at the churchyard entrance has its own Grade II listing. St Peter's is still a working parish church. Volunteers show visitors round when they can, and the parish heritage site offers tours of the hall by arrangement.

Walking between the Woolton sites

Lennon's childhood home, Mendips, is about 0.8 km from the church in a straight line, and Strawberry Field is about 1.1 km. His mother Julia is buried about 1.7 km away in Allerton Cemetery.