ELEANOR RIGBY - What's the truth?

[fortinian]

I've always thought that despite what Sir Macca says it was a subconcious choice. He probably didn't know he'd seen it but my guess was that his brian stored it away somewhere and when he thought of a name it just popped in there - of course we will never be able to prove it .

Is is really so suprising though that in a Liverpool graveyard we have a Rigby and a McKenzie close to each other? They are two very common Irish names and I don't find it co-incidental at all that they were there. It's like finding a MacDonald owning a farm in Scotland - probably not very hard.

[Ged]

In a graveyard though that both John and Paul frequented - that is the deciding factor maybe?

[fortinian]

Perhaps Ged... but we don't really know how much time they spent there do we? And there are a lot of graves in that yard. I don't mean to be a pedantic arsehole... and I do believe that McCartney was subconciously influenced for 'Elenor Rigby' but the Mckenzie one is a bit too far in my oppinion.

I'm pretty sure i've read somewhere that Paul originally wanted it to be 'Father McCartney' but someone said it wouldn't be right for such an obvious name to be in the song.

My argument wasn't so much againt Rigby... but Mckenzie being influenced as well.

[Ged]

Perhaps, but when deciding against Fr McCartney, could McKenzie have not been in his sub-conscious. Those graves are only feet apart you know and there's a pic of them by GerardF on SH showing their close proximity.

The graveyard is to St. Peter's church where JL was in the choir. It is recorded that they frequented the yard and sunbathes there. It is also over the road from the Village Hall where they met at the Garden fete in 1957 so it's a decent bet that they knew the area quite well.

[No-ones_Princess]

As a teen I used to have a thing about wondering around Grave yards alone, a place comfortable to think. There was a particular graves I remember. The Grave was not particularily attractive or adorned but someone had told me a story about the gentleman in question his name was Johnny Sinclair so perhaps like my Johnny Sinclair story McCartney remembers a strory someone told him and he does not want to share something that encaptured his imagination?

What ever the story of Eleanor Rigby its a fantastic mystery.

I do feel the need to say RIP Eleanor.

[Waterways]

It is quite easy to trace an Eleanor Rigby in Liverpool.

The mystery is that in the place where McCartney and Lennon first met there is a gravestone of an Eleanor Rigby - not a common name. And he says he knew nothing of the grave.

What people want is to find out about the lives of any Eleanor Riby's in Liverpool (or elsewhere) and see if they match the songs story.

[Waterways]

Mmmmm. Well you know the creative process is a complex thing, and just as I outlined it, it's possible that McCartney circa 1956 saw the name in the cemetery at St. Peter's Church and thought that "Eleanor Rigby" was a great name, and he stored it in his subconscious but on a conscious level forgot about it.

Just think about the life the man has lived -- it was a full ten years later that he came to write the famous song.

And in the meanwhile there was Hamburg, changes in the lineup of the Quarrymen, the change of name to The Silver Beatles, playing in Hamburg, the death of Stuart Sutcliffe, playing at the Cavern and other clubs round Liverpool, being picked up by Brian Epstein in the early sixties as "The Beatles," the first singles and LPs, America, the world, etc, etc, etc.

Frankly I think it's a bit much to expect the man to remember that he had actually somehow remembered the name from a gravestone that he had read back in Liverpool years before, after all that water had gone under the bridge. But maybe you yourself realise that, Chris, yes?

Chris

Names sometimes just stick in your head - a song writer would remember certain words that stand out. That is what they do. I recall hearing a woman's name that has always stuck in my head, "Fanny Kershaw". Very Victorian. I always thought a good name for an actress as it stands out and very different. Although the word "fanny" has a different meaning these days and I know of no one who is named Fanny.

Eleanor was very much a Victorian name, as was Fanny which was dropped, and few were called Eleanor. Eleanor was kept up by the Jewish community in small way.

[Kev]

The words, familiar to countless millions around the world, are among the most poignant in popular music: 'Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name; nobody came.'

Set to a haunting melody by Lennon and McCartney and backed by a string octet masterfully arranged by George Martin, the song broke new ground with its heartrending refrain: 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from?'

Its funereal orchestration and bleak message of isolation, depression and desolation were a far cry from the upbeat hits the public had come to expect from The Beatles - yet it climbed straight to number one and changed the face of pop music in the process.



Since its release 40 years ago, the tragic heroine of this two-minute masterpiece has become a source of endless fascination for Beatles' enthusiasts.

Indeed, interest is so strong that next week a 1911 salary ledger from Liverpool City Hospital bearing the details of 'E. Rigby', a 14-year-old scullery maid, is expected to fetch up to ?500,000 at auction.

In truth, this unknown teenager almost certainly had nothing to do with the much-loved song. (In all likelihood her first name was not Eleanor, and Sir Paul McCartney, who donated the item to charity having been sent it by a fan, concedes that she had no bearing on the process of composition.)

In a neat churchyard in the leafy Liverpool district of Woolton, however, lies the final resting place of the real Eleanor Rigby - the woman widely regarded as the subconscious inspiration behind the classic song.

It was here, at the St Peter's Church fete, that John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time.

The church is a stone's throw from Lennon's childhood home on Menlove Avenue. He sang in the choir and frequently played in the graveyard, which he referred to with characteristic irreverence as the 'bone orchard'.

The tombstone of Eleanor Rigby has become a landmark to Beatles fans visiting Liverpool and was even featured in the video for the band's 1995 reunion single, Free As A Bird.

But though many people believe this is the final resting place of the woman who gave the song its name, until now any details about her life have remained an intriguingly blank slate.

Today, for the first time, a Daily Mail investigation painstakingly unravels the true story of Eleanor and tracks down the last surviving member of her close family.

What emerges most poignantly is that whatever her association with the song may be, there is no denying that the Rigby family history is eerily consistent with The Beatles' bleak tale.



There are no surviving pictures of Eleanor, who was born on August 29, 1895, at 8 Vale Road in Woolton - which, intriguingly, backs onto Menlove Avenue, where Lennon grew up.

The patriarch of the family was her grandfather John Rigby - her mother's father - a stonemason who presided over the poky, two-bedroom terrace house crammed with five adults and the infant Eleanor.

Eleanor's real name, in fact, was Eleanor Whitfield, but with the Rigby family line on the cusp of dying out, her grandfather appears to have insisted that she take his surname - and this is how it appears on the family gravestone.

Eleanor's father, a journeyman joiner called Arthur Whitfield, passed away while she was still a child, so she remained in the family home until shortly after her 15th birthday, when her mother, Mary Elizabeth, remarried.

That marriage produced two half-sisters for Eleanor - Edith and Hannah Heatley - who would become the guardians of Eleanor's memory as, one by one, the Rigby family passed away.

Eleanor was devoted to her sisters and lobbied to be appointed godmother to Edith, which she duly was.

But as the years went by and her schoolfriends married and started families of their own, Eleanor's existence became more solitary, and she was forced to eke out a living by helping her mother, a laundress.

It was not until the age of 35 - positively ancient in those days - that she was eventually married to Thomas Woods, a railway foreman 17 years her senior.

The marriage, witnessed by her half-sister Hannah, was a joyous occasion but her happiness was not to last long.

Eleanor proved incapable of bearing children - a source of great heartbreak - and on October 10, 1939, a month after the outbreak of World War II, she suffered a massive brain haemorrhage.



And so it was that at the cruelly young age of 44, Eleanor died in the same house where she had been born, was interred in the graveyard of St Peter's Church, and had her name added prominently on an increasingly crowded headstone.

Precisely one year later, John Lennon was born, going on to play out much of his childhood against the background of that same church.

His schoolboy band, the Quarrymen, would cut their teeth at the church fete, and Paul McCartney would join him to sunbathe in the graveyard.

It was during this time, many Beatles experts are convinced, that the seed of an idea was planted which would subsequently grow into the song Eleanor Rigby.

'I am absolutely convinced that this woman is the real Eleanor Rigby - there are just too many coincidences,' says Ray Connolly, the respected Beatles biographer.

'That graveyard was a place John, in particular, knew very well, but it was also pretty close to Paul's house at the time.

'Paul has come up with various explanations for how they came up with the name Eleanor Rigby down the years, but the subconscious is a very powerful thing when you're writing music, and there is no accounting for it. Anyone who was growing up at the time will remember the kind of character The Beatles were singing about in that song.

'You'd see these lonely old ladies going to church every Sunday. Perhaps they'd lost their husbands in the war, or who knows what sort of tough lives they'd lived, but there was a sadness about them.

'Nobody has told the story of the real Eleanor Rigby before, and it's absolutely fascinating that her life has such parallels with the woman in the song.'

The lonely tale of the Rigbys did not end with her death, however. Having died childless, the family line was continued by her sisters, who moved into the family home on Vale Road and lived there together until they died, within a month of each other, in 2001 - long after Eleanor's husband Thomas Woods had passed away.

Neither married or had children, and when they died their entire estate - amounting to ?40,000 - passed to Robert Donnellan, who, by his own admission, barely knew them but was the husband of a late friend of theirs.

They knew no other family member or friend for them to leave their estate to.

Graham Paisley, the verger of St Peter's Church, says: 'Edith and Hannah were two elderly spinsters who lived a very quiet life and were not demonstrative in any way.

'They seemed to lead quite a lonely life, but they always had each other, and I know they were very close indeed. I'll never forget Edith standing at the side of Hannah's grave at her funeral, looking utterly desolate.

'It really wasn't much of a surprise that she died so soon afterwards, because I don't think she had anyone left in the world.'

Indeed, the only remaining memories of sisters Eleanor, Hannah and Edith consist of a few scraps of paper bearing a rudimentary family tree. Entire lives reduced to the dates of birth, marriages and deaths in spidery handwriting, bequeathed to a man (Mr Donnellan) for whom they are nothing more than names and numbers.

In the course of this investigation, however, two other developments have unfolded.

Firstly, in the Vale Road house which was the Rigby family home for well over a century, a school geography textbook has been found bearing the signature of a young Eleanor Rigby.

The book was found, hidden in the depths of the coal shed, by university worker Alice Bennett when she moved into the property in 2003.

Inside the cover it has been signed with the names Eleanor Whitfield and Eleanor Rigby Whitfield - a perfect match to the signature on her official marriage certificate from December 28, 1930.

If a salary ledger for an unspecified 'E. Rigby' can raise ?500,000 at auction, what price this artefact, signed by the woman whose headstone has become a Beatles icon?

Miss Bennett told me: 'When I first moved into the house, my neighbour told me that Eleanor Rigby used to live here, but I didn't really believe it was her until you showed me the signature on Eleanor's marriage certificate. I've put it in a bank vault for safe keeping, and only told a few of my friends about it until now. I'm a huge Beatles fan and I adore the lyrics to Eleanor Rigby.

'This is a little piece of history and I'm not sure how much it might be worth, but I don't want to sell it anyway.'

With Eleanor having died childless, and her spinster sisters following the same path, it would appear that this dog-eared copy of Gills Oxford and Cambridge Geography is virtually all that remains of her.

Just two miles away, however, in a semi-detached house in the Liverpool suburbs, I finally tracked down Thomas Rigby, Eleanor's cousin and her last surviving close relative.

The 88-year-old retired accounts clerk told me: 'I was aware of my cousins Edith and Hannah, but we never kept in close touch after their mother had died.

'As for Eleanor, the only recollection I have is of my father talking about how he paid for her piano lessons. He spoke fondly of her, as I recall.

'There was talk of Eleanor Rigby on the television this week, and I've often been asked if I'm any relation to this woman in a famous Beatles song. I've always told them that the answer is no.

'Of course, I heard a lot of Beatles' music in the Sixties - you couldn't get away from it in Liverpool in those days. But I like proper ballroom dancing, not these pop bands, and as far as I'm concerned The Beatles started all that off.

'Now I find that my cousin really was Eleanor Rigby, as you can imagine I have mixed emotions about it. I never knew her, which is very sad, but that's just how life turned out, I suppose.'

It is worthy of note that Thomas, like his cousins, has no children. Indeed, of six siblings born to Eleanor's uncle William and aunt Louisa Rigby - Thomas's parents - only two of them married.

Another child, Arnold, died in infancy, but Thomas, Albert, William and Louisa lived their entire lives under the same roof as their mother.

'Some may regard it as unusual, but we were very happy with the arrangement,' says Thomas.

'We were there for each other as a family, and that was enough for us.

'A lot of time has gone by, and Eleanor's side of the family has run out. They were ordinary, hardworking folk, the Rigbys - joiners, bricklayers, farmers and the like - not the kind of people you expect to go down in history. And now there's nobody left.'

So it seems that the only memories remaining of Eleanor Rigby are a few scraps of paper, an old, long-forgotten school textbook, and an iconic gravestone.

Elsewhere in the churchyard, Eleanor's sisters, Hannah and Edith, are buried with Eleanor's mother in an altogether more anonymous plot.

Nobody ever wrote a song about them, but as the Rigby dynasty approaches the end of the line, it seems this somewhat sad family were indeed just the kind of 'lonely people' The Beatles wrote about all those years ago.

REVEALED: The haunting life story behind one of pop's most famous songs... Eleanor Rigby | Mail Online

[M6AJJ]

Really interesting, many thanks for posting Kev.

[Paddy]

I find the subject interesting especially the idea that it came from the unconscious mind. Sometimes I think we also look for too deep a meaning into things. Great expectations and Pips encounter with Magwitch 'I'll tear your heart and liver out' is a graveyard sequence we all know and remember. Once in a church in Highgate cemetry I looked down at my feet and discovered I was standing on the grave of Coleridge the poet.Then there is everyone's experience of graveyards some people love them. Recently I went to a chrisistening in Liverpool and then a reception at Woolton Hall I got talking to a fella and realized I knew him from years ago as he was the gravedigger at Springwood in the seventies. He told me he was still there and he had seen a few pass through. I started to feel uncomfortable with the subject,and struck up a conversation about Football. Anyway the graves act was passed in 1832 I read that on a sign outside a dead spread and I have always remembered it, funny isn't it.

[Ged]

Great posting Kev whether the song was about her or not. Very similar parallels to my family tree too. My dad's 4 brothers never married an were childless too, one of those dying just in his 30s and only my dad and his married and had children.

I remember seeing a small stone in a cemetery and I could just make out '200' engraved on it which is quite some age to die. I asked my friend what his name was and as he moved the undergrowth he said 'Miles from London'.

[edwardo]

I have a pair of old socks that I have allway thought were Father Mckenzie's.(The one's he was darning)if someone would like to offer me a good price...I may part with them.

[pablo42]

I have a pair of old socks that I have allway thought were Father Mckenzie's.(The one's he was darning)if someone would like to offer me a good price...I may part with them.

How much? Gotta be a collectors item...

[Oudeis]

I have noticed one thing Eleanor Rigby related. Her initials appear on most of the post boxes that I see around, though the logo of an ornate Dollar sign, used on the gravestone at the start of this thread, has changed a bit over the years.

[kevin]

A little bit of a swerve from the topic but you might find it fun.

Before the birth of our first child we were struggling over names. I was keen on either Alexander or Alexandra, depending on the sex. We discussed it for weeks and Ruth had her own ideas (funnily enough, one of them was Eleanor - but no connection to Rigby).

The day I was taking her to the hospital, we had a sign!

Waiting to turn into the road where the hospital was, I noticed the number plate of the car in front.

A437LEX.

That was it - the name was chosen! He'll be 20 this year.

Anyone else named their child after a number plate?