Growing up in Liverpool, The Beatles were used to life in a tough port city, but they were now off to an even tougher one – Hamburg.

In Part 4 I explained how the group had become The Beatles,  consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, and also how they had become acquainted with Liverpool nightclub owner Allan Williams, who through his Hamburg connections, was able to secure the group’s first big break.

Allan’s main contact in Hamburg was a tough no-nonsense club owner called Bruno Koschmider who had several establishments in the notorious red-light district of St. Pauli. As the group members were all still only teenagers, Allan thought it best to transport the group over to Hamburg himself, and so on the morning of 16^th August (1960) he crammed himself, his wife Betty, her brother Barry, fellow promoter Lord Woodbine, and the five Beatles, into his old Austin van and drove, via the Harwich – Hook of Holland ferry, all the way to Hamburg.

The trip wasn’t without incident, not helped by Allan’s failure to get work permits lined up. They conned their way across the Dutch/ German border, and a couple of incidents with the van could have easily got them into trouble, but in the end they reached Hamburg – tired and weary, but relatively unscathed.

The picture below (which I scanned from Spencer Leigh’s excellent  book The Beatles in Hamburg) shows some of the occupants taking a pit stop at Arnhem on the way there.

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Originally posted 2022-04-19 15:05:54.