Saturday 15 November 2008

Was This Eleanor Rigby?

A document recently came to light that how Paul McCartney may have come up with the name Eleanor Rigby, one of the "lonely people" that he sung about in the famous song of the same name. In the early 1990s a lady named Annie Mawson had a job teaching music to children with learning difficulties. Annie managed to teach a severely autistic boy to play "Yellow Submarine", on the piano, which won him a Duke of Edinburgh Silver Award. She wrote to the former Beatle telling him what joy he’d brought. Months later, Annie received a brown envelope bearing a ‘Paul McCartney World Tour’ stamp. Inside was enclosed a page from an accounts log kept by the Corporation of Liverpool, which records the wages paid in 1911 to a scullery maid working for the Liverpool City Hospital, who signed her name "E. Rigby". There was no accompanying letter of explanation. Annie said in an interview that when she saw the name Rigby, “I realised why I'd been sent it. I feel that when you're holding it you're holding a bit of history.”

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