G R I F F E N 2 0 2 3 | 2 0 The Beatles’ previous timekeeper. At Ringo’s Cavern debut on 19 August, some fans had chanted “Pete forever! Ringo never!” Now, after the band’s opening number, Grigsby’s microphones caught a member of the audience shouting, “We want Pete!” The rest of the show passed without incident, but the Cavern’s poor lighting delayed transmission of Grigsby’s film when a producer declared it too grainy for broadcast. Nevertheless, Mike’s footage, which was eventually screened and has subsequently featured in numerous documentaries, remains the only record of the band playing at the Cavern, and provides the world’s first glimpse of the soon-to-be Fab Four in both sound and motion. But what of Michael Grigsby? In a career spanning six decades, he directed nearly forty featurelength documentaries for mainstream television. In 2013, at the time of his death, he was hailed by the British Film Institute as one of Britain’s greatest documentary makers. Ten years before, in autumn 2003, he returned to Abingdon to help me establish the Abingdon Film Unit. In the years we spent working together, I was privileged to hear Abingdon and the Fab Four 2022 has certainly been a tumultuous year, packed with significant and often unsettling events, but in what follows, I invite you to contemplate a recent anniversary that will take you to a different and perhaps more innocent time, and make you aware of links between Abingdon School and the world’s most famous pop group that may both surprise and entertain. JEREMY TAYLOR, DIRECTOR OF ARTS PARTNERSHIPS & ABINGDON FILM UNIT more about his extraordinary career, including his lunchtime date with The Beatles in August 1962. The only way in or out of the Cavern was via eighteen stone steps leading to Mathew Street, and at the end of the gig, with tensions still running high over the sacking of Pete Best, Mike could see The Beatles were uneasy about who, or what, might lie in wait for them at the top of the stairs. Their anxieties were well-founded; during Ringo’s first Cavern gig on August 19, George Harrison had received a black eye from a disgruntled fan, and today, he’d spent most of the show standing sideon to the audience to conceal the worst of his injury from the cameras. Now, rumours had reached The Beatles that some female fans had asked their brothers to come and “teach The Beatles a lesson”. This may explain why, as they prepared to mount the stairs to the street, Mike saw each Beatle arm himself with a length of scaffolding which he concealed in the sleeve of his jacket. In fact, The Beatles’ fears of a confrontation proved groundless, but Mike’s story reminds us that despite their subsequent “All You Need is Love” message, violence, or the threat of it, was an ever-present part of the band’s formative years. The time is 1962. “Wasn’t that the year of the Cuban missile crisis?” you ask. Well, yes. Perhaps 1962 isn’t the most obvious choice for a feelgood retrospective. Sixty years ago, the world felt as scary as it does now, as tensions between Soviet Premier Khrushchev and American President John F Kennedy peaked in October ‘62 over ships laden with nuclear missiles. Yet at the same time, tensions of an altogether different kind were building in the north of England. A band called The Beatles was going down a storm in a Liverpool cellar, and there to record them was an Old Abingdonian called Michael Grigsby (1955). Grigsby left Abingdon in 1955 after kickstarting the School’s now well-established reputation for student filmmaking. He took a job with the newly formed Granada TV in Manchester and worked on a range of programmes, one of which was a show called Know the North. On 22 August 1962 he brought a film crew to Liverpool’s Cavern Club to record The Beatles’ lunchtime performance for what was meant to be their first television appearance. He caught them at a hugely significant moment. Ringo Starr, the band’s drummer, had only joined the group five days before, and many fans still resented the sacking by manager Brian Epstein of Pete Best, Michael Grigsby’s first job at Granada TV in Manchester Left to right: AFU tutors Mike Grigsby, Jeremy Taylor and Mikkel Eriksen Photo courtesy of Tarun McGinnigle
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