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CHAPTER ONE

“…A BIT POSH FOR ROUND HERE AT THE TIME.”

1940 was a vintage year for pop stars: it was then that Gene Pitney, Smokey Robinson, Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard, two Beatles (three if you include Stuart Sutcliffe) and a Mother of Invention all made their first appearances, mewling and puking.

These 1940 babies reached puberty at around the same time as Elvis slunk into Sun Studio, the first Gaggia arrived in Soho and the Daily Express coined the term “Teddy Boy”. By the time they reached their late teens, they were prepped to take the great banner of progress from the hands of Bill Haley, Ray Charles, Lonnie Donegan, Little Richard and the other pioneers, and go on to rule the world. Something like that, anyway.

Ronald Wycherley, the boy who would be Billy Fury, came into the world on April 17 at the Smithdown Road Infirmary, Sefton, Liverpool, weighing in at a healthy seven pounds. His parents thought about calling him Kenneth, but his mum had twin brothers called Ronald and William so they went with Ronald.

Little Ronald was a beautiful baby. It was in the genes. His mother, Sarah Jane Homer, known universally as Jean, was a beauty, blessed with the sculpted cheeks, the brooding eyes and the heartstopping smile she passed on to her son. She was just 17 when Albert, a cobbler, met her. He put an engagement ring on her finger within the month. They were married a year later and moved into a place on Sefton Square, Liverpool 8, a street the bulldozers demolished 50-odd years ago.

Albert and Jean both had vague showbiz connections. Jean had an uncle who’d worked with a minstrel show. Albert had a cousin who, reputedly, at some time or other, accompanied Gracie Fields on a piano accordion.

At the outbreak of war, the previous September, there had been talk of gas attacks, invasion and bombing raids. None of which had happened.

Billy’s arrival seemed to get things going.

By the end of May, Hitler had taken France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and the British army had lost 68,000 men.

In August, the Luftwaffe started dropping bombs on mainland Britain. London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Hull, Coventry – all the major ports and centres of industry got hammered. And the heroes of pop who lived in those places grew up in a world of Anderson shelters, patched-up houses and blacked-out alleys; an often fatherless anarchy of aunties and grannies and cuddles, punctuated by bouts of inexplicable terror, thumps and screams.

Merseyside, where the Atlantic convoys docked, was an obvious target. One hundred and sixty bombers came on August 28. They came again on the 29th and the 30th and then came back regularly until May the following year. A direct hit on an air raid shelter at the Ernest Brown Junior Instructional Centre in Durning Road, Edge Hill, killed 166.

The Wycherleys in Sefton Square, less than a mile away from Brunswick Docks, were in the firing line. “We were under the stairs and in and out of shelters,” Jean said, “and I think that told on Billy.”

Ricky Tomlinson, the actor, was living nearby with his brother Albert. “The sirens would sound and Albert would make his way down the stairs in the pitch black, while mam held tightly on to my hand. She came down on her bum one step at a time. If the bombers were already ahead she bundled us under the stairs lying on top of us. Some nights mam was too exhausted to care. She gathered us into bed, wrapping us in her arms saying, ‘If we go, we’ll all go together.’ We lay under the blankets listening to the explosions and the bells of the fire engines. I was too young to realise the dangers we were in or to understand death and war.”

Eventually, Albert Wycherley’s papers came through and he was sent to the Woolwich Arsenal in London to service anti-aircraft guns with the Royal Artillery. In 1942, Jean and Ronnie went to be with him for a bit, staying in digs. The bombing had stopped by then, but still the family suffered its only wartime injury when Ronnie was bitten on the cheek by their landlady’s dog. He bore the scar for the rest of his life.

The Government Evacuation Scheme gave assistance for children, the elderly and pregnant women to move out of major cities into the comparative safety of the countryside. In 1943, in the later stages of her second pregnancy, Jean moved out to Prestatyn on the coast of North Wales, where she gave birth to another son, named after his dad, Albie. But the sea air didn’t seem to suit her. As soon as Albie was out she scurried back home to Liverpool.

Ronnie had developed an inquisitive nature.

“First thing I can remember in my whole life,” he said, “was this time my dad came home on leave from the war and bought presents for me and my little brother – two little Dinky cars. An army lorry and a Riley car. I remember exactly.

“I took the army lorry and my brother took the Riley. We started playing with them on the kitchen floor. Then my mum and dad went out to the pictures and I suddenly got the idea of finding out what was inside. So, I took an axe and smashed it open. There was nothing inside. So, I took the axe and smashed up my brother’s Riley.”

Why mum and dad went out leaving two toddlers home alone with an axe remains a mystery. But it was wartime. Things were different.

By the end of the war, the Wycherleys were living up the road from Sefton Square at 34 Haliburton Street – now swallowed up by the big Tesco Extra on Park Road. It was an area known as “the Holy Land” because on the other side of Park Road was Isaac Street, Jacob Street and David Street. Dad had his own shoe repair shop just around the corner, named ‘Jean’s’ after the missus.

The Wycherleys’ was a decent terraced house – parlour, back parlour and kitchen downstairs, and three bedrooms upstairs. The outside lav and coal house were in the entry at the back.

“My dad had his own shop, so that meant we had more money than other folks,” said Ronnie’s brother Albie. “We could afford to spend a bit more on a nice and tidy house. Black and white tiled step. Only one in the street, probably. It was a bit posh for round here at the time.”

Post-war Liverpool, like most of the big towns, was a mess, physically and psychologically.

Everybody spoke of time in terms of “before the war”, “during the war”, “after the war”. Everybody knew somebody who’d been killed, been maimed, been bombed out, been buried in an air-raid shelter or still woke up screaming in the night. They’d all come to terms with mayhem. And they had, like good Boy Scouts, done their best to smile and whistle under all circumstances.

In the 21st century, people get counselling for post-traumatic stress syndrome, but how do you counsel whole countries, whole continents? You don’t. “Britain can take it,” the newsreels at the pictures said. And so it did. Most of it did anyway, and most of the rest pretended. When the war was over, the need to get back to some half-remembered state called “normal” was urgent and the new National Health Service, the 1944 Education Act and the lovely new houses with inside lavs promised it would be “normal” with knobs on. Kids played on the rubble that had buried their aunties and uncles and neighbours and had a terrific time.

“Cratered and pocked with bomb sites,” was how author Lorna Sage remembered Liverpool. “I saw in reality the cityscape of the newsreels – the remains of the tenements, wallpaper, fire grates and private plumbing exposed, clinging to the walls which were buttressed with wooden props while they waited for demolition.”

“We used to play on what we called the Diamond Dump,” says Pat from Birmingham, later a Billy Fury fan. “There’d been a jeweller’s shop there and it had been bombed out. We used to dig down and sometimes you’d find bits of metal and shiny stuff we pretended was gold and diamonds.”

“Opposite our school was a huge bombsite we called the Tip,” says Marion from Hull, another fan. “It was all grown over with weeds and we used to catch butterflies and put them in jam jars. All different kinds of butterflies, half of them kinds you don’t see any more at all.”

They were skinny kids, the post-war lot. Sweets and sugar were rationed until 1953. Meat until ’54. “Mum used to mix a bit of the sugar ration with some cocoa and we’d dip our fingers in it and suck them. That was the nearest we ever got to sweets,” says Pat.

Lorna Sage remembers her first sighting of a bag of crisps. “I couldn’t at first understand my mother’s delight in these crumpled fossils with chewy grey bits (they must have used frost-bitten potatoes back in the beginning as a concession to austerity) although I saw the point of the blue twist of salt from the first moment. It was a matter of luxury, having portable food you could play with.”

Scarcity left the pop stars of the future blessed with the drainpipe-legs, the needle-cheeks and the damaged adenoids with which they captured the hearts, minds and money of their fans.

Ronnie started school at St Silas’ C of E Primary on High Park. He never took to it.

“I suppose I was a dreamer,” he said, much later. “I remember sitting all by myself in the playground in school, in a corner away from the other kids and dreaming about this island I was going to have. About half a mile square it was, and about half a mile off shore, with a big white crescent-shaped house in the middle with a swimming pool. When you think of the place that I come from – the Dingle district of Liverpool, you’d think all this dreamy stuff would be knocked out of me. I just didn’t like going around with the other kids. I suppose there’s something about a kid that’s always drifting off by himself that makes him a kind of natural target for other kids. They think it’s weird that one kid could do without company.”

By the age of six, he was taking himself off on expeditions to collect bird’s eggs – a hobby that was banned in 1954 but was once deemed an almost respectable occupation for the budding ornithologist. When he was a bit older, he’d take a bus to West Kirby on the Dee Estuary to see oystercatchers, redshanks, plovers and, if he was really lucky, a godwit or two; or nearer to home, he’d hang around Sefton Park or Prince’s Park, and wait for something to show up on the boating lake.

“I had this big book at home and I used to write down all the details I could remember about every bird I saw. I even had the idea I would write a book about birds. This kind of thing must have made everybody at school think I was weird. So, whenever anything went wrong they picked on me – the teachers too.”

The idea of writing the book about birds never left him. He was in discussion with a publisher at the time of his death.

The misfortune that was to blight the rest of Ronnie’s life came when he was just six and-a-half. Up until then, he’d been a bouncing baby and a healthy toddler, full of beans.

These were the days before comprehensive inoculation programmes, before effective antibiotics, when diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough and even a nasty cut could kill you. If you survived, convalescence could run into months. In the poorest areas of the big cities infant mortality was twice or three times the national average.

Billy and his schoolmate Ritchie Starkey – the boy who became Ringo Starr – both did a lot of hospital time. Ritchie had troubles, first with his appendix then his lungs, that put him away for years. Ronnie came down with rheumatic fever, a disease almost unknown in 21st-century Britain but still “very common in poorer parts of the world…where there’s over-crowding, poor sanitation and limited access to medical treatment.” In 1946, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool admitted 300 children who were suffering with the disease.

According to the actress Amanda Barrie, later to become one of Billy’s leading ladies and his girlfriend, Billy was convinced that it was the birdwatching that did for him. “I remember him telling me a story about how he got rheumatic fever,” she says. “He’d been playing out and got wet and when he got home he was punished for it. So, next time, he stayed outside until the clothes dried on his back before he dared go home.”

Another similar story tells of a time he made himself a raft and wondered if it would float. It didn’t.

Rheumatic fever usually starts with something simple like a strep throat – these days a condition treated with oral antibiotics and a few days off school. Without the help of antibiotics, the body’s immune system can kick into overdrive and, in some cases, as well as attacking the bacteria causing the infection it begins to affect other parts of the body, most damagingly the joints and the heart valves.

Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in West Derby was five or six miles and an awkward bus journey from Haliburton Street. Visiting hours were short. The treatment was long and difficult. The first stage required Ronnie to lie motionless on his back for two months.

He’d been through a war, separated from his dad, uprooted to London, then Prestatyn, then back again, then he had to lie absolutely still on his back for two months with only the occasional visit from his mum and a few kind nurses for comfort. None of this can have helped his sense of isolation as a child. All the same, given the circumstances, it is a miracle that for the rest of his life he remained relatively stable while so many of his contemporary pop stars, even those with less troubled childhoods, ended up shouting at windows in Venusian or dead from an overdose at 27.

Ronnie failed his 11-plus, the exam that decided whether you’d go to a grammar school or a secondary modern. Grammar school kids did Latin and were in with a chance of an office job or even university. At secondary moderns the teachers were paid less, the students were “shielded from the stultifying effects” of O-levels or A-levels, and the curriculum offered a basic grounding in the usual subjects heavily supplemented by ‘practical subjects’, like metalwork and gardening, according to The New Secondary Education, Ministry of Education, 1947. Girls got an even rawer deal: while the boys did their English and maths, they were often sent away for extra cookery and needlework.

In both type of school, most lessons were slammed home by liberal use of the cane, the tawse, the slipper and the ruler. Corporal punishment was widely regarded as an indispensable element in a fully rounded education.

They were harsh times. In 1956, the Liverpool Echo published a series of letters about the lack of discipline in schools. Many blamed it on working mothers (“the pivot is removed and the family, as such, just disintegrates”). Some correspondents advocated the introduction of the cat-o-nine-tails, which had served so gloriously in Nelson’s navy, while others favoured whippy twigs: “Why not bring back the birch, like the Isle of Man?” (The Isle of Man’s strangely independent judiciary still allowed birching for young offenders.)

Billy went to Wellington Road Secondary Modern. He’d barely got used to the punishment rituals before he fell ill again and was sent back to hospital.

This time, after the hospital had finished with him he was sent to a convalescent home in Wales.

He hated the place – especially the food. At mealtimes, the kids would sing: “Far away, far away/Far away, far away/Eggs and bacon we don’t see/We get beetles in our tea/That’s why we are gradual-lee/Fa-ding away/Far, far away…”

After two weeks he could stand it no longer, and he climbed down a drainpipe from the second floor.

“I didn’t get very far. They came after me in a car and took me back to the home and stuck me alone in what they called ‘the small room’. I would have run away again the first chance I got but they must have got in touch with my mother. She came and took me home.”

Home meant back to school where, once again, he was Billy no-mates, the boy who’d fallen behind with his studies. He called the time he spent at Wellington Road the “dunce years”. The only subjects that interested him were art and woodwork.

He was often in trouble: once for indulging his interest in art by drawing a dirty picture on the blackboard and once for starting a fire in the cloakroom.

“One day I was late and knew I would get whacked. I’d heard somewhere that if you put soap on your hands the cane just slides off. I covered them with soap but Mr Thomas made me touch my toes instead.”

Eventually Ronnie was assimilated. He started hanging around with other kids, and learned to smoke, play out with the lads and generally do boys’ things.

He and Albie joined up with a bunch of kids who went to the Catholic church at the end of the road. Sometimes they even went to church with them, for the company. The Wycherleys were Protestants. A neighbour spotted the lads and shopped them to Mum.

“Then we got the knock on the door,” said Brian Johnson, one of the Catholic lads, in the BBC Omnibus documentary Halfway To Paradise. “‘You’re not going to convert my sons to Catholicism.’ So, we were banned from speaking to ’em.”

“If you went in their house, you weren’t welcome,” said Harry, another neighbourhood friend.

“It was his mum protecting him,” said another.

“If we were going to the park to play football or down to town to do a bit of shoplifting or whatever, we’d say we were going to the park and they’d follow us later on.”

As Chris Eley, founder member of the Sound Of Fury fan club and editor of the club’s magazine, put it, Jean Wycherley “was lovely, but she was steely. She was tough.”

Playing out, as Ricky Tomlinson remembered, “meant action, danger and imagination”.

“By far the most terrifying game was played along the entries, which ran between the houses. The passages were about three feet wide flanked by high brick walls slick with moss. It was a test of bravery to balance on the wall and then hurl yourself across the gap, hopefully landing on the other side on your stomach. We called this belly banding.

“Bigger kids could jump from wall to wall in one long stride and would have races leaping from one side to the other. One slip could mean a broken neck.”

Ronnie and his friends liked to do the “chicken run”, down the railway track towards an oncoming train, jumping out of the way at the last minute. One of the friends was eventually killed doing this, which must have upped its value as a test of courage no end.

“There was this factory,” said Ronnie, “and they used to shoot peanuts from one factory building to another along an outside chute. We used to climb on the chute, wait for a load of peanuts to come down, grab as much as we could and beat it. Then there was a sugar warehouse where they stored what we called ‘jago’, brown sugar with big chewy lumps in it like candy. We used to wait for the lorries to come out of the factory gates, jump on the back, rip open a sack and knock off big handfuls of the stuff.”

Later, Billy occasionally spoke of being bullied at school, but it’s doubtful whether, despite the birdwatching and illness, his suffering was exceptional. Casual violence, big kids kicking little kids, was taken for granted.

Once, when he came home yet again with a black eye, his dad took him out and bought him a pair of boxing gloves, as if their very existence would magically transform a shy lad of uncertain health into a professional street fighter, feared by all.

“Though I was always close to my mother, I never had much communication with my father,” Billy told the Daily Express in 1979. “Although I now realise that I loved him very much, when I was young we did not understand each other.”

“We tried to give the boys what we could,” said Jean. “They did get a bit more than others [in the neighbourhood]. Billy went to piano lessons when he was about 11 because he was so interested in music.”

The piano lessons didn’t take. Ronnie never practised. Later he realised he’d got off lightly when brother Albie was presented with a piano accordion.

The Wycherleys never had a record player, but Gran, round the corner, had a radiogram and a decent collection of 78s that Ronnie played until the grooves ran smooth. The music bug had got him.

“Before rock’n’roll, I’d been into country and western music, because I couldn’t get anything out of the popular music of the time. Actually, in Liverpool, everybody used to play country and western – Hank Williams or whatever. Anything with some real lyrics about a bit of trouble or a bit of heartbreak.”

“I heard country and western before I heard rock’n’roll,” said John Lennon. “The people there [in Liverpool] – the Irish in Ireland are the same – they take their music very seriously. There were established folk, blues and country and western clubs in Liverpool before rock’n’roll.”

Similarly, Ringo learned Gene Autry’s ‘South Of The Border’ at around the same time as he learned to walk. He grew up with country music. “A lot of it was around from guys in the navy. I’d go to parties and they’d be putting on Hank Williams, Hank Snow and all those country acts.”

Country and western music, cowboy music, hillbilly music (few people were as discriminating in their musical definitions as they are now) featured infrequently in the charts – which until 1952 were based on sheet music sales rather than records – and was almost completely ignored by the BBC. However, it had a passionate following in the UK, primarily in working-class communities, and had been adored since the early thirties when the singing cowboys – Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and the rest – first appeared at the pictures.

Never underestimate the importance of the cowboy in post Second World War British history. Men born between 1940 and 1955 anywhere west of Berlin are fundamentally darn-tootin’. You can call them baby-boomers, pensioners, fat, old bastards, anything you like, but they know their real names are Slim, Pecos, Wild Bill, Bucky and Sundance. If you scratch them they bleed cowboy blood. Their hands are shaped like six-guns. When they ride their mobility scooters, they ride tall in the saddle. When they succeed in business or win the lottery, the home they build near Epsom, Surrey is inevitably “ranch style”. And all of them, when the cowboy on the poster invited them to “come to Marlboro country”, went.

As soon as they were able, these men abandoned suits, jackets and ties and went into Levis and check shirts, or something more elaborate. With practically his first wage packet, Ronnie Wycherley bought himself a “two-tone Texas” jacket – like a western shirt, but more substantial. Early publicity stills show him wearing just such a jacket, although whether it’s the original or one of many acquired down the years is impossible to say. In other publicity stills he wears the full Monty – satin western shirt with neckerchief.

Robert Zimmerman has often denied that he chose the name Bob Dylan in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, insisting instead that it was in homage to Marshal Matt Dillon, hero of the TV western series Gunsmoke. David Jones stole the name ‘Bowie’ from Jim Bowie, the frontiersman who died at the Alamo with Davy Crockett.

“Whenever I make a date with a girl,” Billy told Mirabelle in 1960, “I always hope she likes cowboy pictures because to me no date is complete unless we go see one. Not that I would meet my date at the cinema. I like to get to know a girl before we go in. I usually take my girl to an espresso bar first where we can have a cup of coffee and talk.”

In March 1954, a month before Ronnie Wycherley’s 14th birthday, Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, his wife and partner in harmony Dale Evans, and his horse Trigger came to Liverpool. Roy and Dale had both come down with the flu, and though they bravely struggled through the show at the Empire Theatre, afterwards they were confined to bed in the Adelphi Hotel. Trigger brought them flowers.

“For an hour, the horse wandered upstairs and downstairs like Goosey Gander,” said the Liverpool Evening Express, “and finally into his lady’s and master’s chamber.

“Some 4,000 of their young subjects, some of them loyal enough to have taken their places early in the afternoon, crowded the pavements of Lime Street and kept up a continual chant, ‘We want Roy Rogers.’ But the cowboy was not well enough to oblige them.

“And so, his horse, Trigger, did his best to fill the breach. He reared high on his hind legs, took a bow or two outside the Adelphi Hotel and later – the first horse to set a hoof inside – he took more bows from a first-floor window as hundreds of watchful boys and girls caught sight of him.

“Before that he had made his mark at the registration desk with a pencil clutched between his teeth.

“Then he went at a couple of bounds into the residents’ lounge followed by an entourage of intrigued guests, young excited admirers and reporters attending their oddest press reception.”

Hank Williams was from Alabama, Hank Snow from Canada, but both wore stetsons and western jackets, so passed muster. Frankie Laine had recorded the theme song from High Noon, ‘Mule Train’ and ‘The Call Of The Wild Goose’ and later did the theme songs for Rawhide, Gunfight At The O.K. Corral and Champion The Wonder Horse. Tennessee Ernie Ford, one of Ronnie’s personal favourites, had done ‘Shotgun Boogie’ and a ‘Rootin’ Tootin’ Santa Claus’. They were all honorary cowboys.

Singing cowboys played guitars, an instrument which, along with the stetson, the buckskin fringing and the Colt 45, became a must-have for cowboy fans long before Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele, The Shadows and The Beatles made it into the universal fetish object it later became.

Ronnie got one for his 14th birthday, bought new from Frank Hessys’ Music Centre on Stanley Street. Oddly it wasn’t his best present ever: that came eight months later.

“When I was 14,” he told Valentine in 1961 in a ‘Pop Stars Best Present Ever’ feature, “I came down to breakfast on Christmas morning and my dad said, ‘Son, put these milk bottles outside the front door’ – and when I did I saw this fabulous bike parked outside and it had a label on the handlebars with my name on it! It was a really slick racing job. So, I’ve had motor bikes since then and cars and I’ve been up to 120 miles an hour. But, man, there’s never been quite the excitement I had with that bike: I reckon I got well over thirty out of it at times.”

Nevertheless, the guitar must have come a close second, or maybe third. He never became a virtuoso, but on the various self-accompanied demos he made throughout his life, you can hear he was a useful strummer, able to offer a convincing indication of a song’s feel.

He started playing with a friend, Billy Hatton, who later sang and played bass with The Fourmost – stablemates of The Beatles under Brian Epstein’s management. “Owning a guitar in the early fifties was uncommon,” says Billy Hatton, “and there were very few people to teach you, so most budding guitar players were usually self-taught. You can imagine the sort of sounds that we wrenched from the strangled strings. It was bad enough for the artisans who fashioned the tools of our dreams to wish that they had never put chisel to wood. Add to this the howling that came from our untutored tonsils and the meaning of post-war depression takes on another aspect.”

Billy Hatton lived a 10-minute walk from Ronnie’s house. “We were very close,” he says, “because of the bond that music gives you and we spent many nights in the front rooms (the posh ones) of our homes playing and singing to the guitar and working on that rare gift that Ronnie had of songwriting. This was so unusual at that time because being a songwriter was something that people did in films or on the radio. It was a fantasy that did not visit young working-class lads in a poverty-stricken area of a city. It did not happen in a little terraced house in Dingle. But it blossomed in our houses, with Ronnie coming up with the ideas and me slotting in the chords that he wasn’t sure of.”

Ronnie himself had a more down to earth explanation for his interest in composition. “I could only play three or four chords,” he said. “So instead of trying to play songs that needed chords I didn’t know, I started writing my own songs using the chords I did know.”

Something had begun.