Our history books are filled with stories of power crazed dictators trying to send their armies accros the English Channel, but what about British invasions heading the other way?John Hillman looks at one of the most significant, yet least celebrated, Channel crossings in modern history.

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As a nation we like to celebrate the English Channel for the role it has played in preventing unwanted visits from foreign armies. King Philip’s Armada Invencible, Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Hitler’s Waffen-SS, all of these hostile forces failed thanks to the ever-presence of our surrounding seas.

However, when it comes to looking at traffic headed in the opposite direction, our sense of history begins to waver somewhat.

Everyone knows how important the Battle of Trafalgar was, we have a great big monument in the heart of our capital city to remind us how our subsequent wealth, freedom and status depended so much on that fateful encounter, off the coast of southern Spain, in 1805.

Yet there are no monuments to commemorate another crossing; one that’s just as important in the history of the British Isles. There was no nefarious master plan, the protagonists in question barely had enough money to finance their own boat fare, let alone raise an army, but it was the first act in the story of the most successful British invasion of all time.

Within 10 years this new movement had marched its foot-soldiers into every corner of the world, conquering hearts and minds wherever it went, not with guns and tanks, but with a simple 4/4 backbeat and some distinctive three-part harmonies. They changed the world forever and, unlike politicians, they managed to do it without killing anybody.

On August 16 1960 The Beatles, as they had just renamed themselves, set sail from Harwich to the Hook of Holland en-route to Hamburg, Germany. Packed inside an old Austin van were John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, along with their drummer Pete Best, bass player Stuart Sutcliffe, manager Allan Williams, his wife, an obscure character called Lord Woodbine and a German translator who they had picked up in a coffee shop in Soho along the way (as you do).

They were off to begin a two year working association with Hamburg, a city that would have a profound influence on the band’s image and music. They arrived as a rough sounding, greasy-looking, five piece; they left as the mop-topped Fab Four that we all know and love.

As much as Liverpudlians like to claim ownership of the greatest band in the world, and rightly so, it is difficult to ignore the fact that without Hamburg there would, probably, not have been a band called the Beatles as we know them. Had they not decided to head out across the Channel in search of work, opting instead to stay in Liverpool, the chances are that they would never have developed into such a unique group of musicians.

As George Harrison once said:

“When you think about it sensibly, our sound really stems from Germany. That’s where we learned to work for hours and hours on end, and keep on working at full peak even though we reckoned our legs and arms were about to drop off.”

Hamburg in 1960 was not a nice place. Once Germany’s principal thriving seaport, the third largest in the world, by 1944 the entire city had been blasted to rubble by Allied bombing raids. Out of the ashes of conflict grew a harsh post-war urban sprawl with a European wide reputation for vice and criminality.

For British bands, however, it was a land of opportunity. A large market had developed in the seedy bars and clubs along The Reeperbahn for US style rock ‘n’ roll bands. With the US being such a long way off from Hamburg, booking authentic American acts was prohibitively expensive; hence promoters looked across the Channel for the next best thing: British sound-a-likes.

The Hamburg club scene revolved around just six places in the early 1960s: The Kaiserkeller, The Top Ten, The Star-Club, The Beer-Shop, The Mambo, The Holle, The Wagabond and The Pacific Hotel. The Reeperbahn and the Grosse Freiheit were dangerous and intoxicating places, full of neon lights, posters advertising bands and prostitutes walking the streets. Each club had a doorman whose job was to entice customers inside, as the drinks were expensive. Customers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t pay were severely beaten before being thrown out.

The Beatles began work the night they arrived, sticking to a punishing seven-day-a-week schedule from eight at night to two or three in the morning. It was this continuous performing that sculpted the band’s sound. Hour after hour they played, practicing and honing a sound that would eventually take them all the way to Shea Stadium, New York, and global superstardom.

Hamburg did more than give the group a platform to develop musically. It was here that the band met Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe’s fiancée at the time of his death in 1962. She is credited with influencing the Beatles’ distinctive hair-styles and wardrobe, a look that she herself maintains was always popular amongst German students at the time.

Her grainy black and white photographs of the group from this era are amongst some of their most iconic images, and show a meaner, tougher side that the band’s management had purposefully erased by the time they made their first television appearance on 17 October 1962.

It was in Hamburg where the Beatles first met and played with Ringo Starr. It was in Hamburg where they recorded their first record, My Bonnie; an event that set up their first meeting with future manager, Brian Epstein. It was in Hamburg that Sutcliffe left the band, forcing McCartney to take up the bass, and where Harrison began singing with the rest of the group, initially just to give Lennon and McCartney a rest during their marathon performances.

Hamburg was where they were first introduced to drugs, taking amphetamine pills to sustain energy levels throughout the night; it was also where they cemented their reputation as one of Britain’s best live groups. As John Lennon once famously said:

“I was born in Liverpool but I grew up in Hamburg.”

This trip across the English Channel had profound consequences, not just for the Beatles themselves, but for generation after generation of British musicians who have gone on to follow the path carved out buy these early pioneers, and who continue to shape people’s musical tastes to this day.

In recognition of the part Hamburg played in the Beatles’ development, the city has built the Beatles-Platz, a vinyl coloured square at the junction between The Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit, with statues representing the four Beatles and the two other members from this period, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best.

You can visit Hamburg by sailing with P&O Ferries to Rotterdam and then driving to Hamburg along the same route taken by the band before following the seedy trail to Beatles-Platz and paying your respects to the city that gave so many millions of people so much pleasure.

Indeed; it seems that the people of Hamburg have recognized the significance of this event and have commemorated it admirably, but isn’t it about time that the people of Harwich did the same?

Image Credit: Marxchivist

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