The Beatles Were Deported Over a Burning Condom — and That Was the Least Educational Thing That Happened in Hamburg

The quick version, for those of you reading on the bus:

• The “arson” that got McCartney and Best flown home in disgrace was, by most surviving accounts, a prophylactic nailed to a wall and set alight for light — in a cinema built of stone that could not have burned had you doused it in petrol.

• George Harrison spent roughly two months sitting on the bandstand, seventeen years old and technically an illegal alien, without once understanding that the nightly police announcement was, in effect, addressed to him personally.

• The lawless Sodom of legend was nothing of the sort: it had a ten o’clock curfew, an identity-checking vice squad, a long and respectable tradition of drag bars, and an annual turnover in the tens of millions. The Beatles were not its masters. They were tourists.

There is a particular species of English parent who believes that what ails a soft son is the wider world, and that a spell abroad among hard men will sort him out. Send the boy somewhere bracing. Let him rough it. He’ll come back a man.

By this logic, sending five Liverpool teenagers to the red-light district of Hamburg in August 1960 was less a music booking than a character-building exercise — a finishing school with amplifiers. And the historians largely agree that this is how the mothers and managers understood it: Germany as the place that would make men of their boys. What nobody seems to have examined too closely was the curriculum, or the calibre of the teaching staff, or the fact that the headmaster was a former fairground man from Danzig named Bruno Koschmider, who had them sleeping behind a cinema screen.

McCartney’s own summary is the one worth keeping. They went out as kids, he said, and came back as old kids. Which is about the most honest thing anyone has ever said about the whole business, and rather more useful than the reverent guff you usually get.

The music, everyone knows about. Ten-hour shifts, mach Schau, the whole apprenticeship-of-the-eardrums. That is the well-thumbed part of the story and we shall leave it well thumbed.

The other education is the one nobody put on a plaque.

Consider what these boys were coming from. Liverpool, circa 1959, was — in Harrison’s fond recollection — a place of reinforced steel. The girls, he remembered, wore brassieres and corsets that felt like something specified by a naval architect; a lad might spend eight hours at a party snogging with an aching groin and an aching hand and go home with nothing to show for either. McCartney called it medieval, and the girdles rigid, and he was not being unkind so much as clinical. The prevailing sexual economy of the provincial North was one of enormous effort and negligible return, conducted largely in the dark, and lubricated chiefly by lies. Did you get some tit? Yeah, I got some tit. Everyone claimed the finger pie. Nobody, one suspects, had had the pie.

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And then Hamburg, where the girls, as McCartney rather memorably put it, were almost flashing it, and — worse, or better — seemed to know the score. This was the shock, and it was not really a sex shock at all. It was an information shock. Here were young men whose entire erotic worldview had been assembled from rumour and hope, suddenly billeted next door to professionals. Best took up with a stripper who clocked off at four in the morning, which meant he came rolling in around ten looking to go to sleep as the others were tuning up — a scheduling conflict that McCartney, with the tact of a man still nursing the grudge decades later, identified as one of the first hairline cracks in the whole edifice. You want to talk about creative differences. It started with a stripper’s hours.

The teaching staff, in other words, were the Reeperbahn barmaids and the striptease artists, none of whom had signed up to educate anybody and all of whom, by the boys’ own accounts, did the job with more patience than the material deserved. Ringo, who arrived at all this having previously got no closer to the erotic than Nudes on Ice — actual women in actual perspex boxes, forbidden by the licensing laws from so much as shivering — put it with characteristic economy: suddenly it was in your face. As pedagogy goes, it was direct.

We will draw the modest veil that the men themselves drew over Harrison’s own graduation, conducted, by his own cheerful telling, in a bunk bed with three of his bandmates in the room. They faced the wall. They pretended to be asleep. And then, the story goes, they applauded — which is either the most supportive thing four young men have ever done for a colleague, or the least, and I have never been able to decide which. It remains the only debut in the group’s history to receive an ovation before the act had finished being ashamed of itself.

No education in worldliness is complete without a practical humiliation, and the Beatles duly arranged one — not for themselves, on this occasion, but for a visiting Liverpool mate called Bernie, who arrived fresh off the boat with all his provincial certainties intact.

There was a club, the boys had discovered, where the birds had rather deeper voices than one expected and called you mein kleiner Schnuckiputzi — little sweetie — and where it had taken the lads themselves several weeks and a kindly word from a regular to grasp that the birds were, to a woman, men. St Pauli, it turns out, had been running a serious and long-established trade in drag and gay bars for years; this was not some freak of the neon but a settled institution of the quarter, as much a fixture as the herring stalls. The historian Julia Sneeringer, who has done more sober archival work on this district than the entire cottage industry of Beatle-worshippers combined, describes a landscape of prostitution, striptease, and straight and gay bars all humming along in the same few hundred yards. The shock was never really the district’s. It was the boys’. Cosmopolitan vice meeting Scouse innocence, and the vice winning on points every time.

So when Bernie bowled in — eh, all right lads, whoa, look at her, she’s great — the trap was already baited. They agreed she was fantastic. They may have implied one or two of them had personally verified as much. And Bernie went off into the Hamburg night to conduct his own field research, returning the following day, ashen, to report that he had put his hand somewhere hopeful and encountered a fuckin’ knob. The band, to a man, collapsed. It is difficult to improve on this as a parable of the entire trip: everyone arrived thinking they knew what they were looking at, and everyone was wrong.

Here we must pause to deflate the folklore, because Harrison did, and he was there and we were not.

The received image of Hamburg is bacchanalian to the point of parody — donkeys, allegedly, and mud-wrestling, and every conceivable transaction of the flesh conducted in the open air to a rock ‘n’ roll backing. Harrison, asked about the donkeys, was admirably deadpan: allegedly, he said, he never saw it. What they were actually doing, he insisted, was getting a bit pissed and playing rock ‘n’ roll and occasionally making a bit of noise, and the history books had glorified and exaggerated the rest. Which is a remarkable thing for a Beatle to say, given that the exaggeration flatters him, and precisely the sort of dry corrective the whole legend could do with more of.

Because the real St Pauli was not anarchy. It was a business — the sinful mile ran like a Swiss watch. The district turned over something on the order of twenty-five million dollars a year by the early Sixties; the official tourist literature of 1961 advertised its “pleasure factories” with a straight face and some frankly startling nautical metaphors about water nymphs. There was a curfew at ten o’clock sharp. There was the Ausweiskontrolle — the identity check — during which the German police would march onto the stage, throw on every light in the house, stop the band mid-number, and go table to table demanding papers from the under-eighteens. McCartney, who had learnt German at the Inny while everyone else did French, eventually took to doing the announcement himself, in a convincing enough uniform-voice that the punters loved it. It is twenty-two hours and all young people under eighteen must leave. The Cavaliers of the vice squad, he called them, going round inspecting kids’ passports — a thing no Liverpudlian had ever seen in his life, and which McCartney shrewdly filed under leftovers from the war. Nobody in Liverpool had ever come round and asked you for your pass. In Hamburg it was Tuesday.

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And so to the ignominious end, which is where the whole comedy tips over into farce and stays there.

It went off like a set of dominoes. First Harrison — seventeen, underage, and thus, it slowly dawned on the authorities, working every night of a curfew he was legally too young to be up for. He had, by his own account, spent two months sitting on the bandstand through the nightly announcement without twigging that everyone under eighteen get out included him. When the penny finally dropped, it dropped hard: he was to leave. His last act as a Hamburg Beatle was to stay up the entire night teaching John his guitar parts, so the group could carry on without him — a detail that tells you rather more about the seventeen-year-old George Harrison than any anecdote involving bunk beds. Then a long train to the Hook of Holland with his amplifier, a crappy suitcase, and his clothes in paper bags, praying he had the fare. He got home penniless. It took everything he had.

He need not have worried about being left behind, because the school was busy expelling the rest of the year group. Koschmider, sore at losing the band to the plusher Top Ten down the road, went to the police. McCartney and Best had gone back to their quarters behind the cinema screen to collect their belongings, found the place in pitch darkness, and — needing to see — set light to something nailed to the wall. The candidates, across the various tellings, are a rag, a tapestry, and a condom. The condom is the version history deserves and I for one refuse to give it up. It produced a scorch mark and then went out against a damp wall, the building being, as McCartney later pointed out, made of stone: they could not have burned it down with gallons of petrol and a running start. This was reported to the constabulary as arson. Three hours in the cells on the Reeperbahn, and then the pair were flown home like a returned parcel.

Sutcliffe, arriving at the club to find the entire Hamburg police force apparently looking for him, did the only decent thing and gave himself up, smiling, on Astrid’s arm, with no idea what he was supposed to have done. They took his spectacles. They sat him on a wooden bench for six hours without food or water. He signed a confession, in German, to the effect that he knew nothing whatsoever about any fire — surely the most defensible confession ever extracted — and they let him go. I was innocent this time, he wrote home, the “this time” doing an enormous amount of quiet work. John slunk back to Liverpool a few days later, there being no earthly point in staying. Stuart lingered into January at Astrid’s, where she was, he reported with helpless devotion, washing all the muck and filth he’d collected over the previous few months. God, he loved her.

They had gone to be made into men. They came back scattered across the North Sea in ones and twos — deported, penniless, confessing to arson in a foreign tongue, and considerably better informed about the world than any of their mothers can possibly have intended.

The finishing school, naturally, readmitted its expelled pupils the following spring, the moment George turned eighteen and the fines were paid. Some educations you simply cannot get anywhere else.

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