Off The Beatle Track

If this blog has a foundational principle¹, it would have something to do with answering nagging questions about The Beatles. That’s where I start with most posts; a thought gnaws at my subconscious mind until my conscious mind says, “Hey, numbskull, if you write about this topic, you’ll have to do enough research so as not to embarrass yourself, and then you’ll know the answer.”

That’s how I landed on this topic: Information about John’s and Paul’s middle names has become public knowledge; George’s and Ringo’s, not so much. So I said to myself, “I should know this, but I don’t: Do George and Ringo even have middle names?”

John and Paul

John famously changed his middle name from the patriotic Winston to Ono after he married Yoko in 1969. (But did you know that the name-changing ceremony took place on the rooftop of the Apple building at 3 Savile Row?)

Paul, of course, is Paul’s middle name: James Paul McCartney was named after his father, who doesn’t appear to have had a middle name.² (But did you know that Paul’s brother Mike was also known by his middle name? His full name is Peter Michael McCartney.)

George

Mark Lewisohn says definitively that George was “[n]ot given a middle name” at birth, but that he was baptized in the Catholic Church as “Georgius Harrison.” Which clears up the middle name question, but now . . . Georgius?

Apparently using Latin names on baptismal certificates was a common practice when George was born. But George’s birth certificate, as nearly as I can determine, just says “George.”

Ringo

Lewisohn is a little hazy on the question of Ringo’s middle name. He writes that Ringo’s father was born Richard Henry Parkin Starkey in 1913. “In working class tradition,” Lewisohn writes of Ringo’s parents, “they named him after his father [emphasis added], so now there were two Richards, a Big Richy and a Little Richy.”

That might lead one to conclude that Ringo was born Richard Henry Parkin Starkey Jr. But I found a possibly dubious “Ringo Starr Authentic Certified UK Birth Certificate Copy Authentic Beatles” that lists Little Richy’s middle name as “William.” A “Certified Copy Of An Entry Of Birth,” on the other hand, presents no middle name.

After poking around the Internet, I’m going to conclude provisionally that Ringo, like George, was born with no middle name. But this question will continue to bother me, and I may return to the topic later.

If you have info about The Beatles’ middle names, or if you’d like to share your own middle name, please email me at beatletrack@gmail.com.

1. Which it doesn’t. ↩︎
2. I’m relying on the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn’s All These Years Volume 1: Tune In for much of the information presented here. I’ll let you know via a link when I’m using another source. ↩︎