Introduction

The story of the Beatles begins in Liverpool. Situated about 200 miles to the northwest of London, Liverpool falls a significant distance from the capital and the nation's centre of power. Viewed in relation to the sea, however, Liverpool arises as a major port city. It had been a key commercial hub across the Atlantic, bringing untold wealth into Great Britain on account of the ships that left Liverpool to collect African slaves, transported them to the Americas, and returned to Liverpool with cotton from the New World (Millard 2012: 43–4). Prominent Liverpool merchant James Penny once argued before a committee of Parliament that the abolition of slavery would completely ruin the economy of northern England (Coslett 2007). For his eloquence, he was rewarded with a large silver centrepiece from the Liverpool town council in 1792 (International Slavery Museum). A suburban Liverpool street, and eventually a song by the Beatles, would bear his name: ‘Penny Lane’ (Beatles 1967a).

By virtue of their home town, then, the Beatles were incorporated from the beginning into a special relationship that prevailed between Britain and America. This special relationship developed over centuries. The relocation of religious dissenters to the colonies, the slave trade, a revolution and other wars, and transatlantic commercial and passenger traffic are but a few of its constituent elements. The term acquired significant resonance in the post-World War II era, when Winston Churchill suggested that the future of the whole world depended upon ‘a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States’. Churchill had in mind a military alliance that would provide security to a war-weary world, even as it entered a new age of nuclear destruction and the separation that ensued from the partitioning of Eastern Europe behind what Churchill called an ‘iron curtain’. But there was also a romantic component to Churchill's vision as he spoke of the partnership in most intimate terms, not only as a co-mingling of traditions, convictions and ‘kindred systems’, but as the guarantor of a bright future for all nations ‘for a century to come’ (Churchill 1946).