As a family in ‘lockdown’ we recently watched the film ‘Y E S T E R D A Y’. What a lovely film. If only Andrew could have been with us.
ELEANOR RIGBY is my favourite song by THE BEATLES.
After watching this film, I found myself wondering who was ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and was she the one as depicted in this film, inscribed on a tombstone, in a Liverpool Churchyard?
WIKIPEDIA says this:
“In the 1980s, a grave of an Eleanor Rigby was ‘discovered’ in the graveyard of St Peter’s Parish Church in Woolton, Liverpool, and a few yards (a few metres) away from that, another tombstone with the last name “McKenzie” scrawled across it. During their teenage years, McCartney and Lennon spent time sunbathing there, within earshot of where the two had first met during a fete in 1957.
Years later, McCartney said that the coincidence could be a product of his subconscious (cryptomnesia). In 2008, however, when a birth certificate was sold at auction of a woman named Eleanor Rigby, McCartney restated publicly: ‘Eleanor Rigby is a totally fictitious character that I made up … If someone wants to spend money buying a document to prove a fictitious character exists, that’s fine with me.’
So, is that all there is to know about ELEANOR RIGBY, real or fictitious?
History can be unsettling and mysterious. ‘Eleanor Rigby’, fictionally or real, is not one person:
Birmingham,19th December 1822:
Durham, 8th August 1829:
Hindley, 25th October 1884:
Preston, 19th January 1888:
