Most of us know the story about Bernstein taking a class in the winter of 1963 that required him to read an English newspaper once a week. From these papers he learned about the rise of Beatlemania in Britain and he decided to promote a concert for them in the US. In February of 63 he got in touch with Brian Epstein and they informally contracted for two concerts at Carnegie Hall for Feb. 12, 1964.
It’s a lovely story but it’s unlikely to the point of impossibility. In Feb. of 63 the Beatles issued their second single, Please Please Me which went to the top of most of the British charts. Later that month they recorded 10 songs in less then 10 hours for their first album. Certainly the music press did carry notices of the song reaching the charts and no doubt the Liverpool Echo carried some sort of story about ‘home town boys make good,’ as well as Tony Barrow’s Disker column. Was Bernstein reading the British music press? (Were these specialist newspapers available on New York newsstands?) Could he have read a copy of the Liverpool Echo or the Manchester Guardian which probably carried some sort of story about girls mobbing the Beatles after they recorded a TV appearance there? Was he reading Mersey Beat? :(sarcasm alert)
Certainly he did NOT read any newspaper about “Beatlemania” as he claims because the word wasn’t invented until the first stories appeared in the “National press,” in effect the London dailies, until October 14, 1963 reporting on the crowd of fans outside the London Palladium the night before when the Beatles appeared on the British equivalent of the Ed Sullivan show.
The bottom line is that no matter what newspapers Sid read in Feb. 1963, he did NOT read about Beatlemania until the middle of October. I consider it rather unlikely that he read newspapers from a variety of English cities and towns in January and February of that year and if he had, there really wasn’t much written about the Beatles until a good bit later in the year. He may have kept up with the British pop charts in which case there wasn’t much to notice about the Beatles at least until their first album and third single came out later in the spring and rather quickly made an indisputable #1.
Because of London’s prejudice against the North of England and the “odd” fact that until the Palladium show somehow the Beatles didn’t play any real London venues on their tours, the national press didn’t know them and didn’t want to know them. It took months for Dezo Hoffman to talk his paper into sending him to Liverpool to take pictures of them as it did Maureen Cleve to get an assignment to write about the group. Certainly Tony Barrow had been trying, with virtually no success, to get stories in both the London papers and the national music press. It took a gathering of young people numbering something between 8 and 800 depending on who is talking to get the press’ attention – and a slow, Sunday news night.
The question is just what newspapers was Sid reading in January and February of 1963 that convinced him that the Beatles were making a big splash in England and that it would be a major coup to be the first to bring them to America. The answer is that there is no paper he could have been reading that would tell him anything much at all about the Beatles at that time. This is only one of the widely accepted Beatle stories that a look at a calendar will call into serious question.
Miss Marple Meets the BeaTles 
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