42 The Times Magazineam fortunate. For my visit to 20 Forthlin
Road, the tiny Liverpool council house
where Sir Paul McCartney grew up, I’m
accompanied by McCartney’s younger
brother, Mike, and Hilary McGrady, the
director-general of the National Trust,
which owns the so-called “birthplace of
the Beatles”. When Bob Dylan turned up
out of the blue several years ago, he was
told he had to join an official tour.
Mike McCartney – tall, thin and silver-
haired at 78 – relates how his mother, Mary,
decorated the living room with carpet offcuts
and mismatched ends of Sanderson wallpaper
rolls. When she died of breast cancer a year
after they arrived at the house in 1955, their
father, Jim, a cotton salesman earning barely
£10 a week, had to raise his two boys alone. To
occupy them he bought Paul, then 14, a guitar
and Mike, 12, a drum set that “fell off the back
of a lorry”.
Paul met John Lennon at a church fête and
joined his group, the Quarrymen, which became
the Beatles. Mike would also have joined had
he not broken his arm at a scout camp – he
instead formed a comedy trio, the Scaffold,
which produced the Sixties hit Lily the Pink.
By the time the family moved to the upmarket
Wirral in 1964 it had to do a midnight flit
because Beatlemania was in full spate.
I admire the parlour where McCartney and
Lennon wrote the songs that changed musical
culture for ever; the black Bakelite telephone
that Mary needed as a midwife and which
was the envy of the street; and the drainpipe
down which the teenage boys would shimmy
at night.
But the focus of our attention today is the
tiny upstairs loo, for Mike recently let slip
that he and Paul used to doodle on the walls
while doing their business – Mike on the left-
hand wall because he was right-handed, and
Paul on the opposite wall because he was a
southpaw. “You didn’t have iPhones in those
days,” says Mike. “You just sat on the bog,
bored out of your head, and doodled.”
Neither brother can remember what they
drew, but the National Trust is finding out.
It has commissioned a specialist to remove
several layers of later paintwork, a square
inch a day over several months, to reveal
Paul McCartney’s earliest artwork. “I’m
fascinated to know what we did,” says Mike.
“I’m uberexcited about it,” says McGrady.
Ostensibly we are here to promote the Trust’s
plan to commemorate Paul’s 80th birthday
and the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ debut
single, Love Me Do, by inviting unknown
musicians to perform their own songs in the
famous parlour (the chosen artists will be
announced next week). It will then broadcast
the “Forthlin Sessions” on digital media.
But another, unstated reason is, I suspect,
for McGrady and the National Trust totry to regain the initiative after two years of
seemingly relentless adversity.
During that time they have found
themselves on the front line of Britain’s
escalating culture wars, accused by right-wing
critics of rampant “wokery”, kowtowing to the
Black Lives Matter movement, dumbing down,
turning the Trust’s stately homes into “kiddies’
theme parks” and disdaining its traditional
membership. The Trust was also hit so
hard by the Covid lockdowns that at times
McGrady doubted whether Europe’s largest
conservation charity could even survive.
She readily acknowledges that the past
two years have been by far the toughest of
her career. She has been crucified in certain
newspapers. She has received death threats
and other abuse. She admits she has at times
been reduced to tears: “One hundred per cent.
Of course, of course.” At one point she had to
hire a public relations company because the
Trust was under “very significant attack”.
But she believes the Trust has now
weathered the proverbial storm. She says
membership and donations have rebounded to
near-record levels. And she has no intention
of capitulating to attacks that she considers
unwarranted. “So much of the criticism I got
was unfounded. It was just not true.”
She is determined to press ahead with her
plans for “levelling up”, by which she meansbroadening the Trust’s appeal far beyond its
traditional white, middle-class, middle-aged
membership. (When she asks the make-up
artist preparing her for a Times photoshoot
what she thinks of the Trust, the woman
replies, “Old buildings and fusty.”)
To do that she is highlighting its natural,
cultural and urban treasures as well as (but
certainly not instead of) its stately homes and
country houses.
Forthlin Road is a prime example. A tiny
council house in the middle of a city, it is the
polar opposite of a stately home but generates
global interest. Tours are booked up far in
advance. Tourists from around the world gather
outside all day long. “This project is going
to reach a whole bunch of new people who
would never normally think of the National
Trust,” McGrady says of the Forthlin Sessions.
She points out that when her predecessor,
Martin Drury, purchased 20 Forthlin Road
in 1995, he “came in for a huge amount of
abuse because it didn’t fit with the notion
of what the National Trust was all about- big stately homes etc. This is the complete
antithesis of that, but he absolutely had the
right instinct.”
She clearly draws strength from his example.
McGrady is not a conventional director-
general of the Trust. Open, energetic andI
DURING COVID, MEMBERSHIP PLUNGED BY HALF A
MILLION. THE TRUST LOST £222 MILLION IN REVENUE
Left: John Lennon and
Paul McCartney writing
music at 20 Forthlin
Road, November 1962.
The photograph was
taken by Paul’s brother,
Mike, who’s pictured,
right, back at the housePREVIOUS SPREAD: ALAMY. THIS SPREAD: JUDE EDGINTON, MIKE MCCARTNEY/NATIONAL TRUST