In 1964 a Melbourne reporter talked her way into meeting The Beatles
WHENEVER Lady Catherine Mancham hears The Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand, she thinks of Paul McCartney — with good reason.
He once held her hand in a suite at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Hotel.
Back then, Lady Mancham was Catherine Olsen, a young reporter with The Sun, and she had talked her way into a private audience with the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania, just hours after they touched down in Melbourne on June 14, 1964 for a series of concerts at Festival Hall as part of their world tour.
Like any great reporter, she came to work on her day off on the off chance she might get the story of the day.
“I think we were all fans of The Beatles. I wasn’t a crazy fan of The Beatles but I thought that they were great, and I wanted to get the story because I was a keen young journalist and I thought it would be a feather in my cap,” Lady Mancham said.
“So I just hung around, met the manager and he got me inside the hotel. He plied me with drinks, he drank a lot himself, but I tipped my drinks into the pot plant and eventually I said, “’Right, where are The Beatles’, and he took me up there.”
More than 50 years later, Lady Mancham says she does not remember the name of the manager she spoke to, but it did the trick. “He was certainly quite powerful, because he was able to take me straight up to their room, and they were all standing there at the windows, the big windows at the hotel,” she said. “They were looking down on the street, the throngs of people in the street, and I think that they were slightly amazed themselves to have such an enormous welcome in Australia.”
By: Jamie Duncan
Source: Gold Coast Bulletin
