It was 50 years ago today - The Beatles collect their MBEs from the Queen
Fifty years ago it was rare for pop stars to make it on to the Honours List but that all changed on October 26, 1965 - the day The Beatles collected their MBEs from Buckingham Palace.
With four thousand screaming teenagers gathering at the gates of the Queen’s official London residence before the 11am investiture, it must have looked more like the queue for one of their concerts than the scene of a usually sombre ceremony - but patient fans got their reward when the band turned up together in John Lennon’s Rolls Royce.
The ceremony took place at 11am story was front page news in the Liverpool Echo that evening as you can see in our gallery of pictures from the day.
Despite several years of stage experience, the band were nervous before meeting the Queen - which led to one particular urban legend springing up about their day at the Palace.
John Lennon claimed later that the band smoked marijuana in the toilets beforehand to calm their pre-gong jitters (these were pre-smoke detector days after all) although George Harrison said later: “We never smoked marijuana... What happened was we were waiting to go through, standing in an enormous line with hundreds of people and we were so nervous that we went to the toilet. And in there we smoked a cigarette - we were all smokers in those days.”
By: Jamie McLoughlin
Source: Liverpool Echo
