On October 10, 1939, a scullery maid from Liverpool died in her sleep at 44 years old, unaware that her name would come to inspire the titular character of one of The Beatles’ most iconic hits. The songwriter, Paul McCartney, wasn’t even born yet. He would arrive three years later in 1942. Twenty-four years later, the Fab Four released “Eleanor Rigby” on Revolver, posthumously transforming the legacy of a woman who McCartney may or may not have been thinking of when he wrote about her “picking up rice from the church where a wedding has been.”
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Like most decades-old songs, the true origins of McCartney’s song are murky. Rigby’s grave is in the cemetery beside St. Peter’s Parish Church in Woolton. McCartney went to Sunday school at St. Peter’s in the 1940s, and in 1957, the church became the first, hallowed meeting place of McCartney and his future bandmate, John Lennon. Needless to say, a young McCartney spent plenty of time wandering around the tombstones and memorials next to the church. However, the songwriter has also stated that he didn’t write “Eleanor Rigby” because he saw her tombstone. In fact, he didn’t even remember that specific memorial. Moreover, Eleanor Rigby wasn’t the first name he chose.
“I got this name in my head,” McCartney told the Sunday Times in 1966. “‘Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.’ I don’t know why. I couldn’t think of much more, so I put it away for a day.”
How The Beatles Finally Landed on Eleanor Rigby
Paul McCartney fiddled with his melody and lyrics for weeks. Sometimes he sang Miss Daisy Hawkins. Other days it came out, “dazzie-de-da-zu.” The songwriter knew he was looking for a five-syllable moniker for his character. He was already mulling over the name Eleanor when he went on a trip to visit his then-girlfriend, Jane Asher. McCartney spotted a store called Rigby & Evens Ltd., Wine & Spirit Shippers, and thus, Eleanor Rigby was born. The tombstone of the scullery maid who died in 1939, McCartney argued, was not on his mind at the time.
“I thought, I swear, that I made up the name Eleanor Rigby like that,” he said in Anthology. “I remember quite distinctly having the name Eleanor, looking around for a believable surname and then wandering around the docklands in Bristol and seeing the ship there. But it seems that up in Woolton Cemetery, where I used to hang out a lot with John, there’s a gravestone to an Eleanor Rigby. Apparently, a few yards to the right, there’s someone called McKenzie.”
McCartney would eventually concede that he might have picked up on Eleanor Rigby from his childhood days in St. Peter’s Cemetery. We’d argue that both stories can co-exist. A young McCartney might have absorbed the name on Rigby’s tombstone. Then, years later, when he was trying to find a suitable last name for a woman named Eleanor and happened upon the name Rigby, his brain thought, ‘Yes, that does sound like a real name.’ Because it was.
The real Eleanor Rigby died long before The Beatles were even a glimmer in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s eyes. But thanks to them (and George Harrison and Ringo Starr), the 44-year-old maid from Liverpool will live forever.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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