The Real Life Eleanor Rigby

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REVEALED: The haunting life story behind one of pop's most famous songs...

Eleanor Rigby

By Richard Price

Last updated at 12:49 AM on 22nd November 2008

The words, familiar to countless millions around the world, are among the

most poignant in popular music: 'Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was

buried along with her name; nobody came.'

Set to a haunting melody by Lennon and McCartney and backed by a string

octet masterfully arranged by George Martin, the song broke new ground with

its heartrending refrain: 'All the lonely people, where do they all come

from?'

Its funereal orchestration and bleak message of isolation, depression and

desolation were a far cry from the upbeat hits the public had come to expect

from The Beatles - yet it climbed straight to number one and changed the

face of pop music in the process.

Since its release 40 years ago, the tragic heroine of this two-minute

masterpiece has become a source of endless fascination for Beatles'

enthusiasts.

Indeed, interest is so strong that next week a 1911 salary ledger from

Liverpool City Hospital bearing the details of 'E. Rigby', a 14-year-old

scullery maid, is expected to fetch up to £500,000 at auction.

In truth, this unknown teenager almost certainly had nothing to do with the

much-loved song. (In all likelihood her first name was not Eleanor, and Sir

Paul McCartney, who donated the item to charity having been sent it by a

fan, concedes that she had no bearing on the process of composition.)

In a neat churchyard in the leafy Liverpool district of Woolton, however,

lies the final resting place of the real Eleanor Rigby - the woman widely

regarded as the subconscious inspiration behind the classic song.

It was here, at the St Peter's Church fete, that John Lennon and Paul

McCartney met for the first time.

The church is a stone's throw from Lennon's childhood home on Menlove

Avenue. He sang in the choir and frequently played in the graveyard, which

he referred to with characteristic irreverence as the 'bone orchard'.

The tombstone of Eleanor Rigby has become a landmark to Beatles fans

visiting Liverpool and was even featured in the video for the band's 1995

reunion single, Free As A Bird.

But though many people believe this is the final resting place of the woman

who gave the song its name, until now any details about her life have

remained an intriguingly blank slate.

Today, for the first time, a Daily Mail investigation painstakingly unravels

the true story of Eleanor and tracks down the last surviving member of her

close family.

What emerges most poignantly is that whatever her association with the song

may be, there is no denying that the Rigby family history is eerily

consistent with The Beatles' bleak tale.

There are no surviving pictures of Eleanor, who was born on August 29, 1895,

at 8 Vale Road in Woolton - which, intriguingly, backs onto Menlove

Avenue, where Lennon grew up.

The patriarch of the family was her grandfather John Rigby - her mother's

father - a stonemason who presided over the poky, two-bedroom terrace

house crammed with five adults and the infant Eleanor.

Eleanor's real name, in fact, was Eleanor Whitfield, but with the Rigby

family line on the cusp of dying out, her grandfather appears to have

insisted that she take his surname - and this is how it appears on the

family gravestone.

Eleanor's father, a journeyman joiner called Arthur Whitfield, passed away

while she was still a child, so she remained in the family home until

shortly after her 15th birthday, when her mother, Mary Elizabeth, remarried.

That marriage produced two half-sisters for Eleanor - Edith and Hannah

Heatley - who would become the guardians of Eleanor's memory as, one by

one, the Rigby family passed away.

Eleanor was devoted to her sisters and lobbied to be appointed godmother to

Edith, which she duly was.

But as the years went by and her schoolfriends married and started families

of their own, Eleanor's existence became more solitary, and she was forced

to eke out a living by helping her mother, a laundress.

It was not until the age of 35 - positively ancient in those days - that

she was eventually married to Thomas Woods, a railway foreman 17 years her

senior.

The marriage, witnessed by her half-sister Hannah, was a joyous occasion but

her happiness was not to last long.

Eleanor proved incapable of bearing children - a source of great

heartbreak - and on October 10, 1939, a month after the outbreak of World

War II, she suffered a massive brain haemorrhage.

And so it was that at the cruelly young age of 44, Eleanor died in the same

house where she had been born, was interred in the graveyard of St Peter's

Church, and had her name added prominently on an increasingly crowded

headstone.

Precisely one year later, John Lennon was born, going on to play out much of

his childhood against the background of that same church.

His schoolboy band, the Quarrymen, would cut their teeth at the church fete,

and Paul McCartney would join him to sunbathe in the graveyard.

It was during this time, many Beatles experts are convinced, that the seed

of an idea was planted which would subsequently grow into the song Eleanor

Rigby.

'I am absolutely convinced that this woman is the real Eleanor Rigby -

there are just too many coincidences,' says Ray Connolly, the respected

Beatles biographer.

'That graveyard was a place John, in particular, knew very well, but it was

also pretty close to Paul's house at the time.

'Paul has come up with various explanations for how they came up with the

name Eleanor Rigby down the years, but the subconscious is a very powerful

thing when you're writing music, and there is no accounting for it. Anyone

who was growing up at the time will remember the kind of character The

Beatles were singing about in that song.

'You'd see these lonely old ladies going to church every Sunday. Perhaps

they'd lost their husbands in the war, or who knows what sort of tough lives

they'd lived, but there was a sadness about them.

'Nobody has told the story of the real Eleanor Rigby before, and it's

absolutely fascinating that her life has such parallels with the woman in

the song.'

The lonely tale of the Rigbys did not end with her death, however. Having

died childless, the family line was continued by her sisters, who moved into

the family home on Vale Road and lived there together until they died,

within a month of each other, in 2001 - long after Eleanor's husband

Thomas Woods had passed away.

Neither married or had children, and when they died their entire estate -

amounting to £40,000 - passed to Robert Donnellan, who, by his own

admission, barely knew them but was the husband of a late friend of theirs.

They knew no other family member or friend for them to leave their estate

to.

Graham Paisley, the verger of St Peter's Church, says: 'Edith and Hannah

were two elderly spinsters who lived a very quiet life and were not

demonstrative in any way.

'They seemed to lead quite a lonely life, but they always had each other,

and I know they were very close indeed. I'll never forget Edith standing at

the side of Hannah's grave at her funeral, looking utterly desolate.

'It really wasn't much of a surprise that she died so soon afterwards,

because I don't think she had anyone left in the world.'

Indeed, the only remaining memories of sisters Eleanor, Hannah and Edith

consist of a few scraps of paper bearing a rudimentary family tree. Entire

lives reduced to the dates of birth, marriages and deaths in spidery

handwriting, bequeathed to a man (Mr Donnellan) for whom they are nothing

more than names and numbers.

In the course of this investigation, however, two other developments have

unfolded.

Firstly, in the Vale Road house which was the Rigby family home for well

over a century, a school geography textbook has been found bearing the

signature of a young Eleanor Rigby.

The book was found, hidden in the depths of the coal shed, by university

worker Alice Bennett when she moved into the property in 2003.

Inside the cover it has been signed with the names Eleanor Whitfield and

Eleanor Rigby Whitfield - a perfect match to the signature on her official

marriage certificate from December 28, 1930.

If a salary ledger for an unspecified 'E. Rigby' can raise £500,000 at

auction, what price this artefact, signed by the woman whose headstone has

become a Beatles icon?

Miss Bennett told me: 'When I first moved into the house, my neighbour told

me that Eleanor Rigby used to live here, but I didn't really believe it was

her until you showed me the signature on Eleanor's marriage certificate.

I've put it in a bank vault for safe keeping, and only told a few of my

friends about it until now. I'm a huge Beatles fan and I adore the lyrics to

Eleanor Rigby.

'This is a little piece of history and I'm not sure how much it might be

worth, but I don't want to sell it anyway.'

With Eleanor having died childless, and her spinster sisters following the

same path, it would appear that this dog-eared copy of Gills Oxford and

Cambridge Geography is virtually all that remains of her.

Just two miles away, however, in a semi-detached house in the Liverpool

suburbs, I finally tracked down Thomas Rigby, Eleanor's cousin and her last

surviving close relative.

The 88-year-old retired accounts clerk told me: 'I was aware of my cousins

Edith and Hannah, but we never kept in close touch after their mother had

died.

'As for Eleanor, the only recollection I have is of my father talking about

how he paid for her piano lessons. He spoke fondly of her, as I recall.

'There was talk of Eleanor Rigby on the television this week, and I've often

been asked if I'm any relation to this woman in a famous Beatles song. I've

always told them that the answer is no.

'Of course, I heard a lot of Beatles' music in the Sixties - you couldn't

get away from it in Liverpool in those days. But I like proper ballroom

dancing, not these pop bands, and as far as I'm concerned The Beatles

started all that off.

'Now I find that my cousin really was Eleanor Rigby, as you can imagine I

have mixed emotions about it. I never knew her, which is very sad, but

that's just how life turned out, I suppose.'

It is worthy of note that Thomas, like his cousins, has no children. Indeed,

of six siblings born to Eleanor's uncle William and aunt Louisa Rigby -

Thomas's parents - only two of them married.

Another child, Arnold, died in infancy, but Thomas, Albert, William and

Louisa lived their entire lives under the same roof as their mother.

'Some may regard it as unusual, but we were very happy with the

arrangement,' says Thomas.

'We were there for each other as a family, and that was enough for us.

'A lot of time has gone by, and Eleanor's side of the family has run out.

They were ordinary, hardworking folk, the Rigbys - joiners, bricklayers,

farmers and the like - not the kind of people you expect to go down in

history. And now there's nobody left.'

So it seems that the only memories remaining of Eleanor Rigby are a few

scraps of paper, an old, long-forgotten school textbook, and an iconic

gravestone.

Elsewhere in the churchyard, Eleanor's sisters, Hannah and Edith, are buried

with Eleanor's mother in an altogether more anonymous plot.

Nobody ever wrote a song about them, but as the Rigby dynasty approaches the

end of the line, it seems this somewhat sad family were indeed just the kind

of 'lonely people' The Beatles wrote about all those years ago.