Analysis: Maureen Cleave is remembered for her part in the Beatles story, but she was a major force in pop culture herself, championing Irish writers and inspiring Anna Wintour’s bob
In September 1966 a wedding took place in Sligo at St Anne’s Church, Knocknarea. In keeping with tradition, the bride wore white, a full-length dress of white Italian cotton, as the Sligo Champion reported. But her hat looked very modern and stylish. It was floppy and fashionable and trimmed with pink daisies. It made the bride look part of ‘The Swinging Sixties.’ And she wasn’t at the edge of that revolutionary epoch; she was at the core of it.
The wedding was small; only twenty people attended. But the Beatles sent a telegram to Sligo congratulating her. They were at the height of their global popularity. Their songs and albums had captured the pop world and so had their witty, irreverent interviews. They had done thousands of media appearances during their meteoric rise. But the most important interview of their entire career was with that Sligo bride, Maureen Cleave.
The local papers reported various events in young Maureen’s life. She was born in India in 1934, to an Irish mother, Isabella Mary Fraser Browne, and English father, Major John Cleave. She began her education in Ireland at the age of three where she later recalled learning ‘the three Rs [Reading, Writing and Arithmetic] and plenty of Irish.’ She had attended Sligo High School before going to Rosleven secondary school in Athlone.
The Beatles wear overcoats and smoke cigarettes while talking to reporters, including Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, who stands behind them. L-R: Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Photo: Getty Images
Music was one of her passions. At the age of 12 she had entertained guests at the Calry Church sale-of-work as part of a piano trio, and in 1947 achieved a merit in her piano exam in London’s Trinity College of Music. She was a writer of exceptional talent. In 1952, when she was 18, Maureen won a prestigious international essay competition and spent three months being chaperoned around North America as part of the United Nations Youth Forum.
Cleave’s writing skills and music ability were combined with a keen sense of fashion and culture. This made her the perfect chronicler, and champion, of talented, creative and innovative young people in the 1960s. In very important ways, Mary Quant and Maureen Cleave should be acknowledged as revolutionising both youth culture and business during this decade. They were key figures in taking young people seriously, in giving them choices and encouraging a meaningful type of self-expression. They helped to create a world where young women wanted to go out dancing and look good. Now, all they needed were bands to dance to.
Maureen Cleave encouraged those bands in her ground-breaking column in London’s Evening Standard newspaper. Her ‘Young and 20’ weekly feature began in March 1960 and covered music, fashion, books, business and the arts. From an Irish point of view, it’s significant that one of the first people she championed was a young Irish woman making her debut as a novelist. Cleave quoted Edna O’Brien: ‘The English only have time for the stage Irish. I bet they won’t take me seriously. I’m just a little Irish girl from the bog acting the goat.’ But Cleave, with the editorial authority of the Evening Standard wrote “I think they will have to take her seriously.” Later, she urged readers to buy the work of another Irish writer, Molly Keane.
Maureen in 1960. Photo: Getty Images
Cleave had three years of credible youth culture journalism under her belt when she asked her boss, Charles Wintour, to pay for a Liverpool trip to interview a new group. In turn, he asked his daughter, Anna, if she had ever heard of the Beatles. Thankfully she was a fan. And she was also a fan of Maureen Cleave. In particular, she admired Cleave’s hairstyle, a bob from Leonard of Mayfair. The editor’s daughter booked an appointment, and when she later became the editor of Vogue magazine, she was still sporting the iconic style.
Importantly, the Beatles liked Cleave’s hairstyle too. She later recalled: “I had a fringe like the Beatles. They liked me from the start because of my hair. I guess they felt like we could relate.” On 2 February 1963 she penned a piece titled ‘Why the Beatles create all that frenzy.’ The Beatles were a media phenomenon and they depended on media coverage to bring their sound to the world. And Cleave wrote the first major national newspaper feature on them.
Cleave continued to be a cultural tastemaker and an advocate for talented young people throughout the 1960s. And she did it with style, spontaneity and insightful writing. She was one of the first national newspaper journalists to interview rising stars, including Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Joan Baez and Dusty Springfield.
English blues singer and musician Long John Baldry (1941 – 2005) talks to journalist Maureen Cleave (1934 – 2021) of the London ‘Evening Standard’ in Manchester Square, London, UK, 17 June 1964. Photo: Getty Images
The Beatles invited her to tour the US with them in early 1964 and her reports became a part of how their global story was recorded. She had a keen eye for detail. She wrote how among the signs welcoming the band to New York was one that read: ‘England get out of Ireland.’ The band were comfortable with her and viewed her as a friend and ally. They even nicknamed her ‘Thingy.’ So, it wasn’t surprising that John Lennon felt comfortable enough with Maureen to muse that in some places ‘we’re more popular than Jesus now.’
The statement went unnoticed until it was quoted months later in a US pop magazine and then amplified by a radio station in Birmingham, Alabama. Cleave publicly defended Lennon and the Beatles and argued that the quote had been taken out of context. But it was too late. Soon there was a moral panic. The Ku Klux Klan even planned a Beatles’ wig burning.
She will be remembered for her part in the Beatles story. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that she was a major force in pop culture herself. Cleave helped to shape the pop landscape by giving young people credibility. She wrote insightfully about them in a way that placed pop music alongside the ‘serious arts’ like books, theatre and painting. That was a major achievement. The 1960s saw a cultural revolution in the West of the best kind. Maureen Cleave recorded much of it in her elegant style. She deserves a place in the Irish Dictionary of National Biography.
Dr Michael Mary Murphy is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities + Arts Management, Entrepreneurship at the Institute of Art, Design + Technology Dún Laoghaire.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ