With The Beatles (on the Shropshire border)

With their old albums digitally cleaned-up and re-released, the Beatles are back and bigger then ever. But one small town has never forgotten seeing the real thing live.

They were hurtling towards number one in the pop charts and starting to generate the kind of hysteria that would make young girls and boys scream like jet planes.

It was at this moment that Tenbury Wells woman Pat Lambert sat down for supper with The Beatles.

The date was April 15, 1963, the day the Fab Four came to Tenbury and, as one of a group of friends who booked the band to play, town hairdresser Pat was one of the privileged few who shared a meal with John, Paul, George and Ringo before their show at the Bridge Hotel.

"The landlord put a supper on in the dining room, and so it was that I had supper with The Beatles," Pat remembers today.

"Me, my husband and some friends decided there was not much going on in Tenbury and we thought we would start a club, the Riverside Dancing Club. The room where they played is still there and I would think it has not changed much.

"I took my autograph book along and I asked them all to sign it, which they did, and I sold it about ten years ago at Christie's for £1,700.

"But if I had kept it longer it would have been worth more now."

Pat says The Beatles' behaviour was not quite what would have been expected in Tenbury Wells at the time, although she does describe George as "nice".

"We hadn't heard anything like it - they didn't care what they said."

Like what?

"I shouldn't say," says Pat. "We booked lots and lots of famous people to perform there - Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Johnny Kid and the Pirates, The Rocking Berries. But The Beatles were the most famous. People still remember that day even now."

The Fab Four were in town to fulfil a long-standing booking for which Pat and members of Riverside Dancing Club committee would pay the group the princely sum of £100 - peanuts considering their single From Me To You was riding high in the charts and bound for their first UK number one.

At the time Pat ran a hairdressers called Top Style in Tenbury Wells and remembers clearly four star-bound figures walking past the shop window as they roamed the town, taking in the sights before the show later that evening.

She says: "They came early in the afternoon and strolled around the town. Somebody shouted 'The Beatles are here' and some of our clients ran out of the salon halfway through their perms with their rollers still in."

The visit is now part of Tenbury history. On the wall of The Vaults pub, four fresh-faced chaps are frozen in time, staring out of a photograph taken that day in Teme Street.

The black-and-white photograph, which appears to have been taken outside a sweet shop, shows the boys in relaxed and happy mood and on the cusp of world fame. There they are, huddled against the cold. But ever the jester Ringo, is pictured enjoying an ice-cream.

Someone in the pub looks at the photograph and remembers John being so skint that he bummed fags off passers-by.

But later that evening, in a function room at the rear of the Bridge Hotel, these four skinny lads climbed on to a tiny stage and tore the place apart.

"It was just like the records," says Pat. "It was loud and raucous and all the girls were screaming. They were very good."

Pat's husband Tony had a special role that evening. "I was the compere that night and introduced them with a chap called Ernie Davies. So I went on stage with The Beatles!"

And so it was that Tony 'gave' The Beatles to an expectant Tenbury audience of a couple of hundred people just days before they went on the Ed Sullivan Show in the US and became a global phenomenon.

Revisiting the place of his youth, 71-year-old Jim Tompkins stands outside the building that was home to the Riverside Dancing Club and his memories of that day are as clear now as they were more than 45 years ago.

"I was in the bar of the Bridge Hotel talking to George Harrison and he bought me a pint," says Jim. "It was a pint of Wrekin bitter. I can remember we went to look for them earlier in The Crow pub and Jack Knowles, the landlord at the time, said 'I don't want any long-haired scruffy beggars in here!' and sent them to The Oak."

Back at the Bridge Hotel, Jim remembers The Beatles "watching a performance of theirs on a nine-inch black-and-white Echo TV".

Hairdresser Edwina Bishop, who runs the Femina salon in Tenbury, was a regular at the club and one of the lucky few to see the most famous pop group on the planet perform in the small but perfectly formed club.

"They had only just started to get known here and after that they became known around the world," she says.

"The room was packed and the atmosphere was great - but it always was at the Riverside Dancing Club. There was a queue formed outside by 7pm and bus loads of people came from Ludlow and Clee Hill. The music was very loud, but at that age any noise was good."

From Tenbury Wells to stardust — The Beatles set the world alight and Tenbury would never see the likes of them again.

By Ben Bentley