So, Eleanor Rigby Was...

Beatles fans might be very interested in this story:-

Who was the lonely person who picked up the rice in a church where a wedding had been? It is a subject that has intrigued music fans for 42 years: did someone called Eleanor Rigby ever live...

...a fascinating document that is to be sold at auction this month suggests that [Paul McCartney] knew more than he was letting on. It is a page from an accounts log kept by the Corporation of Liverpool, which records the wages paid in 1911 to a scullery maid working for the City Hospital in Parkhill, who signed her name "E. Rigby".

The document belongs to Annie Mawson..."I wrote to Paul McCartney in 1990 to tell him how I was working at a special school in Cumbria," she said yesterday..."Months later, I got a reply with a logo that meant it could only have come from Paul McCartney's office. Inside there was this document dated 1911. Then I saw the name Rigby and I realised why I'd been sent it. I feel that when you're holding it you're holding a bit of history."

...in the 1980s, a grave was discovered in St Peter's Church, Woolton, Liverpool, where McCartney and Lennon went sunbathing as teenagers, bearing the name Eleanor Rigby. She died in October 1939, aged 44, but unlike the lonely people in McCartney's song, she was married. Another gravestone had the word "McKenzie" sprawled on it. Paul McCartney has denied that that is where he got the names, though he has acknowledged that they may have registered subconsciously.