Harrrumph! The day retired brigade members rose in anger – because Queen Elizabeth II got hip and honored the Beatles with MBEs…

The Beatle’s ‘new’ single Now and Then has predictably generated great interest.

However, this is a far cry from the fuss caused in June 1965 when the Fab Four were awarded MBEs in the Birthday Honors list by the Queen.

Less than three years after the group’s debut single, Love Me Do, they topped the charts in what was dubbed the monarch’s first ‘Pop Honours’.

Retired brigadiers huffed and puffed, the palace was knee-deep in letters of complaint. Some high-profile recipients have handed back their MBEs in protest.

Grateful or not, the mop-haired Scousers were cheerfully irreverent at a press conference on the day of the announcement.

“Medals can’t change the way we live,” Paul McCartney squeaked: “I’m still a villain.”

John Lennon had already said: ‘I thought you had to drive tanks and win wars to get the MBE.’

Those who had done one or both were unimpressed.

In a bulging palace mailbag was a letter from former Squadron Leader Paul Pearson, telling the Queen that the Labor government was ‘trying to influence the idiotic vote’ through the likes of the Beatles and Violet Carson (Ena Sharples of Coronation Street ) to the list. to blend.

From Montreal, a disgruntled Canadian navy veteran advised his queen as follows: “Don’t count on me for the next war – use the Beatles or the Beatniks.”

The Daily Mail was apparently serious: ‘The main concern is what all this fraternization with the nobles will do to the Beatles’ image? There was a time when they represented the youthful rebellion against the dusty old tradition.’

As the letters – and returned medals – poured in, a palace spokesperson used an admirable understatement:

“This Beatles tribute seems to have caused quite a stir,” he agreed.

He revealed that the day’s new mail had been forwarded to Windsor (where the Queen was based for Ascot week) and added: ‘There may be more to that.’

Across the pond, the New York Daily News was more optimistic, proclaiming “LIZ HONORS THE BEATLES.” YES YES YES.’

Four days after the announcement, the Band of the Irish Guards performed a rendition of: ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ during Changing the Guard.

Beatlemania reached a new peak on October 26 when the Fab Four received their medals from Her Majesty herself in the State Ballroom of Buckingham Palace.

If she had looked out from behind one of the gauze curtains on the Eastern Front, she would have seen a police officer climbing the palace balustrade to seize a number of agile and determined girls, some as young as 14 years old.

On the ground, their colleagues tried to hold back a tsunami of screaming teenagers in the days before the shatter barrier.

At the palace, the group admitted to feeling nerves, although years later the surviving Beatles quashed the urban myth that John had smoked weed in the palace toilets for Dutch courage.

The ceremony was short-lived, because instead of processing them one after the other, they stood in a row before the queen and looked neat. Their celebrated joke tops had been cut by their hairdresser.

She asked Paul one of her more time-honored questions: “How long have you been together now?” only to receive the response, ‘Oh, for many years. “Forty years” came in for Ringo, who was then asked, “Are you the one who started it all?” whereupon he told her, “I was the last to join him—the little fellow.”

After bowing in unison, they made their way to the waiting press, where they enthusiastically said, “She’s amazing. She was so very sweet and made us all feel completely at ease.’

On an earlier occasion they had been asked what they thought of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the man who had struck the gongs and now found himself at the heart of the storm. (It had not gone unnoticed that Wilson’s constituency of Huyton was on the outskirts of Liverpool.)

“Oh, he’s a good boy,” George Harrison confirmed.

“Did they earn their awards?” (the question on everyone’s lips).

For George it was a no-brainer: “The Queen must have thought that, otherwise she wouldn’t have given them to us.” And finally: ‘What can you achieve now?’ Ringo had a clear idea: “All I want is to be a duke,” he told the 150 reporters.

Four years later it wasn’t Disgusting that Tunbridge Wells returned an MBE to the Queen, but John Lennon himself.

His driver, Mr Les Anthony, delivered the medal to Buckingham Palace with a handwritten note to the Queen stating:

‘I am returning this MBE. I protest against British involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra affair, against our support for America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey [the song he composed for the Plastic Ono Bond] sliding down the charts.’

He signed it ‘With Love, John.’ He also later revealed that he had not told the other Beatles.

One person clearly unimpressed by his action was his beloved Aunt Mimi, who proudly displayed the honor above her TV set.

She told a reporter: ‘I share John’s views on British involvement in the Nigerian war, but I do not agree that this is the way to register a protest. If I had known what he wanted to do with it. I wouldn’t have given him his MBE. This is all very strange for John.’

John’s untimely death in 1980 robbed him of the opportunity for other awards.

By the 1990s, popular musicians began to be honored with knighthoods or dameshoods, including Cliff Richard and Shirley Bassey.

In 1997 it was Paul McCartney who knelt before the Queen for a KBE – a knighthood

Somewhat callously, George Harrison was not offered the OBE until three years later and it was not until half a century after receiving the MBE that Ringo Starr (billed by his birth name Richard Starkey), was knighted by Prince William in 2018. .

Afterwards he told reporters that he had recently had dinner with the other surviving Beatle “and we both laughed about where we came from, and we ended up in the palace and it’s now Sir Paul and Sir Richard.”