George Harrison Saved a Night Out With His Unusual Place to Store Money 

By the time The Beatles were at the height of their fame, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were making more money than they could spend. Despite this, they never carried money with them. There was always an aide or assistant available to pay, so they didn’t bother. On a night out in Wales, though, nobody had enough money to pay for dinner. Luckily Harrison remembered that he had stored cash in an unusual place.

The Beatles traveled to Wales in 1967

In 1967, The Beatles traveled to Bangor, Wales, to attend a seminar on Transcendental Meditation. They took a train from London to Bangor with their wives and Mick Jagger. The band had first met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi after a seminar in London, and they were eager to follow him to Maine. Per The Guardian, Starr said that meeting him was “one of those mind-altering moments of your life.”

“The man was so full of joy and happiness and it just blew my mind,” he said. “It was just so far out I thought ‘I want some of that.’”

George Harrison saved a night out simply by having money on him

After arriving in Bangor, the group went out to dinner, accompanied by biographer Hunter Davies. They were only able to find one restaurant open and settled in for their meal. When they finished eating, though, they discovered that no one had brought any money. The chaos at the train station in London meant they were also without their usual group of assistants. 

“That evening, in Bangor, we all went into the town for something to eat,” Davies wrote in the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. “It was late at night, in a very small provincial town, and we could only find a Chinese restaurant open. When the bill finally came, I found I did not have enough money, nor did anyone else. The Beatles never carried money, just like the royal family, and this time, in the rush from Euston, they were without their normal aides and assistants who carried the purse with them.”

 Their waiter grew increasingly upset, thinking they were going to walk away without paying. Soon, though, Harrison saved the evening. 

“George suddenly put his bare foot on the table,” Davies wrote. “He had taken off his sandals and was examining the sole of the shoes. There was a slit at the front and from it he withdrew £20, more than enough to settle the bill. He had put the money there for such emergencies, months if not years previously, and forgotten about it until that evening.”

George Harrison was concerned about money, but it wasn’t why he played music

Harrison had always been more concerned with the business side of things than the rest of the band.

“He was always very serious about his music, and the money,” his mother, Louise, said. “He always wanted to know how much they were getting.”

Though he was interested in money, he said that this was not why he played music.

“It’s not for the money that I do what I do; it was never for the money really,” he told Rolling Stone in 1979. “We hoped we’d make a living out of it when we [the Beatles] were teenagers, we hoped we’d get by [smiling], but we weren’t doing it for the money. In fact, the moment we realized we were doing it for the money was just before we stopped touring, because we were getting no pleasure out of it.”

With Harrison’s increased devotion to spirituality, though, he grew less interested in money.