George Harrison Sent The Beatles Careening Off the Road in a Frightening Van Crash
When The Beatles were touring, George Harrison drove them in their van. They spent long days on the road, and they traded off driving. While Harrison was behind the wheel, he admitted he was driving a bit too fast. As a result, the van skidded off the road, sending everyone in it flying.
George Harrison crashed The Beatles’ van
In The Beatles’ early years as a band, they drove themselves to their concerts. They all said it wasn’t particularly glamorous; they drove for hours at a time in cramped and often cold conditions. Harrison remembered this period fondly, though.
“There were a lot of good times in the van; all the rough-and-tumble stuff that happens,” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “And there were some hysterical things that happened.”
One of the “rough-and-tumble” things that happened was a crash when Harrison was behind the wheel.
“I had a good crash once,” he said. “We were coming over the Pennines, the roads were icy and I was driving pretty quickly as we came through what turned out to be Goole in Yorkshire. Everything was fine until suddenly I went into a right-hand turn. It was a bit sharper than it looked and we went up onto the grass bank, which then sloped down to the left. The whole van tipped as we went down the embankment, at the bottom of which was a wire-mesh fence with concrete posts around a Burton’s factory.”
The crash jostled everyone around and resulted in a gas leak.
“We bounced along — bump, bump, bump — knocking down all these concrete poles and finally came to a stop with Neil [Aspinall] sitting in the front seat next to me, howling, ‘Ow, ow, my arm!'” Harrison recalled. “The accident had ripped the filler cap off and the petrol was pouring out. We got out and had to shove T-shirts and things into the hole to try to stop the flow of petrol.”
He had to go to court because of the crash
Luckily, no one was hurt. Harrison did land in hot water with the police, though.
“We’d started to push the van back up on the road when, out of nowhere, came, “Allo, ‘allo, ‘allo, what’s all this then?'” Harrison said. “It was a cop, and he booked us for crashing.”
While he wasn’t in much trouble, he had to stop driving for a time.
“A couple of months later I went to court; Brian [Epstein] came with me for moral support. (He did stand by his lads),” Harrison said. “I think they banned me for three months.”
The Beatles were in another accident, but George Harrison wasn’t behind the wheel
This was not The Beatles’ only van accident. While they were driving during a blizzard, the vehicle skidded off the road.
“At one point, it slid off and it went down an embankment. So it was ‘Ahhh!’ a bunch of yelling,” Paul McCartney said, per Express. “We ended up at the bottom. It didn’t flip, luckily, but so there we are, and then it’s like: ‘Oh, how are we going to get back up? We’re in a van.’ Because it was a slope that we’ve gone down. You couldn’t just drive the van back up the slope.”
While it was frightening, McCartney said the experience gave him an adage by which he still lives.
“We’re all standing around in a little circle, and thinking, What are we going to do? And one of us said: ‘Well, something will happen.’ And I thought that was just the greatest,” he said. “I love that, that’s a philosophy. And it did.”
