Ringo Starr Lost Cherished Beatles Memorabilia in a House Fire: ‘Money Can Never Replace Those Things’
Though Ringo Starr was not an original member of The Beatles, he was a key part of the band for years. His time with the group left him with hundreds of valuable items from the band. In 1979, nine years after the band broke up, a fire broke out in his Hollywood home. Starr escaped unscathed, but the fire caused a significant amount of damage. Many of the items destroyed were rare Beatles memorabilia, which Starr said could never be replaced.
Ringo Starr joined The Beatles in 1962
Before Starr, The Beatles had Pete Best as their drummer. Best was with the band for two years and performed with them for their foundational residency in Hamburg, Germany. In 1962, however, the group unceremoniously fired him.
“Unbeknownst to me, they’d approached Ringo,” he told the Telegraph in 2018.
Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison didn’t want to break the news to Best, so they had their manager, Brian Epstein, fire him.
“He said, ‘Pete, I don’t know how to tell you this. The boys want you out’ — those were the words — ‘and it’s already been arranged,'” Best said. “That was another key word. Arranged. Ringo joined the band on Saturday. It was a closed shop. I asked why and he said, ‘Because they think he’s a better drummer.’ The bomb was dropped.”
Starr remained with the band until they broke up in 1970.
Ringo Starr lost Beatles memorabilia in a house fire
After The Beatles broke up, Starr stored many of the keepsakes from his eight years with the group in his home. In Nov. 1979, a fire started in his Hollywood home, forcing Starr to flee.
“I was sitting by a fire when sparks belched out of the chimney,” Starr said, per The Globe and Mail.
The fire ripped through the top two floors of the house. Six fire engines arrived at the home, and firefighters put out the blaze in roughly half an hour. In all, it caused $135,000 worth of damage. Starr said that many of the items lost to the fire were memorabilia from his days in The Beatles.
“I managed to bring out quite a few things, but quite a lot of my souvenirs of my days with the Beatles were destroyed,” he said. “Money can never replace those things.”
He auctioned off many items in 2015
Though the fire may have destroyed a number of items, Starr still owned many valuables from his days in The Beatles. In 2015, he auctioned off more than 800 items, including ones from his Beatles years.
“We have so much stuff and a lot of it we haven’t seen in 20 to 30 years,” Starr told NBC News, adding, “It started with me looking at storage units we have all around the world it seems … we found we had so much stuff.”
Among the items were photographs from the 1960s, his 1963 drum kit, Lennon’s 1964 guitar, and Mercedes owned by Harrison.
