Ringo Starr and His Wife Lived like ‘Simple People’ According to a Beatles Insider
Ringo Starr established himself as a talented drummer early in his career. Then he changed drumming forever with The Beatles. He earned fame and fortune with the Fab Four, but one Beatles insider once explained how Ringo and his wife lived like simple people even after they purchased a huge estate.
Ringo Starr moved out of his apartment and became John Lennon’s neighbor
Ringo moved from Liverpool to London once The Beatles made it big. England’s capital city was also the epicenter of the country’s music scene, so he vacated the working-class port town for cosmopolitan London.
The drummer shared a place with bandmate George Harrison. Then he moved to an apartment in Montagu Square, not far from Buckingham Palace. When Ringo and his wife, Maureen, were expecting their first child, they moved out of the apartment to a house near John Lennon’s residence in Weybridge outside of the city. (The two bandmates lived less than a mile apart). Yet the former Richard Starkey still held the lease, and the apartment became a playground for his famous friends.
Ringo moved again to another large estate in 1968. When one Beatles insider visited the spacious property, he said he found Ringo and his wife living like simple people.
Ringo and his wife lived like ‘simple people’ at their large estate according to a Beatles insider
Ringo formed friendships with several famous people during his time with The Beatles, including actor Peter Sellers. The drummer crashed on Sellers’ yacht (and wrote “Octopus’s Garden” there) when he left the band during The White Album recording sessions.
That relationship paid off when Ringo purchased Sellers’ Brookfield estate in Elstead, Surrey (roughly 25 miles southwest of central London), for £70,000 in 1968. John offered to buy it for £150,000, writes Michael Seth Starr (no relation) in With a Little Help. Still, Sellers sold the property, which included a private lake, walled gardens, a gym, a sauna, and a movie theater, to Ringo.
When Ken Mansfield, the head of Apple Records in the United States, visited, he found Ringo and his wife living like “simple people” in a small section of the massive property:
“[Y]ou go in the big front door and [there is] the staircase and all that, and to the left there’s this giant den on the wing of the left side of the house with a big fireplace in there. They stuck a TV in the fireplace, the crib was over in one corner, Maureen’s sewing stuff was in another corner, and Ringo had his drums set up in another part of the room. It’s almost like, here they were, they had this big mansion, but they were just simple people, like a family living in a one-room place.”
Ken Mansfield describes how Ringo Starr and his wife lived like ‘simple people’
Ringo grew up in the cramped confines of a working-class Liverpool home. The way Mansfield tells it, the drummer found it hard to leave that lifestyle behind, even after he made it big as a rock star.
The drummer bought Lennon’s house a few years later
Ringo’s friendship with John led to another home purchase for the drummer. When his former bandmate relocated to New York in the early 1970s, Ringo bought John’s house in Tittenhurst Park, a western suburb of London.
The drummer reportedly burned John’s possessions that were left behind in the move, but that didn’t sour their relationship. Ringo frequently crashed with John as the timekeeper started spending more time in the United States in the 1970s.
He later spent time residing in Monte Carlo as part of his worldwide living situation, but Ringo Starr and his wife lived like simple people when they moved into Sellers’ former home.
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