Ahomeless black man lived under one of the arches near Waterloo station until about five years ago, when he and his box vanished. His name was Samuel (pronounced to rhyme with Danielle). Most of the time, he talked to himself or slept, but on some summer evenings he would start clapping and sing lines from songs by Marley or The Beatles, or reminisce about Liverpool, where he was born and raised. His deep voice rose from a reservoir of cigarette tar and pain. One story he returned to again and again was that of another Liverpudlian, the calypso singer, songwriter and music promoter Lord Woodbine. For Samuel, Woodbine was just one more talented black man, used then cast aside by the white world, just like those impoverished blues singers in New Orleans, and countless R&B, reggae and rap artists who never got their due: "Who know today that Woodbine, he make the Beatles. Who wants to know a black man did that?" Who, indeed.
When the lads were just starting out, dreaming, green and crazy about music, they, said Woodbine, "made themselves orphans, deliberately" and followed him like motherless chicks, hanging around the joints he either part-owned or played at, always trying to have a go on the steel pans. "Woodbine's Boys", they called them, Paul, John, George, Stuart Sutcliffe (bass player and "fifth Beatle") and, after Woodbine persuaded them they needed a drummer, Pete Best.
