Travel: India to England

Following their first trip to India, The Beatles returned to England on this day.

They arrived at London Airport at 6am. A brief press conference was held, and George Harrison and Ringo Starr were interviewed by the radio show Today on the BBC Home Service.

The following is a transcript of The Beatles’ interview with the ITV network, where they discuss their troubled time in the Philippines.

Q: At the airport, did they come up and start physically threatening you?

Paul McCartney: We got to the airport and our road managers had a lot of trouble trying to get the equipment in because the escalators had been turned off, and things. So we got there, and we got put into the transit lounge. And we got pushed around from one corner of the lounge to another, you know.

John Lennon: ‘You’re treated like ordinary passenger! Ordinary passenger!’ Ordinary passenger, what, he doesn’t get kicked, does he?

McCartney: And so they started knocking over our road managers and things, and everyone was falling all over the place.

Q: That started worrying you, when the road manager got knocked over.

McCartney: Yeah, and I swear there were 30 of ’em.

Q: What do you say there were?

Lennon: Well, I saw sort of five in sort of outfits, you know, that were doing the actual kicking and booing and shouting.

Q: Did you get kicked any?

Lennon: No, I was very delicate and moved every time they touched me. But I was petrified. I could have been kicked and not known it, you know. We’ll just never go to any nuthouses again.

Q: Would you go to Manila again, George?

George Harrison: No, I didn’t even want to go that time.

Lennon: Me too.

Harrison: Because we’d heard that it was a terrible place anyway, and when we got there. It was proved.