Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr fly to India

Paul McCartney, his partner Jane Asher, plus Ringo Starr and his wife Maureen, flew from London Airport on 19 February 1968. They were bound for Delhi, India, where John Lennon and George Harrison had arrived three days earlier.

On the flight over, we, Paul and I, decided to go the whole way, and become vegetarians. I shall still eat eggs, but that’s it. That’s about all in that line. I suppose it would be better to call us ‘fruit-atarians’ than anything else. We all think it is a lot healthier than eating meat, anyway.

The 20-hour flight lasted through the night, and they touched down in Delhi early on 20 February.

Usually, I tell people I want to get somewhere quietly, and it turns out that everyone knows. A hundred people are in on the secret. I know what it is; the airline likes to get you photographed with the name. This time, we just drove into Delhi, got a ticket, and that was it. We stopped off in Tehran and this bloke from the airline came up and said, ‘Excuse me, are you one of The Beatles?’ So I said, ‘No,’ and he just walked away and that was that. I guess we’re not too big in Tehran.