Beatles mentor Lord Woodbine to feature in new BBC drama

Lord Woodbine (third from left) with an early Beatles line-up in 1961. Also pictured are, from left, Allan and Beryl Williams, Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best. Photograph: Keystone Usa/Rex View image in fullscreen Lord Woodbine (third from left) with an early Beatles line-up in 1961. Also pictured are, from left, Allan and Beryl Williams, Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best. Photograph: Keystone Usa/Rex Beatles’ early mentor Lord Woodbine to feature in new BBC drama Six-part series will explore the band’s years in Hamburg, including the overlooked influence of Harold Phillips In 1960, the Beatles arrived in the German port city of Hamburg. Inexperienced, keen and – in the case of George Harrison – underage, they were at the start of a two-year spell that would become a key part of Beatles lore, a time when the band honed their skills while entertaining rowdy sailors. The Hamburg stint, during which the band played more than 250 gigs between 1960 and 1962, is the focus of a new BBC drama, Hamburg Days, which will tell the story of how the band were beaten into shape by performing near the notorious Reeperbahn. Jamie Carragher, who wrote the script for the six-part series, told the Guardian it will include an often overlooked part of the story: the role of Lord Woodbine , the band’s early co-manager and mentor who will be played by the Sherwood actor Jorden Myrie. “He’s represented as very much the friend and partner of Allan Williams,” says Carragher, referring to the first manager of the group. “Woodbine was older than the Beatles, but also played music himself. He knew about music.” Woodbine, real name Harold Adolphus Phillips, was a Trinidadian calypso musician whose connection to Liverpool began when he came to Britain in 1943, during the second world war, serving as a Royal Air Force flight engineer. View image in fullscreen Harold Phillips, known as Lord Woodbine, in Liverpool. He was co-manager of the Beatles early in their career. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Jorden Myrie, known for the BBC series Mood (2022) and Sherwood (2024), will play Phillips. Photograph: Harry Livingstone After the conflict he returned to the Caribbean before coming back to the UK on the Empire Windrush; Phillips stood beside Lord Kitchener in the famous footage of the calypsonian singing London Is The Place For Me at Tilbury Dock. “McCartney and Lennon respected him in a musical sense,” says Carragher. “There weren’t many people in their lives at this point who wrote their own songs, and Lord Woodbine did that via the calypso tradition.” While Kitchener eventually made his way to Moss Side in Manchester, Phillips went back to Liverpool to seek out his wartime sweetheart, with whom he started a family in Toxteth. The academic and author Malik Al Nasir researched Phillips for the British Library’s Beyond the Bassline exhibition , highlighting how he – and by extension