DAILY EXPRESS REPORTED IT 50 YEARS AGO : THE FIRST TRIP TO AMERICA

 

The Beatles visited America for the first time in 1964

It came in the unlikely shape of a British pop group.

The Beatles landed at New York’s recently renamed Kennedy Airport (now universally known as JFK) to be greeted by thousands of screaming fans and their first press conference was packed with 200 journalists.
The headline on the Daily Express’s front page the next day read, “The Bugs are here”, a reference to one American TV commentator’s description of them as “the British bugs”.
“Today’s fantastic reception started when the boys appeared at the door of their plane at Kennedy Airport,” it reported.
“The place erupted as 3,000 youngsters ran wild, charging the guard of 150 policemen.
"Unable to break through, the fans stopped for a moment to pounce on a brave little group of college students who carried signs saying, ‘Down with the Beatles – we are for Beethoven’.
"The students were not seen or heard of again.”
Beatlemania was also very much in evidence when the band reached their hotel in Manhattan.

 
How the Daily Express reported the Beatles trip

After one policeman was injured and taken to hospital the officer in charge called in the cavalry: “As reinforcements of mounted police galloped up Fifth Avenue, security men stood guard on the corridors inside the Plaza Hotel.
"They stopped all guests from passing within six rooms of the Beatles’ suite.”
A Capitol Records executive called Brown Meggs said: “We would never have thought it possible for a British group to make such an impact here.”
The Beatles’ reception was all the more surprising given that they had been complete unknowns in the US just five weeks earlier.
The day after their arrival however, not one but two of their singles – She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand – took joint number one position in the US hit parade.
The very next day they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, a prime-time CBS production that was a national institution.
It had space for a maximum studio audience of 703 but 50,000 people applied for tickets for that night’s show which attracted a record 74 million viewers.
From then on the Beatles’ popularity in America was assured. The Daily Express’s front page also carried news of a saga that is now long forgotten but which caused a constitutional crisis in the Netherlands at the time and gripped the British public’s imagination: the soap opera that was a Dutch princess’s love life.

 
The Beatles performing on the Ed Sullivan Show 

Princess Irene was second in line to the Dutch throne when it emerged she had converted to Catholicism and got engaged to a Spanish nobleman.
This caused a huge scandal as the Dutch fear of Catholic domination dated back to the 16th century when William of Orange was assassinated by a supporter of King Philip II of Spain who had put a price on his head of 25,000 crowns.
After claim and counter-claim by people acting for the princess, the Dutch royal family, the Dutch government and its Spanish counterpart, the newspaper’s Spanish correspondents concluded that the end game was in sight: “Princess Irene’s return [to Holland] today must be the final showdown in this extraordinary affair which has had the country in an uproar, the Cabinet in continuous session and the queen assailed by talk of abdication.”
In fact, the princess’s fiancé turned out to be Carlos Hugo, Duke of Parma, who had links to General Franco’s regime and the couple were forced to marry on neutral territory in Rome with none of the Dutch royal family present. After all that they divorced 17 years later.