Maureen Cleave

• 1. Introduction

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  Maureen Cleave was the first woman ever invited to speak at the Oxford Union. She later built a career on getting people to talk, including some of the biggest musicians of the 1960s. One of her interviews with John Lennon produced a single line that made news. That line would travel far beyond the newspaper page it was printed on. Months later, it caused trouble on another continent entirely. What made Cleave the kind of interviewer a Beatle would open up to? And why did that line cause so much damage so long after it first ran?

• 2. From India To Oxford

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  Maureen Diana Cleave was born in Mussoorie, in British India, on the 20th of October 1934. Her mother, Isabella, was from Ireland, and Cleave was raised there. Her father, Major John Cleave, was English and served with the 7th Rajputs.

  Cleave attended two boarding schools, Rosleven in Athlone and Howell's Girls' School in Denbigh, before going to university. She read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford, graduating in 1957 with third class honours. Nothing about that degree hinted at the career in journalism that came next.

• 3. Making Her Name

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  After graduating, Cleave took her first job at the Evening Standard as a secretary, not a writer. She convinced the paper's editor, Charles Wintour, to make her a show business correspondent, writing a pop music column called Disc Date.

  In January 1963, Cleave travelled to Liverpool to interview the Beatles, acting on a tip from a friend who worked there. The resulting piece, titled Why the Beatles create all that frenzy, ran in the Evening Standard the following month. It was among the first substantial critiques written about the band, and it started a lasting friendship between Cleave and the Beatles as their fame grew.

  By 1964, Cleave was appearing as a guest on the television panel show Juke Box Jury, alongside Millicent Martin, Matt Monro and Bobby Vee. Two years later, she would sit down with all four Beatles again, for a series that made far bigger headlines.

• 4. More Popular Than Jesus

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  In early 1966, Cleave interviewed the four Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, for a series of one-page profiles. Titled How Does a Beatle Live?, the pieces ran in the Evening Standard on consecutive Fridays. They appeared from the 4th of March to the 1st of April.

  In her interview, Lennon told Cleave that the Beatles were 'more popular than Jesus now'. Five months later, on the eve of a 14-city tour of the United States, an American magazine reprinted the remark. The line set off a wave of anti-Beatle sentiment across large parts of the country, especially the South and the Midwest.

  That same run of interviews would later surface again, in a very different kind of story about a song and a rumor Lennon never fully put to rest.

• 5. The Norwegian Wood Rumor

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  According to Bob Spitz's biography of the Beatles, Lennon claimed a liaison with Cleave. He said it inspired the song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). Pete Shotton, a friend of Lennon's, also pointed to Cleave as the inspiration. Cleave herself has said that in all her encounters with Lennon, he made 'no pass' at her. Lennon later said he could not remember who the song was actually about.

  Others have pointed to a different woman: Sonny Freeman, wife of the photographer Robert Freeman. Robert Freeman shot the covers of several Beatles albums, including With the Beatles, Help!, and Rubber Soul. Cleave ended her association with Lennon in 1966, the same year she got married. That timing meant Cleave's most talked-about entanglement with a Beatle ended just as a new chapter of her life began.

• 6. Beyond The Beatles

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  Cleave interviewed Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones during the 1960s, alongside the Beatles. She avoided actors and politicians, saying they had already 'said it all before,' and preferred talking to people who were not celebrities.

  Her choice of 'remarkable people' included the Guinness heiress Aileen Plunket, interviewed in 1983, and the rock star Little Richard, interviewed in 1985. She also spoke with Donald Maclean, who was chairman of the National Vegetable Society. A decade after Lennon was murdered in December 1980, Cleave wrote a warm tribute to him in The Telegraph Weekend Magazine.

  Over more than 50 years, she kept interviewing people in all walks of life. She wrote for the Telegraph Magazine, Observer Magazine, Saga magazine, Intelligent Life magazine, and elsewhere. Her working life as an interviewer stretched on for decades, running quietly alongside a personal chapter shaped by very different circumstances.

• 7. Personal Life

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  Cleave married Francis Nichols in September 1966; the two had met while studying at Oxford. They spent three years living in Peru during the late 1960s, where Nichols worked as an economist and farmer.

  After Nichols's mother died in 1972, the couple moved to his family home, Lawford Hall. They remained married until his death in 2015, and together they had three children: Sadie, Dora and Bertie.

  In August 1992, Cleave collapsed on the platform of Tottenham Court Road tube station and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome shortly after. She died on the 6th of November 2021, two weeks after her 87th birthday, following a short illness. The diagnosis she received on that station platform in 1992 stayed with her for the rest of her life, up to her death in 2021.