"Upon his return to civilian life in 1946 Charlie began working as a chef and caterer. When he wasn't working he appears to have devoted himself almost completely to his family. (That's hardly news, is it?) His widowed mother was only three years away from death when he returned home and possibly his sister was still living at home as well, so he may have had several mouths to feed besides his own in those lean years just after the war. I have Charlie on videotape telling me that after he moved back into Copperfield Street he didn't do much except go to work and come home, and his brother Herbert finally got him to enroll in Herbert's fraternal lodge just to get him out of the house a bit more.

"I don't know when it was that he moved away from Liverpool again, but it would not have been until after his brother George died in 1957 and he finally would have been free, for the first time since the end of the war, to pull up stakes and relocate. Over the next 25 years he worked at a succession of hotels and inns at various locales around the country, including Birmingham and Brighton. In 1977, at the age of 55, he was working as a porter at an inn in Kent. When he was made redundant from that job, his employer wrote him a glowing letter of introduction in which he stated that Charlie had been dutiful, diligent and always cheerful - sounds about right!

"Nonetheless, as Charlie got older he was made redundant from a number of his jobs, often as a result of the many hotel closings that plagued the country's hospitality industries in the difficult economic times of the late '70's and early '80's.

"He was working as a chef in Brighton when he took time of in 1981 and '82 to travel up to Liverpool to attend his first Beatles convention. He also told me that, at one time when he worked as a chef/caterer in Liverpool, it was his job to report to the galleys aboard various of the passenger liners and other ships docked at the Pier Head and temporarily take over preparing meals for the ship's on-duty crews, so that the ships' regular chefs and cooks could get some shore leave along with the crews. He told me he'd worked in that capacity on a number of big ships over the years. The Labour Exchange finally talked him into packing in work in 1982. That same year, because of the tremendous welcome he had received at his first Beatles convention, he moved back to Liverpool to stay. The rest is history, the very history we're endeavouring to write.

"Watching the videos and listening to the tapes makes me miss him terribly, because I really did love him, but the old cliché is so true about it being the next best thing to having the person still there with you.

"I once heard Julia Baird tell an audience of John's fans at a convention in the U.S. that she made it a point never to watch any films or videos with John in them. She told them, "I don't think that, if it were your own brother who had been lost, you would want to see him up there on the screen as if he were still alive."

"I know and like Julia and I respect her feelings, but she and I are poles apart on this particular issue. For me it's an indescribable joy to review all these miles of hard-won, raw video footage of Charlie and to get to relive the events I remember and see and hear all the wonderful peripheral details I missed when it was all passing before my eyes for the first time. Ever since I began capturing Charlie on film and tape eleven years ago, it's been my joy and my mission to come as close as I could to literally preserving a part of him for myself and others to enjoy and share for years to come."

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