Apple scruffs

Loose knit group of Beatles fans
the George Harrison song

The Apple scruffs were a group of devoted Beatles fans who congregated outside the Apple Corps building and at the gates of Abbey Road Studios in London during the late 1960s, in the hope of seeing or interacting with one of the band members. According to Apple press officer Derek Taylor, when The Sunday Times wrote a feature article on the company in the late 1960s, their map included a location for the scruffs, on the steps of the offices at 3 Savile Row. The scruffs carried membership cards and sought to protect the Beatles from the frenzied fan worship of Beatlemania. They built a rapport with the band members and became associated with the Beatles' history in the years before and shortly after their break up in 1970. Harrison's song "Apple Scruffs", from his 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass, is a tribute to the Apple scruffs.

At the start of 1970, shortly before the Beatles' break up, the scruffs started their own magazine, The Apple Scruffs Monthly Book. Lennon enjoyed reading it; when each issue became available, he would be heard laughing uproariously in his office at the comments about him and Ono. Taylor said the magazine was "hilarious" though also "quite cruel at times", and reflective of how the scruffs often had a better perspective on life at Apple than those on the inside, "because they weren't caught up in the details." Several scruffs disliked McCartney's wife Linda, partly out of loyalty towards his former fiancée, Jane Asher. The final issue of Apple Scruffs Monthly depicted Linda as a big breasted dominatrix who bullied her husband.

McCartney's wedding was the subject of heavy press coverage, which showed the Apple scruffs and other fans in mourning at losing the last romantically available Beatle. Margo Stevens recalled reporters pushing her towards the newspaper and TV cameras, and goading her to add to the spectacle by weeping harder; episodes such as this taught the scruffs to distrust the press, she said, since they "didn't understand us and made everyone look like idiots". She included Aronowitz's 1970 piece for the New York Post as an example of misrepresentation in the press. Among his comments in the article, Aronowitz wrote: "Sometimes George would record from 7 p. m. to 7 a. m. and there they would be, waiting through the night, beggars for a sign of recognition on his way in or out." Wendy Sutcliffe, who first came to London to look for the Beatles in 1967, recalled that this issue was what especially impressed them about Harrison's tribute song: "[he] understood how we felt and knew we weren't just sad, stupid girlies." The scruffs converged on the Apple Corps building on 10 April 1970 following McCartney's announcement that the band had broken up. Asked by a reporter whether anyone could ever replace the Beatles, Carol Bedford said that no one could, and that the scruffs had grown up and developed in tandem with the Beatles' developments. A CBS News report predicted that the gathering at 3 Savile Row was "only the beginning", since, "The event is so momentous that historians may one day view it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire." Chris O'Dell, an Apple employee and the inspiration for Harrison's song "Miss O'Dell", described the Apple scruffs as "the most loyal and loving of all the fans". She said that they conferred "the fairy dust of fame" on those they recognised as part of the Beatles' wider circle. Bobby Whitlock, one of the backing musicians on All Things Must Pass, wrote of the Apple scruffs: "All they really wanted was to touch us or just have an autograph. Mostly it was just to see us and give us a flower They were all very sweet and cute."

The scruffs began drifting apart as they grew older and also because several objected to McCartney's actions in dissolving the Beatles as a legal partnership. When Harrison attended the opening of the refurbished Apple Studio at 3 Savile Row, in October 1971, the NME reported that the scruffs were "still around in force". In Alan Clayson's view, the Apple scruffs' vigils ended through the individuals' personal maturation along with "the realisation that the Beatles as a 1960s myth would long outlive the mere mortals that constituted its dramatis personae". According to Bill Harry, the scruffs disbanded in December 1973, when Apple vacated its offices at Savile Row. The scruffs were drawn together again in the wake of Lennon's murder in New York City on 8 December 1980. As part of an international day of mourning on Sunday, 14 December, crowds gathered outside Abbey Road Studios, where Pritchard still worked. She recalled that, following a silent vigil, the studio engineers played Lennon's "Imagine" at full volume. She added that for the former Apple scruffs, it was especially tragic to learn that the murder had been committed by a "crazed fan". Bedford wrote a memoir titled Waiting for the Beatles: An Apple Scruff's Story, published by Blandford Press in 1984. She promoted it with an interview on the London radio station LBC in April that year. In his 2013 novel She's Leaving Home, author William Shaw cast the Apple scruffs as characters involved in a murder investigation. In a 2014 article he wrote for Rolling Stone about this and subsequent fan phenomenons, Shaw states:
There are Beliebers, One Directioners, Miley Cyrus's Smilers and Beyoncé's Beyhive. There have been Blockheads and Duranies. But there will never, ever be any group of fans as legendary and as sweetly original as the Beatles' most devoted admirers, the Apple Scruffs. Because not only did the Apple Scruffs follow the most celebrated and innovative musical foursome that pop music has produced, they helped keep the band sane.