Now in its second year, Kinsale Beatles Festival is bringing a true legend to town. Freda Kelly worked closely with John, Paul, George and Ringo at the height of their fame – and is finally coming home.  

WHEN Freda Kelly visits Kinsale this weekend, it will be a full-circle moment for the woman who was the trusted secretary of The Beatles for many years.

Her visit to the coastal town will reconnect her with her Irish family roots, and allow her to relive treasured memories from the time she witnessed pop history in the making from her office chair.  

This Saturday, the 80-year-old will attend a special screening of Good Ol’ Freda, the acclaimed 2013 documentary about her role behind the scenes of Beatlemania.

If producer George Martin was famously known as the fifth Beatle, then many fans will feel that Freda Kelly could easily be called the sixth. But her remarkable story, which saw her running the Beatles’ fan club at just 19 years of age, began long before the 1960s. 

Her grandmother married a man from Douglas and raised a large family before dying at just 44 years of age. Freda only recently discovered her grandmother was from Kinsale rather than Cork city, as she had always believed. 

Speaking from her home in Liverpool, she recalled: ‘She had 11 children, two of which died, and my mother was the last one in the family.’

After her grandmother’s death, the family moved to Mountjoy Square in Dublin, and later, after her own mother’s early death, so did Freda. 

Today, a memorial board at Sandymount Luas station honours her contribution to music history in both Irish and English. ‘I’m quite proud of it and I just wish my father was alive to see it,’ she said. ‘He always said that job would only last a year. He wasn’t a big fan.’ 

Her father’s sister lived in Liverpool, giving young Freda a reason to head Merseyside and visit her English cousins, nieces and nephews once a year.

Freda with George and Ringo.

The Cavern

By 1961, she had moved to Liverpool and was working as a secretary for a shipping company, a short walk from the infamous Cavern Club, the hub of Liverpool’s lively music scene at the time. 

One day at lunchtime, two workmates invited her along.
‘Lucky enough for me, The Beatles were on,’ she explained. ‘After I saw them, I just wanted more. I kept going back, and at lunchtime the band room door was always open. We could just go in and ask them to play a song.’

Over time, she became friends with the band, often getting a lift home from one of the group. And as their local fame grew, Freda began helping out with their fan club. When Brian Epstein became their manager, he soon offered her a fulltime role at his company, NEMS Enterprises.

‘I did not apply for the job, he offered it to me,’ she said. ‘The other secretary, Roberta Brown, had got married and was pregnant and didn’t want to run the fan club any more.’
Freda started out handling small bundles of handwritten mail from local fans. ‘I’d given my home address out and my father wasn’t happy about it.’

But as Love Me Do and Please Please Me climbed the charts in the early 1960s, the postbags quickly multiplied. ‘The letters came in trolleys and sacks from all over the world,’ she recalled. 

At one point her trusted team included schoolchildren, paid to cut out and re-paste addresses from international envelopes. Fans received official photos, newsletters and information sheets answering their most frequent questions about the Fab Four.

Freda pictured at a Q&A in more recent years.

Beatlemania

Through her job, Freda enjoyed a frontrow view of The Beatles’ rise to stardom but continued to visit her Dublin relatives every Easter, even during the band’s busy years.

She attended premieres for films such as A Hard Day’s Night and Yellow Submarine, and Liverpool’s 1964 Freedom of the City ceremony. 

‘I wasn’t going to go because it was all dignitaries,’ she says, ‘but when the council invited family members, Ringo put me down as a relative.’ 

One of her personal highlights was being part of the Magical Mystery Tour in 1967.

Having kept memorabilia and photos, among her keepsakes are personal mementoes from that time. ‘When The Beatles were in India,’ she said, ‘I got a lot of telegrams — from Paul and Jane, John and Cynthia, George and Patti, and also from Clive Epstein and Ray Coleman. I’ve kept all of them so my grandson can have them.’

When the group split in 1972, Freda also decided to call it a day, and around the same time, she became mother to her daughter Rachel.

She later settled in a village outside Liverpool, keeping two Irish wolfhounds among other pets, and worked for nearly three decades at a solicitor’s firm. 

Her Beatles past remained mainly private until her daughter suggested preserving it as voice recordings for her grandson, who is now 15.

Those recordings got the ball rolling for the Good Ol’ Freda documentary. 

Introduced via a family friend in the US to director Ryan White, Freda began working with him on the documentary in 2011. Ryan White returned the following year to film at her home, and the documentary premiered in 2013, earning warm reviews for its rare behindthescenes look at Beatlemania.

Since the film’s release, Freda has been invited to events across Britain and beyond, this year speaking as guest speaker at the Liverpool Beatles Festival for its 40th anniversary.

The Fab Four at the start of their musical journey in 1963.

Coming Home

Her appearance at this year’s Kinsale Beatles Festival will bring her family to town too. Relatives from Clare and Offaly plan to attend, turning the visit into a small family reunion, while her daughter Rachel will be there as well.

Patrick Ryan, co-founder of the Kinsale Beatles Festival, said they are absolutely thrilled to welcome Freda. 

‘While Freda is a legendary figure in music history, this visit is also a profound homecoming.  With her mother being a Cork native and the recent, wonderful discovery that her grandmother was born right here in Kinsale, having her walk our streets feels like a missing piece of the Beatles story falling into place.’

In its second year, Ryan said Kinsale’s colourful streets, arts scene, and harbour captures The Beatles’ creative spirit.

This spirit will definitely be felt this Saturday at the screening of Good Ol’ Freda,  at Lord Kinsale, with a Q&A with Tom Dunne, tickets at wwwkinsalebeatlesfest.com