Paul McCartney ‘almost became an English teacher’ – and wrote a play with John Lennon

There’d be no Eleanor Rigby, Yesterday or Hey Jude. But Sir Paul McCartney has said he would have become an English teacher if the Beatles hadn’t taken off.

Sir Paul credited his own English teacher at school, Alan Durband, for sparking his interest in literature and the arts back in the 1950s. And he said he wouldn’t have been “too bad” at the job himself.

The former Beatle was responding to a question from presenter John Wilson on the BBC Radio 4 programme This Cultural Life, which airs tomorrow evening. Wilson asked McCartney how his life would have panned out had he never left Liverpool.

“The only thing I was really any good at, or had the qualifications for, was teaching. So I could have taught. And I think I might not have been too bad at it,” McCartney said. “For me, it would have been English. Low level English literature. I’d have to swat up if I was going to get the high level stuff.”

The 79-year-old credited the “brilliant” Durband for introducing him to Chaucer while at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys. Durband had been taught by FR Leavis, the scholar and literary critic, whilst at Cambridge, and his passion for literature rubbed off on the teenage McCartney.

“He was great, a very good teacher. And he got me to get interested [in Chaucer] by telling me about The Miller’s Tale. When I read it I thought, ‘This is great, it’s really dirty’. It gave me a lot of respect for Chaucer and then it got me interested in other bits of literature. And I became really interested in going to the Royal Court in Liverpool and watching plays and reading plays, because he’d done the thing that great teachers do,” said McCartney.

Prior to being taught by Durband, the musician described himself as “a bit of a skiver” at school. “Teachers were pretty brutal in those days, and they were allowed to whack you, so they did. [But] there was a period where I was getting very near exams; those couple of years I paid attention a bit more,” he said. McCartney left the Liverpool Institute – known by pupils as The Inny – in 1960 having sat A-Levels in art and English. He failed the former and passed the latter, according to biographer Philip Norman. While this would have been enough to get McCartney into teacher training college, his fledgling band decided to go and play music in Hamburg instead. The rest is history.

The musician also reveals that he was an aspiring playwright himself. As teens in Liverpool, he and fellow Beatle John Lennon wrote four pages of a play called Pilchard. Influenced by the kitchen sink plays of the day, Pilchard features a mother and daughter standing in a kitchen. The discuss the whereabouts of a character called Pilchard. It turns out that he’s upstairs but never comes down because he’s the Messiah, who is busy “doing stuff and thinking”.

McCartney also uses the interview to set the record straight over who broke up the Beatles. For years he was widely seen as the man responsible for ending the band after he sent out a press release casting doubt on their future in early 1970. But in fact Lennon had already broken up the Beatles months before, and his bandmates were sworn to secrecy, McCartney said.

This Cultural Life will air at 19:15 on 23 October on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds