@kelicopter asked in another thread

So when is George’s birthday?!

The story (I thought) is that he always celebrated it on the 25th February, but in later life discovered he was actually born shortly before midnight on the 24th.

I also vaguely remember a quote by Olivia, where if you wished him Happy Birthday on the 24th, he would say “it’s not my birthday yet” and if you said in on the 25th he’d say “you missed it.”

How much of that is true and how much is myth?! Does anyone have the original source of that Olivia quote?

Okay, the mystery of George’s date and time of birth… How did it change? Why did it change?

George’s date and time of birth is recorded as being at around 10 minutes after midnight on the 25th February. There are stories that his mother, Louise, would ring him at that time, wherever he was in the world, to wish him a happy birthday.

Then, in the 5 December 1992 issue of Billboard (a PDF of which can be found here), on the event of George being awarded their inaugural Century Award, an interview with George began with a paragraph which stated that George was born at 11:42pm on the 24th:

Where did they get that from? George, and he knew it would surprise most, as shown by the issue’s Contents entry for the article:

“I only recently learned after all these years that the date and time of my own birth have always been off by one calender day and about half an hour on the clock.”

So, how did George learn that the date and time were wrong?

The first thing to dismiss is that it had anything to do with British Summer Time (BST) – which is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), now commonly known as Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), +1 hour – remaining in place throughout the winter between 1940 and 1947, as ignoring it wouldn’t have shifted George’s birthday by half an hour as the UK is all within one timezone, and BST is +1 hour not +½ hour.

There have been some suggestions that he discovered some family document that gave the earlier time. There is no evidence for this, and no such document has ever been found.

The strongest suggestion is that his astrologer came up with his new time of birth by looking for the birth chart closest to his original time of birth that best fitted his life:

Astrological blogger Mary Barron points out that Beatle George Harrison was so into astrology he had his birth chart rectified to make certain he had the right time and date. He didn’t.

Rectifying a birth chart is a sophisticated process that requires matching the progress of transiting planets and angles with actual events in an individual’s life. Harrison was born near midnight and, before his chart was rectified, the date was recorded as February 25 at 12:05 a.m. However, Harrison‘s astrologer fixed the time a half-hour earlier on February 24 at 11:35 p.m., and the rock star emerged as an individual whose life experiences were more in sync with his astrological map.

Barron explains that Harrison closely identified with his Pisces birth sign and rectification didn’t change his sun sign. His deeply moving song, “Pisces Fish,” appeared on Brainwashed – the album released posthumously in 2002 after its production was completed by his son. “It’s a song deep with Piscean perspective,” she noted.

“I’m living proof of all life’s contradictions,” Harrison sang. “One half’s going where the other half’s just been. I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul.”

After rectification, the moon in Harrison’s chart remained in Scorpio, the sign known for probing the mysterious, for life-and-death concerns and for a “certain darkness,” Harrison called himself a Dark Horse more often than he called himself a fish, Barron noted.

What most changed with rectification was the astrological sign rising on the eastern horizon at the time of Harrison’s birth, which moved from Scorpio back into the late degrees of Libra with the correction.

“Libra adds a certain intellectual detachment, a love of beauty and a need for balance. Where the sun sign indicates the basic ego-sense of self, the moon represents one’s emotional nature and the ascendant or rising sign one’s dealings with the outer world. All come through with great strength in Harrison’s theme song for his sun sign,” she said.

Times are recalled wrong in the above, but it seems George changed his date and time of birth on the advice of an astrologer who told him an astrological chart based on a time of 11:42pm on the 24th was a better fit for his life than the one based on his given time and date of ten past midnight on the 25th.

As Mark Lewisohn notes in Tune In:

Both Louises, George’s mother and sister, gave the date of birth as 25 February 1943, which was also how it was registered the next day, and on the baptism certificate soon after, and was always written and celebrated until the 1990s … when George decided to announce he’d been born on the 24th.

So, it seems, all the evidence is the 25th, and a little George eccentricity and an astrologer moved it to the 24th.

georgefan1970 said
Hi everyone!

Forgive me if this is a stupid question but a debate has been sparked up between my daughter and I.  Any idea what shampoo George used?  

Stupid question, I know.  🙁 But we had no idea where to find that kind of info, as trivial as it sounds.

**sneaking off into a corner getting ready to be laughed at**

Thanks! 

  

I don’t know what he used at home but his hairdresser only ever put conditioner on his hair

“The only thing I would use at the time would be a conditioner. Just a little conditioner cream after you washed their hair. You just put a little softener on so you literally could put a comb through their hair. Paul and George had terrific hair. I’d just put a little conditioner on the ends. In fact, I’d rub it on my hands and I would touch the very ends of it. They probably didn’t even know I was doing it. But it was just a tiny little thing. They never complained, which was good.”

From the sound of it, he always used to get his hair washed at a salon, not do it himself – lazy thing.

” George would come up once a week, every couple of weeks, just to have his hair washed. He used to like to sort of just chill out.”

I think this might come from a misunderstanding on my part of what hair products were available.

In the ’60’s you only had shampoo with conditioners starting to enter the market but not incredibly popular. Surely washing only with stripping shampoos left your hair terribly dry?

You can also wash your hair in different ways without using shampoos as a lot of curly haired people do. 

I guess we’ll have to ask Leslie what products he used when washing their hair.