1. Alice Mona Best was a British music club proprietor, best known as the owner of The Casbah Coffee Club, a club in Liverpool which served as a venue for rock and roll music during the late 1950s and 1960s.
23 Facts About Mona Best
1. 2.
Mona Best later opened The Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of the house.
3.
Mona Best died on 9 September 1988 in a Liverpool hospital after a heart attack coupled with an unspecified "long illness".
4.
Mona Best was born on 3 January 1924, in Delhi, British India, to an Irish father Thomas and English mother Mary Shaw.
5.
Mona Best was the youngest of four children: Brian, Patrick and Aileen.
6.
At the time of their meeting, Mona Best was a commissioned officer serving as a Physical Training Instructor in India, and was the British Army's middleweight boxing champion.
7.
The Bests lived for a short time at the Best family's large home in West Derby, which was called Ellerslie, but Mona fell out with Johnny's sister Edna, who resented her brother's choice of wife.
8.
Mona Best decorated the living room in an Oriental style, which reflected her own upbringing in India.
9.
Mona Best had previously tried to interest her husband in other houses, including a Formby lighthouse, a windmill in St Helens and a circular house in Southport, which John disliked and rejected.
10.
Roag's birth certificate was registered on 31 August 1962, stating his name as "Vincent Rogue [sic] Mona Best" and naming John Mona Best as his father.
11.
Mona Best came up with the idea of the club after watching a television report about The 2i's Coffee Bar in London's Soho, where several singers had been discovered.
12.
Mona Best had booked the Les Stewart Quartet to play the opening night with George Harrison on guitar, but they cancelled the booking after Stewart and Ken Brown had a quarrel.
13.
Stewart was angry that Brown had missed a rehearsal, because Brown was helping Mona Best to decorate the club.
14.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe and Harrison went to the club to arrange the booking, to which Mona Best agreed, but she said she needed to finish painting the club first.
15.
The reason for Brown's exit from the group was that he turned up on the seventh Saturday night of the Quarrymen residency at The Casbah with the flu, so Mona ordered him upstairs to the Best's living room to rest.
16.
Mona Best refused, and so the Quarrymen angrily cancelled their residency and stormed out.
17.
When Pete became a member of the Beatles, Mona Best repeatedly tried to get the group a lunchtime residency at The Cavern Club by talking to the owner, Ray McFall, but they were turned down, as The Cavern had a jazz-only policy at the time.
18.
Brian Epstein later wanted to manage the group, and Mona Best was asked for her advice, and although she had her own plans for the group, she concluded that Epstein would be good for them over time.
19.
Mona Best reportedly harassed Epstein about the quality of their bookings, and his management of them, which led to Epstein never referring to her by name, but always calling her "that woman".
20.
One musician commented that if Mona Best said it was a Sunday when it was Tuesday, one would be forced to agree with her.
21.
Mona Best wrote to Granada Television in 1961, in an attempt to gain the group a booking on the television programme People And Places, but was sent a letter telling her that they would contact her in the future.
22.
Mona Best never opened another club, or engaged in another business venture, although she did have paying guests at her house, which she shared with her bed-ridden mother and her sons after she and her husband Johnny had parted.
23.
Mona Best died of a heart attack on 9 September 1988, after a long illness.