A photograph of a young John Lennon has been uncovered after more than 50 years. Laura Davis reports

FOR millions of people around the world, the Liverpool suburb of Woolton exists as the site of a pivotal moment in musical history. On July 6, 1957, 16-year-old John Lennon was introduced to 15-year-old Paul McCartney by a mutual friend.

The story goes that the younger boy showed Lennon how to tune his guitar and their journey to become the world’s best-known band had begun.

In the years to come, their music would cause overwrought teenage girls to faint and adults to weep.

It would be played at weddings and funerals, and would inspire countless other musicians, books, works of art and films, including Sam Taylor-Woods’s Nowhere Boy being premiered in Liverpool today.

But, on that day in 1957, they were just two regular lads at a church fair that could have been taking place in almost any small township in the country.

This is demonstrated in a charming collection of photographs unearthed by Rod Davis, a member of Lennon’s first band, The Quarrymen, and shown on these pages.

His father, James Davis, was a keen amateur photographer and, for a time, official photographer to the Woolton Rose Queen event, which was part of the fete.

After he died in the late 70s, thousands of his negatives were stored in tea chests in his children’s lofts.

When Rod began scanning them into his computer, he uncovered a unique portrait of Woolton in the 1950s – rose queens posing shyly in the field behind St Peter’s Church, women on the cake stall dishing out slabs of Victoria sponge on china plates, village streets devoid of cars.

And, on one, a fresh-faced Lennon in a checked shirt, singing with his eyes closed on the back of a lorry.

“As I held the next strip up to the light, the distinctive square edge of what could have been a tea chest bass caught my eye, but as it was in negative the details were impossible to make out,” says Rod.