Forty-three years on, his sister Paula recalls the last time she saw her brother, the “lost” Beatle

“I last saw Stuart in February of 1962. He was back from Hamburg for a week, catching up with old art school friends. It was a bit of a reunion: we went out for drinks and a Chinese. Whenever he came back to Liverpool, he and I would go together to The Cavern. At some point in the evening, he would make sure I got home OK. He would then stay on and shoot the breeze with John, Paul and George.

“I have a vivid and very funny memory of that visit. I was taking the bus with Stuart to The Cavern. He and John were both practical jokers, and they pretended to be disabled. Stuart pulled a glove over one of his hands and pretended to fumble for the money in his pocket. I was doing all I could to try not to laugh.

“I also found him to be somewhat fragile: he was on prescribed medication because of his headaches. He did an interview at the time with Mike McCartney, Paul’s brother, who said there was something unusual about Stuart, that he was in a hurry. Mike was concerned about what might happen, but I didn’t get any sense of real foreboding on that last visit.

“Thinking about Stuart is always painful for me. He was my big brother. He was always parental with me. It was difficult never being certain that I was going to see him again. I remember the day he went back to Germany. A cab came to collect him from our house. He was 21 and I had just turned 18.”