THE girlfriend of a journalist covering the Beatles' 1962 concert at Lydney Town hall was one of a group who 'legged it' over the fence with the Fab Four to avoid crowds gathered outside.
"I never believed so many people would come from the Lydney area," recalls Liz Koehane, who now lives in Bream.
It was her first date with the man who was to be her husband, Garrod Whatley, who was then the South Wales Argus showbiz reporter.
"I used to go to the same Newport pub as the journalists and we were all after Garrod but I spoke to him first.
"He asked me what I was doing on Friday and I said nothing that couldn't be changed and then he said he was covering this concert with the Beatles at Lydney Town Hall and would I like to come. So I did.
"Even though they hadn't had their first hit they were well known by then and had been on television, but even so the concert was packed.
It was a superb concert, she recalls, and the first time she heard "Love Me Do".
"The Beatles were due to play in Abergavenny the next day and they were going to stay at a place in Monmouth, and we were going to follow them.
"There were hundreds and hundreds of people outside, and of course we couldn't get out there so in the end we went over the fence at the back of the town hall."
Liz says she thinks she also met ill-fated Brian Epstein, the Beatles' then manager, at Lydney – or perhaps elsewhere, because she also met the Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra while accompanying Garrod to concerts throughout South Wales and the Bristol area.
"Brian was a very charming man, but very, very shy," she said. "Then I met the Stones, and believe it or not, Mick Jagger was a perfect gentlemen. That was back when Brian Jones was in the group."
Her picture above taken at Lydney shows her husband on the right, but they parted after she suffered a serious illness and Garrod died a few years ago.
"But we had great fun back then," she said. "They really were great times. The Beatles were very nice then, like the rest of us. It was only a few years on, when they were really well known, that all these people started being different."