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Maureen Starkey Tigrett

wife of Ringo Starr (1946–1994)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ2124432
Source-derived summary

Maureen Starkey Tigrett (born Mary Cox; 4 August 1946 – 30 December 1994), also known as Mo Starkey, was a hairdresser from Liverpool, England, best known as the first wife of Ringo Starr, the Beatles' drummer. When she was a trainee hairdresser in Liverpool, she met him at the Cavern Club, where the Beatles were performing. Starr proposed marriage at the Ad Lib Club in London on 20 January 1965. They married at the Caxton Hall Register Office in London that same year but they divorced in 1975.

The Starkeys first lived at 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, then bought Sunny Heights, in St George's Hill, Weybridge. In 1973, they bought Tittenhurst Park from John Lennon. They had three children together: sons Zak and Jason, and daughter Lee.

Early life

Mary Cox was born on 4 August 1946, in Liverpool, Lancashire, (now Merseyside), England. She was the only child of Florence Cox (née Barrett) and Joseph Cox, a ship's steward. As a teenager, she remembered turning her school uniform around to make it look like a frock, and paying a school friend ten cigarettes a day to teach her how to "smoke properly".

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maureen Starkey Tigrett” is wife of Ringo Starr (1946–1994). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maureen, Starkey and Tigrett, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1946, 1994, 1965, 1975—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1946-08-04. For this dossier, Maureen, Starkey and Tigrett is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “wife of Ringo Starr (1946–1994)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2124432. VIAF identifies the subject as 44382756. The Library of Congress control number is n80077254. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1994, 1965 and 1975.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Maureen Starkey Tigrett primary sources, Maureen Starkey Tigrett archive and Maureen research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Maureen Starkey Tigrett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.