SIR - It would appear that you are unwittingly colluding in a re-writing of Beatles recording history.

In your edition of May 27, in a report on a sale of Beatles autographs, you stated that their first number one was From Me To You, a similar claim to that made in a piece on an earlier autograph sale on April 8 last year.

On May 24 - prior to the recent sale - you referred to Please Please Me as the Beatles' first number one, and then went on to mar this outbreak of accuracy by commenting on a "hat-trick" of Beatles number ones in 1963, i.e., excluding Please Please Me. This confusion arises because, 40 years ago, there were four published charts - those appearing in Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Disc and Record Retailer. In the first three of these, Please Please Me made it to the top, but, in the Record Retailer chart, it only reached number two. I'm guessing now, but it would appear that, in more recent years, someone has compiled an unfortunately well-used reference work that was based only on the out-of-kilter Record Retailer.

In any event, the BBC - which, I believe, calculated its chart based on an average of these other rankings - most certainly had Alan Freeman playing Please Please Me at number one on Pick Of The Pops on three successive Sundays during January/February 1963. If Please Please Me had not reached number one, there would be no point in the well-known story of George Martin's comment over the talkback after the recording session on November 26, 1962: "Gentlemen, you just made your first No. 1."

DAVID BARLOW,

Worcester.