From the day they first hit the headlines, The Beatles had style, charisma and, most importantly, brilliant, genre-defining music coming out of their ears. But to maximise their chances of sustained success, they needed an easily identifiable image that was singularly theirs, too. At least that’s what the group’s manager Brian Epstein thought.

For John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to win over a mass audience, they needed the swag to match their swagger. And so, Epstein soon set about moulding them into the picture of a band he felt would best appeal to the widest possible demographic while ensuring they stood out from the crowd. He did away with the leather jackets and brill-creamed quiffs of their Cavern Club days and replaced them with fitted collarless suits, bowl-cut moptops and a type of ankle-high Chelsea boots which came to be named after the Fab Four.

The look soon caught on and turned The Beatles into four of the most recognisable people in the world between 1963 and 1964. All that was missing from their brand was a logo. Epstein would change that, too, but this time unintentionally, as the result of a happy accident.

In April 1963, Ringo Starr decided he needed to upgrade his drum kit for the band’s upcoming summer tour. Epstein took him to a specialist music shop he’d found in the heart of London’s West End to buy a replacement instrument. Little did the two of them know that by the time they left the shop, the most famous band logo in the history of popular music would be born.

Who ran the shop, then?

The music shop in question was called Drum City, Britain’s first store specialising solely in drum kits. It had opened less than a decade earlier and was run by its founder, native Londoner and jazz instrument expert Ivor Arbiter.

Not long after entering Arbiter’s shop, Starr identified the kit he wanted, a Ludwig Downbeat set with an oyster black pearl finish on the drum cylinders. The only problem was that Epstein didn’t want to pay for the kit. He was an astute businessman who drove a mean bargain and believed The Beatles’ growing fame merited a deal in which Arbiter would get free promotion for his shop in exchange for giving the drums away to Starr.

But Arbiter wasn’t having it. “Here was this drummer, Ringo, Schmingo, whatever his name was. At that time I certainly hadn’t heard of the Beatles,” he recounted. He wasn’t convinced that he’d get much promotion out of this band he didn’t know from Liverpool. “Every band was going to be big in those days!”

Eventually, he settled on a compromise with Epstein. Drum City would let Ringo have the new kit in return for his old Premier drum set, and Ludwig’s logo would be added to the bass drum. Arbiter had a direct distribution agreement with Ludwig, and so advertising the manufacturer would allow him to negotiate more favourable terms with them.

And what about the band’s logo?

Before finalising their deal, Epstein had one last request for Arbiter. If Ludwig was going to be branded onto the bass drum, then so were The Beatles. For an extra £5 fee, he asked that Drum City paint the band’s name onto the drum skin. Arbiter agreed and sketched an idea for the name design for Epstein there and then on the back of a cigarette packet.

On the spot, he came up with the idea of enlarging the “B” and dropping the “T” in the word “Beatles”, to emphasise the name’s pun on the word “beat”, as in the beat of the drum this name would be painted on. By the time The Beatles arrived in the United States and appeared to 75 million viewers on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, Arbiter’s design had become part of the group’s look as much as their haircuts or sharp-suited attire.

It would later appear on the cover of their 1980 compilation box set The Beatles Box, before featuring on virtually every new musical release by the band thereafter, as well as the majority of Beatles merchandise. It was trademarked by the band’s company Apple in 1994, a privilege which was never afforded to Beatle boots, suits or haircuts.

For his part, Arbiter continued working with instruments into the 1970s, supplying the likes of Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix with some of their equipment. Decades after his work for The Beatles, he was responsible for introducing karaoke machines to Britain. Still, his greatest claim to fame will always be his first. That drop-T font binds him inextricably to the biggest band in history.