Four thousand, right? That’s the obvious answer for any Beatles fan.

That number comes from this verse of A Day in the Life:

I read the news today, oh boy,
4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,
and though the holes were rather small
they had to count them all.
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Lennon’s lyrics

But I’m not so easily convinced that four thousand is the answer.

Reading the lyrics strictly, we only can be sure of two things: (1) they have counted four thousand small holes in Blackburn, Lancashire and (2) they now know how many holes are required to fill the Albert Hall. The song does not explicitly state the number of holes it would take to fill the Albert Hall, it just tells us that they now know that number. The number would be 4,000 only if there is some direct equivalency between Blackburn, Lancashire and the Albert Hall.

Not knowing much about the Albert Hall, or Blackburn (or Lancashire, for that matter), I decided to do a little research. The results of my investigation might surprise you.

(click more to find out!)

max capacity

The Albert Hall is a large public venue, and as such has a documented maximum capacity:

It was originally designed with a capacity for 8,000 people and has accommodated as many as 9,000 (although modern safety restrictions mean that the maximum permitted capacity is now 5,544 including standing in the Gallery). |from Wikipedia

Royal Albert Hall at its opening in 1871

The trouble is, we don’t care about the number of people the hall will hold; we want to know how many holes it will hold. We need to change units. And to do that, we need to know how many holes equal one person (or vice-versa).

Fortunately for us, the same news article that provided the number of holes in Blackburn ALSO provides us with a people-to-holes ratio!

UK Daily Mail
(17 Jan 1967)

John Lennon wrote the lyrics to this verse after reading an article in the UK Daily Mail titled “The Holes in our Roads.”

There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey.

Brilliant. So now it’s just a matter of simple mathematics (all values rounded to the nearest whole number of holes):

Using the original design capacity:
8,000 / 26 = 307 holes

Using the maximum recorded capactiy:
9,000 / 26 = 346 holes

Using the modern safety-code maximum capacity:
5,544 / 26 = 213 holes

Without the information in the Daily Mail article, we wouldn’t know the conversion rate of one twenty-sixth of a hole per person. Now that we do, we can easily determine the number of holes it would take to fill the Albert Hall to capacity.

That realization is probably what caused Lennon to interject “oh boy!” after reading the news. Like a mathematician exclaiming “eureka!” when he finally realizes the solution to a heretofore unanswerable question. Lennon didn’t include the math in his lyrics. But Fermat didn’t include the proof for his last theorem, either. For these men of genius, sharing the revelation is enough. It is up to lesser minds to work out the details.

So, the next time someone asks you how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall, you can confidently reply

“213, of course.”

You could say 307 or 346, but let’s keep it up to code, shall we?