The Beatles in Scotland E-Book

Ken McNab

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 530

Beschreibung

The Fab Four: George, John, Paul and Ringo, a quartet of working-class kids whose magical songs and revolutionary influence still inspires four decades on. More has been written about The Beatles than any other rock group in history and it is difficult to imagine that there remains anything new to say, but lifelong Beatles fan Ken McNab reveals for the first time, in intimate detail, the pivotal part Scotland played in the genesis of the group and the extraordinary connections that were fostered north of the border before, during and after their meteoric rise to global fame. McNab follows The Beatles as rough and ready unknowns on their first tour of Scotland in 1960  -  when they were booed off stage in Bridge of Allan  -  and again, in 1964, as all-conquering heroes. He also discovers that the momentous decision to break up the band was made in Scotland and provides details of the McCartneys' lives in Mull of Kintyre and Lennon's childhood holidays in Durness.

Leseprobe

First published in 2008 by Polygon. This paperback edition published in 2012 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

West Newington House 10 Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Ken McNab 2008 and 2012

The moral right of Ken McNab to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 238 6 eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 202 3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

CONTENTS

Preface

1. Durness

2. The First Tour

3. The Scottish Beatle

4. The Concerts

5. The Fans

6. The Scottish Photographers

7. Fellow Musicians and Friends

8. Mull of Kintyre

Afterword

Index

For the other half of the sky . . .this book is dedicated to my wonderful wife Susannaand our children, Jennifer and Christopher.

PREFACE

I’m always getting asked: ‘Why do you like the Beatles so much?’ Well, you know . . . songs that changed the world, the soundtrack of a generation, the special chemistry between these four guys, landmark albums such as Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road . . .

But the truth is simple, really. The music makes me happy. And it’s been making me happy ever since, as a 14-year-old schoolboy in Glasgow, I first heard the 1962–66 compilation known as The Red Album. Now I am older, so much older than yesterday, my enthusiasm remains undimmed. The songs still make me happy. All of them.

From the raucous 1, 2, 3, 4 intro of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ to the mercurial brilliance of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ to the elegiac genius of ‘Let It Be’; growing up, there was nothing like a Beatles song to track your mood through the pitted path from adolescence to adulthood.

Amazingly, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of ‘Love Me Do’, the band’s first single. Who then could have foreseen the musical chain reaction that song would spark or the impact the Beatles would make on popular culture all over the world. Who then would have thought that, half a century later, the Beatles would still be the standard by which all bands are measured? What a legacy they left us!

Four years have passed since The Beatles in Scotland appeared in hardback, after my friend and Evening Times colleague Russell Leadbetter first suggested a book that explored the band’s links to Scotland. It was great fun. I could never have believed how well the book would be received within the Beatles community and for that I am extremely grateful. I also owe a debt of thanks to those attentive fans who pointed out the need for some minor clarifications in the original text. I am also grateful to Polygon for giving me the opportunity to become a fully-fledged paperback writer with the publication of this updated revision.

The seeds of the original book were sown once upon a time a long ago, but I think it’s worth recalling the embryonic process by which the book came to be born.

I knew John Lennon’s cousin Stan Parkes lived in Largs, in Ayrshire, and I went to see him as a first point of contact. It was purely exploratory. I expected nothing except to shake the hand that shook the hand of the late great Johnny Ace. Stan, though, was warm and welcoming, and regaled me with tales of the mischievous kid who spent his summer holidays in the Highlands. Then of course there were the numerous trips north when his band became ‘quite well known’. Not forgetting the car crash outside Tongue, Sutherland that saw him spend a week in a cottage hospital.

By the time I got back home, the sapling was beginning to take root in my mind. As well as John’s links to Durness, Paul McCartney’s connections to Argyll run deeper than a simple song in homage to the Mull of Kintyre.

Then there was the Silver Beetles’ first tour, a tour that started in Alloa three long years before the first scream of Beatlemania was heard. And, of course, there were the Scottish concerts that took place when the tidal wave of Beatlemania crashed upon the rocks of popular culture. Who saw them in places like Alloa? What did they remember? Was the hysteria for real or an urban myth? Were they any good?

And what about all those Scots who stood out so prominently in the circle of famous friends of John, Paul, George and Ringo – people like Donovan, Lulu, Sir Jackie Stewart, Davey Johnstone, Hamish Stuart. And has time simply airbrushed away the fact that one of the original Beatles was, in fact, a Scot? Hang on . . . getting ahead of myself a bit here.

But in that hour’s drive to Glasgow, I came to realise the Beatles loved Scotland and the evidence was all there. What I was unprepared for was just how astonishing that evidence would turn out to be.

This was always a labour of love, consummated by the joy of talking to so many people who have had some connection to the Beatles in Scotland. These days are past now, and in the past they must remain. But I hope this book will rekindle some joyous memories for those who can truly say: ‘We were there.’ And for the rest of you, it may open a page to an era that brought us some of the best music in modern times. Music that makes me happy.

The Beatles long ago passed the audition. I hope I’ve managed to do the same.

Special thanks remain to the following people in the without-whom department: Stan and Jan Parkes; Russell Leadbetter; Ronnie Anderson at the Sunday Mail picture desk; the Daily Record library staff; the Evening Times picture desk, especially Grace; Kerry Black at the Scotsman picture library; Bill McLoughlin at DC Thomson; George Burton; Derek Yeaman; Fraser Watson; Donovan; Johnny Gentle; Gavin Askew; Lulu; Iain Leckie; Hamish Stuart; Pete Nash; the British Beatles Fan Club; Sir Jackie Stewart; Davey Johnstone; Richard Park; Len Murray; Linda Thompson; Andy White; Barbara Dickson; the guys in Marmalade, the Campbeltown Pipe Band; Paul Young; all the people I spoke to who saw the band back in the day; brother Ian; Bridget and Kieran; Caroline and Allan; Linda and Kieran; Jacqueline and Ronnie; Terrance and Anne-Marie; Drew and Maureen; Isabel, Gail, Keith and all the Broons; Seán Costello; Neville Moir at Polygon; my agent Mark Stanton; mum and dad. And, of course, John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Ken McNab

Autumn 2012

1 DURNESS

September 1979. Dawn. Hong Kong harbour. The first crimson streaks of a new day break the sky with colour. No one gives the stranger gazing out over the junks and sampans a second glance. Yet there is an air of familiarity about him, a faint echo of memory. His long hair is swept back in a ponytail and a large bushy beard frames his face. In profile, his distinct aquiline nose looks almost aristocratic. He’s wearing a long coat, a fedora and white tennis shoes. Between his fingers smoulders the ever-present Gitanes, held at its familiar rakish angle.

John Lennon’s eyes were fixed on the famous shipping lanes, the soft breeze washing over his face and the smell of the sea in his nostrils. Behind him, the giant peak of Mount Victoria towered above the oriental skyline. But John was 6,000 miles away from here. In a time before fame. Before money. Before the mania. Before the Beatles. In his mind’s eye, John was about 11 and running through the rugged countryside of Sutherland in the far north of Scotland with his older cousin, Stan Parkes. Summer holidays were always spent at his Aunt Mater’s seven-acre croft in the village of Durness, the most northerly village on this gnarled but beautiful coastline. Together the two boys would comb the beaches looking for shells, build dykes, fish for salmon, draw the odd sketch and chat away to the local crofters.

Imagine. It’s tempting to think that’s what the youngster did as he felt the silver sands shift beneath his feet, followed by a blast of the searing wind as it whipped off the Atlantic. Looking round the bay, he would see rocks that had been weathered by the elements every day for millions of years, leaving the environs of Sango Bay resembling a lower jaw of rotting teeth.

Lennon once wrote a song called ‘Isolation’. Durness was isolation in its purest form. The nearest train station lay 60 miles to the south. In the other direction, single-track dirt roads hugged the coastline. To the west lay Cape Wrath, as far north as you can go on the mainland. In the other direction, John O’ Groats signposted the jutting edge of remote north-eastern Britain. The clear Highland air and stunning landscapes were a world removed from the smoke-belching factories of post-war Liverpool. And that feeling of unfettered freedom, the memory of those innocent summer days spent exploring the sea caves, hills, glens and Stone Age ruins never left him.

Now, in Hong Kong some 28 years later, the same longing had returned, washing over him like a ghostly reminder of more carefree times, of the fact that all his yesterdays were now carefully folded away. John said: ‘I wandered around Hong Kong at dawn and it was a thrill. I was looking out over the bay when something rang a bell. It was the recognition – my God! This relaxed person is me from way back. It was rediscovering a feeling that I once had as a youngster walking the mountains of Scotland with an auntie. The heather, the mist. I thought – aha! This is the feeling that makes you write or paint . . . it was with me all my life! It’s so overpowering that you have to tell somebody. So you put it into poetry or whatever. But that feeling . . . that’s where it all began. And that’s why I’m free of the Beatles, because I took time to discover that I was John Lennon before the Beatles and will be after the Beatles.’

Indeed, that long-submerged awakening was the first crackle of an electrical charge that ultimately lit up popular music forever and created a legend. It was also the start of a secret love affair with Scotland that continued right up until the moment a deranged fan snuffed out the life of the man who was the pioneering spirit of the Beatles and the maverick standard-bearer for a generation. In one of his final letters to Stan from his New York home, John wrote with typically mischievous wordplay: ‘It’s a braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht since I last had a word.’ And, in another, he declared: ‘You know I miss Scotland more than England.’

Stan told me: ‘It was a typical thing for him to say. He had a tremendous affection for Scotland. These holidays in Durness were very special to him. It was a different world to the one he was used to. The area made a lasting impression. I never heard him say a bad word about Durness all his life. These were very happy times for John and I suppose that’s why the memories stayed with him. And I was so glad to share them with him. We had a very special bond. He was always great fun even though he was a bit of a rascal from time to time. But I remember the other kids in the village always looked forward to seeing John because he was so much fun to be around. He was a real boy, full of energy and always looking at things differently.’

Often, when working at home on demo recordings, he would break into a broad Scottish accent, lampooning his own musical efforts. ‘Ah cannae dae it, ah cannae dae it,’ he chuckled in a mock-Scots brogue as the first embryonic, wistful version of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ breaks down after a few seconds.

Scotland was in John’s blood, and the first transfusion took place in the three-bedroom cottage at 56 Sangomore at Sango Bay. Here it was that the young Lennon ran free every summer from 1950 to 1955. But it’s only when you actually visit the croft at Durness that you begin to appreciate the effect the location must have had on young John’s city sensibility. The house stands atop a windswept pinnacle, looking down like a sentinel on the rest of the village. In the distance you can just about make out the fringes of the wonderful beaches that must have been the ideal summer playground. And a brisk five-minute walk would take him to the clifftop passageway leading down to the entrance of Smoo Cave, a natural rock formation creating a doorway into the very hill-face. In front of him the mighty Atlantic would have seemed to go on forever before, in a child’s imagination, falling off the end of the world.

John’s Highland holiday retreat was the perfect escape from a home life that was anything but conventional. He was raised by his mother’s eldest sister, Mimi, from the age of five. His parents, Julia and Freddie, had separated. At one point Freddie, a merchant seaman and the bête noire of his young bride’s family, had given the young John an ultimatum: either go with him to start a new life in New Zealand or stay with his mum. After a second’s hesitation, the boy, aged just five, ran to his mother’s arms. And he didn’t look back. Julia, though, was a free spirit and not yet ready to take on full-time responsibility for a child. So Mimi, the family matriarch and the eldest of four headstrong Stanley sisters, stepped in, and John was raised at Mendips, the respectable semi-detached house at 251 Menlove Avenue in the middle-class Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where she lived with her husband, George Smith. John was not the working-class hero of Beatles mythology.

When he was older, parental responsibility during the school summer holidays was shared by another Stanley sister, John’s aunt Elizabeth. Known to her family as Mater, Elizabeth was married to her second husband, Bert Sutherland, an Edinburgh dentist whose family owned the croft in Durness. Mater’s son Stan was seven years older than John, but despite the age gap the two cousins shared a deep friendship. And he took John under his wing during those rumbustious summer days.

Stan, now 78, recalls: ‘When I first moved to Scotland from Fleetwood in Lancashire, I would go down to bring John up because Mimi wouldn’t let him go anywhere unchaperoned, but as he got a bit older, she relented and let him come on the bus. She would put him on the bus at Liverpool and that would come up through all the border towns of Scotland to Edinburgh. I’d meet him off the bus at Edinburgh bus depot and take him to my parent’s home at Ormidale Terrace, near Murrayfield rugby stadium in Edinburgh. He would stay there for a week or so, and then off we’d go to the family croft in Sutherland at Durness.

‘What a lot of people don’t realise is that John went frequently to Durness, from the age of nine until he was 15. My stepfather owned a Highland croft based in the village. It was in his family for generations, and it always had to be worked as a croft even though my stepfather used it as a holiday home. It had to have sheep on it, otherwise the Crofters Commission would take it off you.

‘I used to take him up in a van or a car. We’d call in at Kirkcaldy, where my stepfather’s brother Angus lived, and we’d pick up bits and pieces and furniture that he’d collected to go up to the croft. And I’d be driving John up and I’d get up as far as Inverness, and he’d say, “Where are all the mountains? I don’t see any mountains. You said there were a lot of mountains.” I said: “John, you haven’t really hit the real Highlands yet.” Anyway, further on up, from Lairg to Durness you’re passing through various bits of the road where there are drops of 20, 30 feet either side and massive mountains overpowering you, and then he went white as a sheet and said: “Oh, I see what you mean now.”

‘John always remembered his times at Durness. He loved the wilderness and the openness of the place. We went fishing and hunting and up into the hills to draw or write poetry. John really loved hillwalking, shooting and fishing, which is perhaps not the image most people would have of him. He used to catch salmon. He would have been quite a laird.’

The other kids in Durness were intrigued by the cheeky and irrepressible youngster from Liverpool, which must have seemed like the other side of the world. But for all his urban upbringing, John mingled well with the village children. One of them was Iris Mackay. She says: ‘We just played together. We behaved just like children normally do, hit each other with seaweed and chased each other on the beach. We were always glad to see them. We didn’t see that many kids from England at that time. It just added to the whole holiday feeling. They came several times over a period of a good few years. John was just another boy on his holiday.’

Lennon’s links with Durness might have faded into the Highland mist had it not been for a chance encounter Stan had with the local primary school head teacher. Graham Bruce was rendered speechless when Stan told him of his famous cousin and of his connections to a place that was as far from Beatlemania as Mars. Graham listened intently as Stan entertained him with tales of his famous young cousin and a seed was sown, one that in the last few years has earned Durness its own mark of distinction on the Scottish tourist map.

Graham recalls: ‘We came to Durness in 1984. At that time, Stan and his wife Jan were still living in the village. I got to know them through the church and he told me this story about John Lennon. Well, I just laughed out loud and said: “You’ve got to be joking.” You don’t associate John Lennon with Scotland, let alone Durness. So I became absolutely fascinated by this connection to John Lennon. I have checked a lot of books on the Beatles, and that very important early influence isn’t mentioned. Yet it would appear from Stan’s stories that Durness had a fairly major impact on his life. You could easily picture the effect it would have on a young John Lennon, coming here on holiday away from all the grime and industry of the city. The contrast must have been enormous for him.

‘I felt that, as a community, we just didn’t play up to this. Local people also tended to be dismissive. They would say oh yes, he came here, but they didn’t seem to realise how significant this was. So it was always in the back of my mind that we should do something to recognise the fact that this very significant character had such close links with Durness.’

In 2002 work started to renovate the village hall and overhaul the gardens, which had become overgrown and overrun with weeds and dead shrubs. When Stan quietly suggested that perhaps a small memorial to John could be erected in the garden, he set a hare running in Graham’s mind. He contacted the makers of BBC Scotland’s long-running gardening series The Beechgrove Garden to gauge whether they would be interested in joining forces with the village to create a horticultural tribute to Durness’s most famous holidaymaker. ‘But their first reaction was one of disbelief,’ Graham recalls. ‘They just said, “John Lennon up in Durness? He was never up there.” But when we told them the story, they agreed to come up for a look and see if it was feasible.’

So it was that a BBC team went to Durness to check out Graham’s tale and to see if they could be convinced about the practicality of creating a John Lennon memorial garden in one of Scotland’s last untamed wildernesses. Programme producer Gwyneth Hardy recalls: ‘It was the most astonishing landscape. It gave us goosebumps and our mouths dropped open round every bend. It is a small community, yet they had managed to raise half a million pounds to build their own community hall. We met these guys and they were so welcoming and so together, and we just thought immediately they were going to be able to do this. We just felt we had to do this one, this is fantastic. Obviously for us the John Lennon connection was a nice hook. But it was all about the people and the place as well as John.’

Work on transforming the garden took three days in the middle of August 2002. The centrepiece was three standing stones created by local craftsman Neil Fuller, inscribed with lyrics from ‘In My Life’, the classic Lennon-McCartney song, from the 1965 album Rubber Soul, which was said to have been inspired by John’s visits to Durness. Taking centre-stage at the opening ceremony was Stan Parkes, his mind drifting back to the days when he and his wee cousin didn’t have a care in the world as they ran from house to house and raced along the beach. Stan said at the time: ‘John would be thrilled with this tribute, and I know it would have meant more to him than any fancy statue in a hotel or whatever in Liverpool. He really loved Durness and he would have loved this.’

*

As John’s oldest surviving relative, Stan Parkes remains his most enduring link with Scotland. Between 1963 and 1965 the Beatles played 22 Scottish concerts, including matinee shows, and Lennon would always try to find a way to escape the mayhem to snatch a few hours with his cousin’s family in Edinburgh. Even in later years, when John moved permanently to America with second wife Yoko Ono, Stan would still receive the occasional cheeky postcard from ‘Jock’ Lennon. Now living in Largs, Stan has every right to be called an honorary Scotsman, and has done as much as anyone to talk up John’s Caledonian connections, as well as being the proud gatekeeper of the Lennon name on this side of the Atlantic.

Despite the distance between Liverpool and Edinburgh, the two boys would see each other as often as school timetables allowed. Stan played a huge part in building bridges between the young John and his mother Julia, especially at the onset of adolescence. In her own memoir of these times, John’s half-sister Julia said Stan would often go behind Aunt Mimi’s back to spirit Lennon away for a secret rendezvous with his mum. Contact with Julia grew, a rapprochement brokered by Stan, although the task of turning the boy into a man was Mimi’s. Throughout his adolescence, however, John, for all Mimi’s nesting instincts, inherited his mother’s restless and rebellious gene. And music, specifically a shared love of the banjo, was the cord that bound them together.

At the age of 15 John heard the radio waves crackle with Elvis Presley’s libido-charged vocals on ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Suddenly all that pent-up rebellion, hemmed in by Mimi’s well-intentioned discipline, exploded. And from then on, music dominated John’s life. He cajoled a group of school pals into forming their own group, the Quarrymen, named after their school, Quarry Bank. And he persuaded Mimi, against all her protests, to buy him a guitar. John was besotted with it, also honing his musical talents on a harmonica, striving to blow out the same raw blues he heard from black American artistes. Fate intervened once again during one of his last holiday journeys to Scotland.

Stan recalls: ‘John originally had a very cheap little mouth-organ. I don’t know whether he got it at Woolworths or what. Anyway, he was keen on learning the mouth-organ, and he would play it on the bus coming up to Scotland, probably driving everyone scatty. As it happened, the conductor had been listening to him, and when he got to Edinburgh he said: “You’re quite good on that mouth-organ. Would you like a real professional one with side buttons and everything?” “Oh yes!” he said. “Well, a passenger left one on the bus months ago and it’s never been played.” He said: “If you come back to the bus station tomorrow, I’ll give it to you.” So I took John there the next morning and he was given this mouth-organ. He had it for years and in fact he played it on some of his records. Eventually he took it to America and had it in the Dakota building in New York, I believe.’

Six years later, that same mouth-organ was destined to announce the Beatles on the world stage. The instrument was used for the distinctive bluesy blast that was the hallmark of ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’, the band’s first two singles.

John had total recall of his trips to Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city having made an indelible imprint on the youngster’s mind. He remembered: ‘Edinburgh was one of my favourite cities. The Edinburgh Festival and the Tattoo in the castle. All of the bands of the world’s armies would come and march and play. I always remember feeling very emotional about it, especially at the end where they put all the lights out and there’s just one guy playing the bagpipes, lit by a lone spotlight.’

Amazingly, Stan was also a witness to the day when John Lennon first met Paul McCartney. Lennon’s school band, the Quarrymen, had been handed their first-ever semi-professional gig at the Woolton Church fête on Saturday, 6 July 1957. Stan and his sisters had been visiting their Liverpool cousins, and there was a ripple of excitement at the prospect of John’s band playing in public.

Mimi, naturally, was horrified, but Julia could hardly contain her excitement. John steeled his nerves by having a couple of illegal light ales. Stan takes up the story: ‘We were all very excited. It was a big thing for all of us that he was actually going to be playing on stage. I remember that it was a sunny day. We just wandered along until we heard him belting out this song. He sounded great, he had so much confidence even at that young age. Afterwards, we went to a backstage area and he was talking to this other boy. There was no big fanfare or anything. He just mentioned casually that this was Paul. But right away you couldn’t help but be impressed by Paul. He was more musical than John, especially on the guitar. But the Quarrymen was John’s band. And he had to decide whether to let this young guy into the band. Paul right away noticed that John was playing the guitar strangely. He noticed instantly that John was playing banjo chords on the guitar. So he showed him some guitar chords he knew.

‘At the time, we didn’t think an awful lot about it. It was only later, when the Beatles became so big, that I could look back and say I was actually there when John met Paul for the first time. But for the family, it was just the fact he was playing on a stage for the first time that was the big thing.’

Stan naturally remained close to John as the Quarrymen slowly morphed into the Beatles, with various members quitting and George Harrison and, later, Ringo Starr joining the ranks. But he had no inkling that his young cousin was in on the ground floor of a musical revolution. He says: ‘We had no idea that this phenomenon would happen. John brought up his demo record of “Love Me Do” to Edinburgh and we thought, “Oh, this is great.” And then “Please Please Me” went up the chart. I thought, this is going to be a bit of a success here. We’ve got a fine musician in the family. And then of course the concerts started and the film career started and we, as the family, were invited to the likes of the film premiere of A Hard Day’s Night in Liverpool. We all went to that and the civic reception afterwards in Liverpool town hall. He’s up on the balcony with the rest of them waving to the crowds, and of course half of Liverpool was inside the town hall and one of the family got lost in the crowd, and John said: “Where’s my family? I can’t see my relatives,” and we’re saying, “We’re over here, we’re over here.” “Oh,” he said. “Come up to the front.” So we were very excited.’

When Beatlemania erupted into a worldwide phenomenon, Stan was simply stunned. Lennon always said that, for the four Beatles, it was like living in the eye of a hurricane. Staying grounded amid the money, the adulation and the publicity would have been tough for anyone, let alone four working-class kids from Liverpool. But with the mayhem still in its infancy, John and Stan’s bond remained strong.

He recalls: ‘When the Beatles came up north to do gigs, John would normally stay with my mother in Ormidale Terrace in Edinburgh while the others were in hotels, until he got just too famous. Then they had a hideaway at the Roman Camp Hotel in Callander. On one occasion, however, John stayed with Jan and me at our home in Currie. The following morning after breakfast I took John down to the RS McColl shop for some ciggies. The girl behind the counter almost fainted when she looked up and saw who it was. The fans weren’t expecting to see him where we lived, but they found out eventually.’

The family ties that bound Stan and John together were never broken throughout the tumultuous decade over which the Beatles reigned as rock royalty. Stan says: ‘He was a great letter-writer, and we always got postcards wherever he was in the world. In fact, in the mid-seventies, he rang me up and asked me to send him a full Highland outfit including a kilt. He also asked if he could have my chanter for the bagpipes.

‘The other thing I had to send him out was a copy of the Broons annual. He loved things like that. John stayed close to his family. At one point he found out from The Times in London that the Durness estate was up for sale. Right away he said he wanted to buy it. But as usual with John, he just left it too late. And it was bought by a Dutch and Belgian consortium.

‘In the same way, when my parents died, their home at 15 Ormidale Terrace in Edinburgh was put up for sale as part of my stepfather’s estate. And John wrote me a letter saying he would have bought the house had he known. Again, he was too late. But right up to the end of his life he said he was coming home and wanted a big family reunion, possibly in Scotland. In his last letter to me, just before he died, he said he always missed Scotland more than England. In that last letter he quoted a famous Scottish song that says: “It’s a braw, bricht moonlicht nicht.” He wrote: “Come on man, send me a postcard. Life is short.” So it turned out to be very poignant.’

*

It was one of those curious draws from the deck of life that John Lennon should shut the door on the sixties in almost the same way he began that tumultuous decade – by being involved in a car crash in the remote Highlands. On 23 May 1960, John was abruptly woken from his golden slumbers when the van taking the Silver Beetles to Fraserburgh crashed into an Austin saloon carrying two pensioners on the A96 just outside Banff. The band’s van was being driven by Johnny Gentle, the Liverpool singer the band were backing on their first venture north of the border. Lennon, asleep in the front passenger seat, was all shook up but unhurt, and in the best showbiz traditions that night’s show still went on, the accident dismissed as a consequence of life on the road.

Just over nine years later, on 1 July 1969, John’s karma would not be so fortunate. A sentimental journey to take Yoko, his son Julian and his new wife’s daughter Kyoko to Durness, the Highland village where he had enjoyed so many happy summer holidays as a boy, ended in a ditch at the side of a single-track road near Tongue. An ambulance arrived from Wick to ferry all four some 40 miles south to the Lawson Memorial Hospital in Golspie, where they spent five days recovering from the accident. John received 17 stitches in his face, just along his jawline, while Yoko had 14 to repair a gash on her forehead.

Normally, that would be the beginning and end of the story. But John Lennon, of course, was no ordinary tourist. And this was no ordinary tale of a road accident. For the best part of a week the cottage hospital played host to a media circus that pitched its Big Top on the giant lawn in front of the wards.

Every spare bed-and-breakfast room in Golspie and nearby Brora was quickly snapped up as TV crews and newspaper reporters flocked to the Highlands. Some flew into Inverness and then headed north by car. Others drove the whole way from Glasgow or Edinburgh. It was a huge story. The headlines circled the world. The maverick Beatle turned global peace campaigner, his Japanese wife of just four months and their two children – laid up in a tiny Highland hospital.

It was the last thing the Lennons wanted. If anything, John had planned the holiday to try to escape the glare of publicity that constantly shone on their lives – attention, it has to be said, they had largely encouraged. Amazingly, however, many of the circumstances surrounding this incident, the people whose lives it briefly touched and the legends it created, have disappeared from the pages of Lennon’s life. The reason is simple. John and Yoko used their unexpected incarceration to haul up the drawbridge on their public activities. During their five-day stay the couple shunned the constant requests for interviews and photographs. At one point a posse of pressmen sent in a joint communiqué suggesting a single interview with one of them that they could all share. John’s handwritten reply? ‘Get well soon lads.’

So although it was a massive media event, it generated very little newsworthy copy. Hospital staff were privately amused at the goings-on. Publicly, though, they respected the couple’s wish to be left alone without any special privileges. Still, it was hard for some not to acknowledge the fact that they had a Beatle in their midst. By the time he was discharged from the Lawson, John had left his own distinctive mark on the staff at the hospital and one or two key members of the local community. And almost all of them have until now maintained a 43-year silence on what was the last time John ever set foot in Scotland.

First, though, it’s important to shade in the background to this long-lost episode in the Lennons’ lives. In the summer of 1969 John was the most famous person on the planet. Forget the fact that he was a Beatle, a badge of honour that brought its own unrelenting fame. John had become a figurehead of the growing counter-culture movement which had radicalised the world’s youth. There was a whiff of revolution in the air. American imperialism in Vietnam and the sight of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia had lit a torch of defiance among millions – and John Lennon appointed himself as the movement’s de facto prince of peace.

The start of 1969 saw the Beatles slowly imploding before the cameras during the shooting of Let It Be. Arguments raged over their music and, eventually, over the appointment of New York huckster Allen Klein as the man to guide their futures. Away from Abbey Road studios, the swirling currents of John’s private life had created a fountainhead of controversy. He was under fire from all sides after leaving wife Cynthia for the Japanese avant-garde artist who was, in his eyes, his mirror-image non-conformist. John and Yoko soon merged under a single identity. The couple married on 20 March in Gibraltar, eight days after his songwriting partner Paul McCartney wed Linda Eastman.

The next day they travelled to Amsterdam for the first of the famous Bed-Ins that would ultimately raise John’s global profile from barmy Beatle to serious non-violence campaigner. For the next three months they were never off the front pages or TV screens as they rallied the world to ‘Give Peace A Chance’ and end US involvement in Vietnam and other conflict hotspots. They became trapped on a self-created publicity rollercoaster that looped around them 24/7, eight days a week. And in between they made avant-garde movies, founded their own film production company, released their second solo album, Unfinished Music, No. 2: Life With The Lions, and splashed out £150,000 on Tittenhurst Park, an 18th-century house near Ascot. And Lennon showed the spark with Paul could still light up when they were the only Beatles to work on the recording of ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’. On the same day, he officially changed his name to John Ono Lennon, consigning his mother’s patriotic choice of Winston as a middle name to the history books. As if all that wasn’t enough, John announced in the middle of June that Yoko was pregnant.

Burnout was fast approaching when a window appeared in their schedule at the end of June, so John hit upon the perfect idea for a get-away-from-it-all break to Liverpool and Scotland. Initially he wanted to introduce Yoko to his relatives in Edinburgh, hoping naturally to win approval for their controversial union. From there he planned to head further north to Durness to rekindle his teenage love affair with the most remote village on mainland Britain. They could stop off on the way at bed-and-breakfasts, just like regular tourists, he reckoned.

This was fine in principle. Except that somewhere along this road of thought, one of them – history disagrees over which one – suggested John drive the 700-odd miles from their home in Surrey to Sutherland. It was an almost comical decision, one that perfectly illustrated either John’s charming naivety or Yoko’s insistence that he behave like ‘a real man’, as one biographer has suggested. John had passed his driving test some four years earlier, but despite buying a fleet of luxury cars including the psychedelic Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari, he was a shocking driver. His highway skills were rusty and his eyesight, famously myopic at the best of times, made his driving even more erratic. Of course, he rarely needed to get behind the wheel, since there was always an Apple flunkey on hand to ferry him to all points across his own personal universe. But the minute he turned the key in the ignition, he was an accident waiting to happen. Their chauffeur, Les Anthony, offered to drive them all the way, but John and Yoko were determined it would be a back-to-basics experience without any of the usual rock-star trimmings.

And so it was that on 29 June the Lennons set off on their adventure. That meant leaving behind the instantly recognisable Roller and opting instead for a hired green-and-yellow Mini which had barely enough room for all four of them and their luggage. It also involved the biggest risk of all. Forget that John couldn’t possibly expect to stay incognito; the real gamble was him driving all the way.

The first stopover was in Liverpool, to visit his Aunt Harriet and her husband Norman and touch base with old friends, but even by then the car was toiling. Unused to being behind the wheel, John often charged through the gears. They pulled into a service station, where the resident mechanic took one look and told John the clutch was burned out and the gearbox wasted. Antony was duly summoned to drive up to the old hometown with John’s other runabout, a white Austin Maxi, which the following day – the last day of June – the couple commandeered for the next, cross-country leg, over the Pennines and across the border towards Edinburgh.

They arrived at the Scottish capital without mishap, eagerly looking forward to their stay in a city John knew so well. Just as eagerly anticipated was the prospect of spending quality time as a family. First stop was Aunt Mater’s house in Ormidale Terrace in Haymarket, where she and Bert were waiting, along with Stan, to meet Yoko for the first time. No one knew quite what to expect. Mater had always been close to John’s first wife Cynthia and had natural reservations about her nephew’s new paramour. Like all the strong women in the Lennon family, she spoke her mind, and had made her feelings crystal-clear over John’s divorce from Cynthia, a pretty Liverpool lass who knew her place and respected her elders. Yoko, unconventional and not conventionally pretty, and carrying baggage from two failed marriages, was far from Mater’s template of a Lancashire ‘Stepford Wife’.

Naturally she was delighted to see her famous nephew, although she could scarcely recognise him at first beneath the shock of hair covering his shoulders and framing his face. Bert quickly made it privately clear he was unhappy at the lovers living under his roof, and was already making mutterings about heading off to Durness and the croft to avoid any unpleasant showdowns. But his wife persuaded him to stay for John’s sake and try to make the best of a difficult situation.

As always, Stan was on hand to provide some balm to salve any open wounds. In public he maintained a dignified and supportive front over John’s new relationship. In his private moments, though, he thought John was insane to have given up marital stability for this inscrutable woman whose main claim to fame was that she had once made a film about bare bottoms.

For John, though, Edinburgh provided a bolthole away from the ructions at Apple and the internecine warfare with the other Beatles. Heavily bearded, and with his hair at its longest, he was able to stroll round Scotland’s capital largely unrecognised and free from press harassment. Even allowing for the Bed-Ins and peace campaigns, few people recognised Beatle John as the loveable moptop of just three years earlier. Like any other tourist, he visited the usual attractions with Yoko and the children, seizing on this rare opportunity to behave like a proper father and husband. He and Yoko popped into the Scotch House on Princes Street to kit out the kids in matching tartan outfits, with John signing the till receipt for the shop’s owners.

Back at Ormidale Terrace, however, tensions were obvious. The presence of Yoko appeared to make everyone slightly uncomfortable. Even mealtimes were fraught, as Yoko preferred her macrobiotic diet and sushi, shunning nearly all of Mater’s meals. By the third day, Mater and Bert were relieved to be hitting the high road to Durness, a diplomatic retreat that at least gave everyone a few hours’ breathing space. John, desperate to show Yoko the Highland holiday destination that meant so much to him, said they would make their own way north. Stan arrived from his house in Currie to lead the way in the direction of South Queensferry, with the Lennons following behind in the Maxi. Stan, however, had serious reservations over John’s ability to tackle the journey, especially when main roads turned into narrow, winding, single-track farm roads beyond Inverness.

‘I said to him: “What are you doing in an old Maxi like that? You’ve got a Rolls-Royce, a chauffeur, and you come up in a rubbishy old car like that. You must be mad.” John was very short-sighted and not a good driver at the best of times. I thought it was mad to think he could carry this off. He had this long hair and the beard, but he still thought he wouldn’t be recognised. The idea was that they would stay at local bed-and-breakfasts like any other holidaymakers. He said: “I want to be ordinary.” However, I warned him to be careful. I said, “Remember, John, when you go up into the Highlands, the single-track roads start after Inverness. And remember the rule of the road for the single-track road.”’

John’s confidence, though, had been bolstered by how far they had travelled. He headed first across the Forth towards Kirkcaldy to see Stan’s stepfather’s brother, Angus. Having fulfilled another family obligation, he then had to negotiate a route back on to the road to Inverness. Like any other tourist, John probably put his trust in a road map to find the most direct artery to the capital of the Highlands, without having to go the coastal route to Aberdeen and round the neuk (corner of the land) of Fraserburgh.

The Lennons opted for the tourist route, a road that would have taken them through some of Scotland’s most stunning scenery, with the Cairngorms forming a craggy outline against the skyline. Eventually they hit Inverness and crossed the Moray Firth to the Black Isle. Given the fact that they had set off in the middle of the afternoon, they had no chance of making Durness in one go. Amazingly, though, they got as far as Golspie, where they decided to look for a local B&B, in keeping with the ordinary-John theme of the trip. Even though it was the height of the holiday season, John and Yoko struck it lucky at the first place they tried.

The house was called Kildonan, at 12 Ferry Road, and its owners didn’t even blink when they ushered the long-haired Beatle, his Japanese wife, Kyoko and Julian into their home. They were shown to a snug room on the first floor, where all four remained until breakfast next morning.

The owners’ son, Kevin Simpson, was about seven at the time, so he paid little attention to the newcomers. Tourists were a daily occurrence in his parents’ line of work, even though this particular man seemed to carry a special charisma. It was only several years later, in a passing conversation, that his father revealed John Lennon had once slept in an upstairs room. ‘I was just amazed,’ Kevin told me. ‘To them he was just another guest. But by this time I was a big Beatles fan and John was always my favourite, so to find out that Lennon had actually stayed under the same roof as me was incredible.’

The Lennons checked out early next morning. The Maxi loaded up once again, John and Yoko, after asking for directions and with a map on their knees, started out on the last leg of their marathon journey. Two hours later, the seemingly never-ending horizon of peaks and fields cleared to reveal the rugged coastline of John’s childhood, a childhood that had for so long seemed so far away.

As they passed the signpost for Durness, Lennon’s face must have lit up like a beacon as the memories came flooding back. He would have passed Iris Mackay’s old shop and the caravan site on his way to his Aunt Mater’s family croft at Sango Bay. The house, which seemed to stand guard over the rest of the village, was far from being a rock star’s normal retreat. But for John it was a signpost to a carefree past. He was delighted to walk through the front door for the first time in years and, naturally enough for a man steeped in unlikely sentiment, the memories washed over him like the breakers from the nearby Atlantic.

John wasted little time in taking Yoko, Julian and Kyoko off on a tour of the local beaches and coves, and ventured down for a nostalgic peek inside Smoo Cave. He also followed Mater’s advice to go down to the Cape Wrath Hotel to buy the villagers a drink, an occasion that is still fresh in the mind of Iris McKay, the little girl he once played with on the sand and in the coves.

She recalls: ‘He came to the Cape Wrath Hotel and stood his round at the bar. There was nothing starry about him. He was quite chatty and, of course, he looked a lot different from when any of us had last seen him. It would be easy to say people were amazed to see him, but for a lot of us it wasn’t that much of a surprise because we all knew he had family in the area. Obviously his life had changed beyond all recognition. But I always remember the boy from Liverpool who came up here for his summer holidays.’

They then decided to follow the road south-east out of the village and headed in the direction of Loch Eriboll, driving round the Melness side of the Kyle of Tongue in the days before the road over the causeway was built. Miles and miles of stunning mountaintops formed a giant, craggy curtain on the horizon before the village of Tongue loomed into view, the first sign of civilisation they had seen since driving away from Durness.

To give the kids a break they stopped at the local post office, which also doubled as a pit-stop café. Some pretended not to notice him, while rubbed their eyes in disbelief that a Beatle was among them. One man who has good reason to recall the Lennons’ visit is Norman Henderson, whose grandmother owned the post office.

Norman, who today still runs the same post office, says: ‘They came in for tea and something to eat. It created a bit of a stir. Word quickly got round, especially in such a small place, that we had a celebrity in our midst. But it wasn’t that much of a surprise to see him, because the older members of the community knew he had family in the area.

‘He had very long hair, and Yoko looked tiny, even among the local kids. They seemed quite happy together and chatted away to people. He seemed very friendly, and then they left after about 20 minutes or so, and I think they were heading back towards Durness. It was hard not to recognise him because his picture was usually in every paper just about every other day, but when they came in they were more or less left alone. It was only the younger ones who eventually plucked up enough courage to ask for an autograph. People still talk about the John Lennon visit even today. We’ve had some fans coming here as well.’

By now John’s confidence behind the wheel was high, perhaps bordering on complacency. This may explain why he forgot Stan’s parting words of wisdom to remember the etiquette of driving along single-track roads in the Highlands. Squinting ahead in the distance, John glimpsed what he thought was another car trundling towards them on the Melness side of the Kyle of Tongue. Unconcerned, he drove on regardless until he realised the other driver, a German tourist, was as ignorant of the rules of the road as he was and they were both on a collision course. At the last minute John swerved, taking the Maxi out of the other car’s path but leaving it perched in the ditch at an awkward angle. John emerged with blood trickling from a gash to his face. Likewise, Yoko’s forehead was bleeding. The couple had taken the full impact of the crash. The kids in the back, although shocked, were largely unhurt, although Kyoko suffered a small cut to her face.

All four staggered to the roadside and waited for help to arrive. First on the scene was a local butcher who stopped to check first of all on the injuries. He then drove to nearby Melness Farm to call for an ambulance. Unfortunately, the Lennons had to wait almost an hour for an ambulance to arrive from Wick, about 60 miles away, to take the injured victims to Lawson Memorial Hospital in Golspie, a further 35 miles south. By now word had slowly spread to Tongue, the nearest village to the accident scene, that a car carrying two hippies and a couple of kids had gone off the road. So far, John’s anonymity remained intact, although not for long. When the ambulance arrived, the shocked driver took one look at the victims and didn’t need John to tell him his name.

Professionalism, though, quickly kicked in as he carried out a quick condition check on each of them before radioing ahead to the Lawson that four victims of a road traffic accident were on their way. None of the injuries was especially serious, despite the blood seeping from John and Yoko’s facial wounds.

On arrival at the hospital, the Lennons were ushered into a side room where they were cleaned up by nurses and examined by Dr David Milne, who instantly recognised the celebrity couple in his hospital. He told me: ‘I knew right away who they were and I remember the whole episode quite clearly. When they were first brought in there was quite a bit of commotion. They were quite shaken up.’

A quick check revealed John had suffered a deep cut to his left cheek that would need stitches. Similarly, the gash on Yoko’s forehead would also require to be knitted together. Julian was the only one of the four to escape shocked but otherwise unhurt. An added complication, however, lay in the fact that Yoko was in the early stages of pregnancy, an inconvenient truth that was virtually forgotten, or simply missed, by the media at the time and by Beatleologists over the years.

John was told they would have to remain in the hospital at least overnight just to ensure there were no hidden injuries. His immediate reply was to insist that he and Yoko be given beds side by side, breaking the hospital’s normal policy of maintaining separate wards for men and women. Dr Milne, however, gave the unusual request the nod, and they were even given a ward to themselves, away from the prying eyes of other NHS patients.

In the meantime, John made a few calls to tell everyone that he might be back in the papers again, so they’d better be prepared. They included informing Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, through the offices of Apple, that he wouldn’t be at Abbey Road studios the next day for the latest sessions on the album that would eventually become Abbey Road. He also asked Ringo and his wife Maureen to brave the media frenzy and stand in for Yoko and him at the launch party for the Plastic Ono Band’s iconic ‘Give Peace A Chance’ single at Chelsea town hall. His other call was to Mater at the croft in Durness. At first she was furious that John could have been so careless, especially with children in the car. Her second reaction was to ask a neighbour to drive her to the cottage hospital, where, after checking on John and Yoko, she bundled a perplexed Julian into the back of a car for the return journey to Sangomore. Kyoko remained at her mother’s bedside.

And then the Lennons drew the curtains together and signalled their retreat from public life for the next five days. Inevitably, it didn’t take long for word of the accident to spread. Within hours the news wire services were sending the story all over the world. Next day the banked lawn outside the Lawson had been turned into a makeshift media centre. Newspaper reporters and cameramen and Highland freelancers, sensing the chance to make a fast buck, jostled for space with TV crews from all over the country. But there was little hope of catching a glimpse of Beatle John and his bandaged wife. They remained incommunicado behind the hospital’s whitewashed walls. Dr Milne saw his patients every day to check routinely on their progress and was impressed by John’s lack of starry self-absorption.

‘I had long chats with John, and he just seemed like an ordinary bloke to me. We covered a wide range of subjects. We spoke at length about the life he had been leading. He told me he had been through it all from religion to drugs. He was very honest and extremely down-to-earth. He seemed very intelligent to me, well-read and well up on world events. I thought he was quite an impressive figure.’

Dr Milne practically became the Lennons’ unofficial spokesman for the week, wheeled out before the cameras to give regular condition updates. In truth, though, there was very little he could tell the media that would spark a call to hold the front page. Today, there would be 15-minute updates on Sky News and BBC News 24. But more than 40 years ago, the column inches generated by the Lennons’ hospital stay amounted to little more than a trickle. A long trawl through the archives of the Daily Record, the Scottish Daily Express, the Herald (formerly the Glasgow Herald) and the Scotsmanreveals few headlines, and proves that John succeeded in his bid to recharge his drained batteries away from the media spotlight.

Even the fact that a furious Cynthia Lennon arrived at the hospital after a turbulent flight from Glasgow to collect Julian – unaware that he was with Mater at the croft – failed to ignite any serious coverage. She eventually took a taxi from the hospital to pick up Julian in Durness before heading back to Inverness for a flight back south, a round trip of some 120 miles.

In fairness, the tragic death of Rolling Stone Brian Jones, from drowning in his swimming pool, was enough to nudge even a hospitalised Beatle down the news schedules for the next few days. But not even that shocking event was enough to make John break his vow of silence from his hospital bed. There was no public tribute from one pop icon to another, nor any attempt at sympathy for the other members of the Stones, despite the close friendship John had always enjoyed with them.

One man who did slip through the net was the Free Church of Scotland minister, the Reverend David Paterson, whose church in nearby Brora provided him with a soapbox from which to rail against the world’s moral failings. Like most clergymen, he had been outraged just three years earlier when Lennon suggested in a newspaper interview that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. It may have been a clumsy attempt to deconstruct and debunk modern religious teachings, but Lennon’s comments nevertheless sparked a firestorm of protests across the globe, especially in America’s ultra-conservative Bible Belt.

In Scotland, the church informally known as the ‘Wee Frees’ manned the battle ramparts from its Highland base and denounced Lennon as Satan’s spawn. When Paterson discovered this apostle of evil cloaked as a prince of peace was in his own back yard, the chance to reprimand him was too good to pass up.

Obviously a well-known face in the community, he had no trouble gaining access to the hospital. And his request – no, demand – for an audience with the heretic millionaire pop star was relayed to John’s bedside. Minutes later Paterson was face to face, not with the Antichrist, but a man of flesh and blood just like himself. And, amazingly, the two men – polar opposites in every possible way – dug out some common ground. Perhaps it was the fact both were straight talkers – the minister, like John, was not one to shrink from forthright views – that helped them form an unlikely bond. For two hours the maverick musician, icon of his generation, locked horns with the Scottish Free Kirk minister over a range of subjects that included philosophy, religion, peace and war.

Paterson was one of only a handful of outsiders to pierce the Beatle bubble during the five days John was at the Lawson. For the rest of the time Lennon would read the papers in a secluded part of the hospital and enjoy fresh fruit scones, home-made marmalade and locally-caught salmon.