Those lovely folks over at the mine of Merseybeat information that is Liverpool Beat have kindly agreed to host an article about John Lennon's aunt Mimi and how she came to live by the sea.
Ever keen to oblige we've supplied an extract from Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth.
Read it here.
The photo was taken at Harbour's Edge, the home John bought for Mimi at Sandbanks, by press photographer Tom Hanley on assignment for the Daily Sketch at John's insistence in 1971 around the time he left for New York with Yoko.
Tom, who had been a confidant of The Beatles since finding himself holed up in a hotel room with them in Paris in 1964, visited Mimi with reporter Mike Hennessey.
"We spent the best part of a day with Mimi and found her to be very nice, very generous old lady, not at all how she has been portrayed since," remembers Tom.
The full story of Tom's day by the sea with Mimi is told in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth, which can be ordered from the official website.
More of Tom's photos of The Beatles and others can be seen at tommyhanley.com.
Of all the
people, stories, events and landmarks that connect The Beatles to Bournemouth,
among the most unlikely is this humble barber chair, which occupies a corner at
Mister M’s Barber Shop in Old Christchurch Road.
The chair
came from Horne Brothers’ barber shop on the corner of Paradise Street and Lord Street in Liverpool which was one
of the locations featured in Dezo Hoffman’s photo session with the boys on 23
March 1963, the day Ringo finally traded in his Tony
Curtis DA for a grease-free mop top like the others had brought back with them
under the influence of the Hamburg art crowd they befriended in Germany.
Brian
Epstein was a regular at Horne Brothers and the barber pictured is Jim Cannon
who turned down the offer to be The Beatles’ personal barber on tour.
He opted
out of the limelight and remained at Horne Bothers where he continued to cut
The Beatles’ hair when they were in town.
Horne Brothers has long since gone, but three of the chairs - made in Chicago in 1923
– turned up in a salon supplies company in Liverpool.
One had been renovated, but the other two were bought and restored before being auctioned in 2009.
Mister M, who cuts a mean head of hair himself, it has to be said, can be visited at his website here.
- The mop top was almost certainly first styled for John and Paul in Paris in September 1961 by Jurgen Vollmer, their photography student friend from Hamburg.
