All together on the wireless machine ... again

BBC Radio Solent presenter - and ardent Beatles fan - Alex Dyke interviewed Nick Churchill in The Big Hour feature on his show today. Listen here. The interview starts around 2 hrs 39 mins.

Aunt Mimi, Sandbanks, 1981

Now I need a place to hide away...

In 1965 John Lennon bought a new home for his beloved Aunt Mimi. The bungalow, at 126 Panorama Road, Sandbanks, near Bournemouth, became his refuge from the world until he moved to New York in 1971 to be with Yoko.

This extract from Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles and Bournemouth, relates Mimi's first ever television interview, in 1981 – the year after her nephew's death:

“Mimi later recalled that John used to send her rambling 10 or 12 page letters signed, “from your lunatic, artistic son John.” She said he “used to just appear. He’d fling himself on the settee and say how lovely it was here, so quiet.”

On one occasion he was surprised to find a television news crew had found him.

“He would just turn up and there would be a whirlwind when he arrived,” said Mimi in her first television interview, with Southern Television reporter Christopher Peacock in 1981. “It was usually when the pressure got a bit much. He used to like to come here and turn cartwheels on the beach, just by himself, there was nobody else there. When the television cameras turned up – I think the ferryman must have tipped them off – I got very annoyed, but he said: ‘Oh Mimi, don’t get annoyed, he probably got £5 for telling them I was here.’”

An exhibition of photos from the book and memorabilia relating to The Beatles in Bournemouth has now been expanded to include new images and can be seen at Lighthouse, Poole until 10 March. The venue is hosting a special screening of A Hard Day's Night on 28 February and the book Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth is now on sale at the Lighthouse ticket shop.

- The photos are on show again this summer, from 9 July until 5 September in the Bourne Lounge at Bournemouth International Centre.