B.C. museum gets groovy with John Lennon’s Rolls-Royce
“You swine! You swine! How dare you do that to a Rolls-Royce!”
Imagine John Lennon telling the story over a cup of tea, eyes glinting in quiet amusement behind those round-rimmed glasses. The tale of the woman who attacked him with an umbrella, provoked into berserker fury by the psychedelic Romany paintwork of his big yellow Rolls-Royce. Was it true? Maybe, maybe not.
As for the Rolls-Royce, it’s as solidly real as they come – 2,500 kilograms of a Liverpudlian’s Brobdingnagian folly. It sits in the foyer of Victoria’s Royal B.C. Museum, drawing eyeballs like it has its own gravity well, an icon of British nobility turned on its head. In the mid-1960s, this car was right in the heart of Beatlemania – so how did it end up in a museum on the Canadian West Coast?
You can blame Ringo Starr for the paint job. According to Lennon’s former chauffeur Les Anthony, the idea of painting the Rolls like a Romany caravan came from the Beatles’ drummer as they passed a fairground. Soon, respectable Rolls-Royce black was replaced by a yellow background with floral flourishes and a zodiac symbol atop the roof. Lennon would give back his MBE in 1969, and the yellow Rolls-Royce would return it to the Royal Chamberlain’s office.
By: Brendan McAleer
Source: Driving
