From where John Lennon first played guitar to Agatha Christie’s murderous country estate: A tour of National Trust treasures
A few days after my Christie pilgrimage I visited the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, now also owned and managed by the National Trust, extremely modest properties in comparison but the Liverpool houses tell a story even more extraordinary.
Lennon and McCartney’s homes themselves were both unspectacular (McCartney’s substantially more unspectacular than Lennon’s) – they were the houses lived in by most British people in the Fifties; yet visitors come to gaze on the signs they gave of incipient greatness.
Going in to Lennon’s house I felt rather like the chap who welled up in Greenway. I saw The Beatles in Weston-super-Mare in 1963, aged nine, pre-Beatlemania, so had some stake in their success; Lennon’s death was my Diana moment.
And Colin has had illustrious visitors. Six years ago he met the minibus at the gate and there was Bob Dylan.
‘He was interested in how cold it was in the house in winter – he’d had a similar experience growing up in Minnesota.’
Other paying punters have included Debbie Harry, James Taylor and ‘someone from Kasabian’.
He estimates he’s shown more than 110,000 people round the house. My group averaged over 50 in age and, unusually, we were all from the UK.
'There are normally lots of young people, particularly from Brazil.
‘Britain means The Beatles to them.’ When we think about the Best of Britain, we do think of the likes of The Beatles and Agatha Christie.
By: Frank Barrett
Source: The Daily Mail
