'Day-dreaming' Hampstead schoolboy defaced exercise book containing unpublished Beatles song
It is believed to be a cast-off song from one of The Beatles’ best-known albums, doomed to be forgotten without ever being heard in concert or recorded for the Fab Four’s fans.
Instead, the lyrics and chords for Pensioner’s Waltz, thought to have been omitted from the final running order of The White Album nearly 50 years ago, were curiously left hidden in an exercise book owned by a Hampstead schoolboy, who subsequently defaced the cover with a transfer of a cow.
The full, and bizarre, story of how Robert Barclay, then aged 10, ended up with Sir Paul McCartney’s makeshift manuscript has been revealed after the key pages were put up for auction with memorabilia hunters expecting the surviving notes to be sold for tens of thousands of pounds.
In a signed statement to prove its authenticity, Mr Barclay, now in his 50s, told of a chance meeting with Linda McCartney – Sir Paul’s first wife who died in 1998 – as well as Crosby, Stills and Nash at his mother’s shop at the Hampstead Antique Emporium in Heath Street, where he would head to at the end of his day at school.
“Around 1968/69 I was a pupil at St Anthony’s School in Hampstead and I was learning how to play the guitar. I was 10 or 11 years old,” Mr Barclay said in his letter, explaining the source of the notes.
By: Richard Osley
Source: Camden New Journal
