Help! Curators hoping to discover Fife links to lino from Beatle’ s home

Curators are on a quest to discover whether a piece of the linoleum that furnished Sir Paul Mccartney’s childhood home was made in Fife.

Staff at Kirkcaldy Galleries will sift through 1950s pattern books to find a match for the former Beatle’s floor covering in the hall at 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool.

The investigation is part of a venture celebrating Kirkcaldy’s industrial past, which saw the Fife town become a world leader in linoleum production.

The National Trust donated a sample from the floor to Kirkcaldy Galleries in 1997, two years after the trust acquired the property where Mccartney lived from 1955 to 1964.

The 24cm by 9cm sample had been displayed in Kirkcaldy, but is currently in storage.

Gavin Grant, collections team leader with the cultural charity Onfife, which runs the galleries, said: “The Mccartney’s floor covering is one of 6,000 objects in our internationally significant collection... we’d love to know if it was made in Fife.

“This new project will help us to promote the collection more widely and to conserve a vast range of artefacts.”

The galleries’ collection includes photographs, pattern books, catalogues, samples and workers’ tools.

If curators find a match for the floor covering, they will try to trace workers who produced it.

The quest is one strand of a £115,000 project, which starts later this year, backed by the Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund, that seeks to engage people with the globally-renowned linoleum collection.

Products made in Kirkcaldy and the Fife villages of Falkland and Newburgh floored millions of homes, offices and public buildings in the UK and abroad and, at its peak in 1914, the industry employed one in 10 people in Kirkcaldy.

By the time the Beatles made their only concert appearance in the town in 1963, just one factory remained.

It is still in production today and operated by Forbo.

PATTERN: Top left and right: The childhood home of Sir Paul Mccartney, right, at 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool. Above: The 24cm by 9cm sample of linoleum.

“We’d love to know if it was made in Fife