WHY JOHN FLED TO NEW YORK

IT WAS not Yoko ‘breaking up the Beatles’ that led to John’s selfexile in New York. His escape to the Big Apple was a desperate bid to find the apple of his eye.

Having gained ‘two wonderful girls for the price of one’ when he married Ono – who arrived with a daughter, Kyoko – he was enraged when the child’s American father abducted her.

At first, Yoko’s ex-husband

Tony Cox appeared to get on with John. But as the Lennons settled into their Surrey mansion, Cox bolted for Majorca with Kyoko and second wife Melinda.

John and Yoko followed and snatched the child from school. They were arrested and imprisoned. An emergency court hearing granted the Lennons permission to take Kyoko to England, but Tony and Melinda absconded with her again. Believing they’d gone to America, John and Yoko raced after them. But their leads went dead.

Nevertheless Yoko applied for full custody, which was granted, on condition Kyoko be raised in America.

Which proved the impetus

John needed to start a new life. He was exhausted by media attention; revolted by Britain’s failure to accept his new wife. There was no plan to emigrate permanently. He merely wanted a break.

The Coxes washed up in Texas, where they joined an evangelical church, and befriended

Meredith Hamp, the 17-year-old daughter of a Granada TV boss who had given the Beatles their television break.

Meredith was invited to be godmother to Kyoko, whom she knew as Rosemary. Then Tony and Melinda told her they had to go away, and left their daughter with her. Meredith told me: ‘I did not suspect that Melinda was not Rosemary’s real mother.’

Nor did she know that they were on the run from the police, and that the most famous couple in the world were pursuing them.

The Coxes returned for the child, then vanished.

‘I never heard from them again,’ said Meredith.

Yoko never got her daughter back – and because that loss rendered her incapable of being around children, John effectively lost the father-son relationship with Julian, too.

John never saw his beloved stepdaughter again. And Kyoko was only reunited with her mother 30 years later, when she became a mother herself.