Happy hoarder: the Beatles gems I saved from the bin
Hunter Davies clung on to everything, from Beatles lyrics to Paul Mccartney’s swimming trunks, until the British Library came calling
My wife, the novelist Margaret Forster, always used to say that, if I died first, it would be ‘straight to the dump’. She didn’t mean my body, but my treasures, my collections and my assorted tat and rubbish which I have collected over a lifetime.
She maintained they just attracted dust and dirt – what a lie – and that I did not know where anything was – another fib – and that I was continually buying the same stuff, which was often true.
Margaret died three years ago. And now, at 83, I am about to start some modest decluttering. Nothing to do with that dopey Japanese woman Marie Kondo, who says you should have only 30 books. There is no joy in being tidy. But oh the joy in hoarding, collecting, hunting and gathering, over the past 30 years.
I’ve kept every scrap of research material about the 100 books I’ve written – and retained every half-interesting piece of paper that ever came my way. I happened to look in an old drawer recently and found letters addressed to me from four different prime ministers (Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-home and Wilson), kept from the 1960s and 70s when I interviewed them for the Sunday Times. I then set myself the target of securing an autograph signed by every PM, going all the way back to Robert Walpole. It only took me ten years.
In 1984, my wife wrote a book called Significant Sisters, about women who changed lives for other women. That Christmas, I bought her a really fab present – the autographs of the three Pankhursts, mother and two daughters.
‘Why would I want these?’ she said. ‘They are of no interest to me.’
I thought, ‘Up your bum, you ungrateful thing!’
So I started collected suffragette material. Today I have 1,000 suffragette postcards, newspapers, letters, cuttings and illustrations. When I started, you could get a good original postcard for £8. Now you have to pay £80. I have a
collection of No 1 editions of newspapers and magazines. They include Punch, the Daily Mail, Picture Post, Private Eye and The Oldie. (By far the most valuable? Private Eye. Because so few copies of No 1 were printed.)
My two biggest collections are about football and the Beatles. I have 2,000 books on each subject and 5,000 assorted documents and scraps.
In the next few weeks, a lorry from the British Library is coming to take my Beatles stuff away. Thirty years ago, I handed over to the British Library the originals of nine Beatles lyrics ( I Want to Hold Your Hand, Ticket to Ride, Help!, Michelle, The Fool on the Hill, Yesterday, She Said She Said, In My Life and Here, There and Everywhere), acquired while I was doing their only authorised biography, The Beatles [1968].
You can see the lyrics in the Library’s Manuscript Room, next to Magna Carta, Shakespeare and Beethoven.
At the end of a 1967 Abbey Road session, I asked the Beatles if I could have some of their handwritten lyrics, lying on the floor. They said yes – they could see no point in keeping them, now they had done the recording; and, anyway, the cleaners would just burn them. They give me other handwritten lyrics as presents. The copy of Yesterday is a bit of a fiddle – Paul wrote a copy for me in 1967, two years after the original version came out.
The material I’m now handing over to the British Library includes snaps of the Beatles in their underpants in Hamburg, and eating at the George V hotel in Paris on the night they heard I Want to Hold Your Hand was No 1 in the US – someone has put a potty on Brian Epstein’s head.
I am also passing on my original manuscript of my Beatles biography, and the notebooks in which I scribbled down the interviews with folks now long dead; not just the Beatles but their mums and dads, too.
One reason for moving the stuff out is to keep it all together – and to keep it safe. I don’t fear burglars. They would have to be pretty smart to know what is of real interest – and then find it amid the clutter. I fear a fire. The other day, I went out and left four eggs boiling on the stove. I came home to find firemen in the house and my son running around, convinced I was lying dead upstairs.
One thing I am not chucking out is Paul Mccartney’s swimming costume. He left it behind in 1968, when he and Linda, who he’d just met, spent two weeks on holiday with us in Portugal. When I told him, he said, ‘Just dump it.’
I have a fantasy that, when Paul dies (many years from now, we hope), they might be able to clone him, using a sample of his DNA from his cossie…
Hunter Davies’s 100th book is Happy Old Me (Simon & Schuster, £16.95)