Yoko buys up Lennon's house for the nation

March 15, 2002

John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, has bought the late Beatle's childhood home and donated it to the National Trust.

Ono is believed to have paid more than £150,000 for 251 Menlove Avenue, where Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi.

The house had been on the market for months.

There had been fears that it would go to someone who may have had little sympathy for its unique place in the history of popular music.

At one stage, a private foreign company was understood to have been showing an interest in the property.

Lennon wrote the early Beatles hit Please Please Me at Menlove Avenue. His teenage band, The Quarrymen, and then The Beatles, rehearsed there.

Ono gave her backing to a campaign to save the building when she visited Lennon's old school, Dovedale Primary, last year and received an honorary degree from Liverpool University.

She worked anonymously through a third party to secure the property, which she said she was ‘thrilled’ to have acquired.

‘I think Menlove Avenue has an important place in Beatles history, and it saddened me to think that it might be lost.

‘The fact that this is happening in the same week that Liverpool airport is officially opened as Liverpool John Lennon airport would have made my husband very happy,’ she said.

Lennon once described the house as ‘a nice, semi-detached place with a small garden’.

He wrote about a donation to the National Trust in his song Happiness is a Warm Gun on the 1968 ‘white’ album.

The song mentions ‘a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust’.

From BBCi

Copyright (c) 2000-2002 Sue Kelly