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Document Reveals Beatles' Inspiration?
11-Nov-2008
Written by: Jill Marino
Auction item offers identity of “Eleanor Rigby.”
In London, a manuscript is expected to be sold for $775,000 at an auction this month because it connects the dots to the meaning of one of the Beatles’ most famous songs.
Reuters reports that the 97-year-old salary register is from Liverpool City Hospital. The name of a scullery maid appears on it. The maid, E. Rigby, has signed for her monthly wage on the document.
The owner of the item, Annie Mawson, received the register from Beatle Paul McCartney in 1990. She wrote to him about her charity, the Sunbeams Music Trust, a foundation that uses music to help individuals with special needs.
Mawson asked him for “half a million pounds” for the charity, but ended up just wanting to tell him about the foundation because McCartney is well-known for being a person who helps charities.
“Nine months later, in June 1990, this amazing envelope arrived in the post,” she told Reuters, “It was nine months after I’d written to him, which was part of the mystery because you always think it ended up in the waste paper basket.”
Inside the envelope was the document from the hospital. It had an official Paul McCartney tour stamp on it because he was on a world tour at the time. Mawson didn’t understand why the register was so important until she found the name E. Rigby on it.
In previous interviews, McCartney has said that the woman in the song, “Eleanor Rigby,” was fictional.
Ted Owen, who is the managing director of the Fame Bureau, the organization that is selling the document on November 27 in London, said of the register, “I wonder just how much Paul McCartney meant to unmask when he passed it on.”
Mawson thinks the time is right for her to sell the piece. “I thought this was the right time. I got the document out of the bank vault and decided I’ve got to go for it.”
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