Please Mr Post man

EXCLUSIVE:

THE photos of John Lennon and Yoko Ono posing after getting married in front of the Rock of Gibraltar are among the most seminal from the Rock n Roll vaults of fame.

The iconic shots that have appeared in thousands of publications and dozens of documentaries show perfectly the depths of love the Beatles lead singer and his Japanese paramour were in.

The story has been recounted to death, but like so many chapters in the life of the world’s most famous band, there is a back story almost as interesting.

And in this case it’s a darker one, for the set of photos - and others taken during the period in 1969 - were stolen, leading to a half-century closer to finding the negatives and explaining, at last, what happened to them.

It comes after the Olive Press received two anonymous letters from an individual in America named only as ‘R Sheelly’, with nearly two dozen copies of the negatives inside. Some blown up on card-

ANONYMOUS: But detailed and intriguing letters from America board, some as part of a contact sheet, they arrived two weeks apart, posted from Colorado and gave few clues to the sender’s identification. But what they did do was bring one of the most exciting times in British music history very much back to life.

The photos, including John Lennon wearing a silly hat, reading a newspaper on a plane, and canoodling with his new wife - as well as posing at the registry office and signing the marriage forms - have only once been seen before. And that is in the book of the man who borrowed them before they mysteriously vanished. Poring through them was like watching a decades-old cold case come back to life before our very eyes: The blackened embers of one of the greatest mysteries in Beatles history spluttering and sparking up once more.

Stamped from Fort Collins, Colorado (a ‘fake address’) on April 25, the first letter teased us with promises of new leads and a tantalising clue behind the legendary negatives, missing for nearly five decades.

By Jon Clarke & Walter Finch

and a time of the Apollo program and sexual emancipation, when the soul of a young generation was unleashed by a new brand of rock’n’roll.

The fabled Summer of Love was imminent, New York was gearing up for Woodstock, and the Beatles had just played their last ever public performance.

Lennon, by now one of the greatest icons in pop music, had eloped with his controversial lover, Yoko Ono, often dubbed a groupie and hanger on.

They had chosen to wed in the one place where the press would not be able to hound them - at the registry office in Gibraltar.

At the peak of General Franco’s embargo of the British-held peninsula, the region was isolated and inaccessible, the border closed and flights limited.

John and Yoko flew out on March 20, 1969, and there they met a young London hipster photographer, David Nutter, who was handed the ‘secret assignment’ and had no clue of who his subjects were to be.

“I was told to come to Gibraltar with my camera and no questions asked,” Nutter told the Olive Press.

Simon Hunter simon@theolivepress.es

Alex Trelinski alex@theolivepress.es

Cristina Hodgson cristina@theolivepress.es

Walter Finch walter@theolivepress.es

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The second letter, a week after we published a story on the first letter, expressed the writer’s pleasure at making print and reaffirmed her goal - to get the missing photos ‘back to the photographer who took them’.

But first, we have to travel back to the spring of 1969,