Liverpool Beatles Museum unveils tiny item with big history
The Liverpool Beatles Museum has unveiled a brand new acquisition relating to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's first ever peace events. The Mathew Street venue's latest acquisition though small, is mighty impressive. Squirrelled away for for more than five decades it's been unveiled by a special guest.
Transcript
00:00 Liverpool Beatles Museum has unveiled its newest addition, already home to one of the
00:06 largest Fab Four collections in the world. Its latest acquisition is also one of its
00:13 smallest. Two acorns from John Lennon and Yoko Ono's first ever peace event have found
00:19 their way to Matthew Street.
00:21 I'm stunned. They're bigger than I thought they were going to be. Sort of quite chunky
00:28 and obviously they would have chosen, whoever picked them would have chosen ones that they
00:33 would think had a good chance of surviving and growing.
00:38 In June 1968, John Lennon and Yoko Ono planted two acorns at Coventry Cathedral. A wrought
00:45 iron bench surrounding two acorns that would subsequently grow into oak trees had been
00:49 submitted by the couple for a sculpture exhibition.
00:53 We got contacted by a retired police officer who told us this tale. He pulled over a drunk
00:59 driver, they take him to the station, he's being arrested, he's going to get prosecuted.
01:05 Empty your pockets out. He empties his pockets out and wrapped up in tissue paper are these
01:10 two varnished acorns and of course they say, what are you walking around with acorns in
01:15 your pocket for? And being in an inebriated state he told them that they were John and
01:21 Yoko's acorns that they'd planted at Coventry Cathedral.
01:25 When Traffic Sergeant Mike Davies retired in 1980, he rediscovered the acorns in a desk
01:30 drawer. He has since gifted them to the Beatles Museum here in Liverpool.
01:35 They were sending two acorns to world leaders, acorns for peace to different world leaders.
01:42 Whether the different world leaders planted their acorns, well we'll have to go and that
01:46 will be the next part of the story. We'll track down all the world leaders. Did you
01:50 plant your acorns? The acorns were revealed to the public for
01:53 the first time by John Lennon's sister Julia Baird.
01:56 I have friends who are gardeners, like serious gardeners and they say, plant them. There's
02:03 magnolia seeds that have been thousands of years old that have been planted and some
02:07 take and some don't. So I think we're just going to have a go, maybe even with one of
02:14 them in a special pot and we'll find out soil and it'll have to be indoors for a while.
02:20 But it's possible that you could get a tree. We asked Julia where she thinks her late brother
02:26 would have liked these acorns to be replanted. Sefton Park is a fantastic place, but again,
02:34 from the middle of the country to the middle of our city, our beautiful park it is, isn't
02:40 it? The Beatles are the icons of our time, you
02:44 know. They are living legends. They will be remembered the same way that Strauss, Mozart,
02:51 Beethoven, Picasso, Da Vinci and the list goes on, the same way that they're remembered.
02:58 It's never going to go away and what they did was unprecedented.