I Had Lunch with The Beatles Once…
In June of 1964 Timaru’s Christopher Watson won a competition to have lunch with the world’s most successful band of all time: The Beatles. Webb’s is now auctioning the printed menu that the Fab Four autographed for him as a memento of their time together.
Webb’s The Estate has been given the groovy task of auctioning a piece of 60s pop history: A 1964 menu from The Mermaid restaurant in Kilbirnie, Wellington which has been signed in ink by members of The Beatles: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
The story of how this hip and happening piece of Wellington’s swinging history came to be is just as interesting and rare as the item itself:
In June of 1964 Timaru’s Christopher Watson won a competition to have lunch with the world’s most successful band of all time: The Beatles. Webb’s is now auctioning the printed menu that the Fab Four autographed for him as a memento of their time together.
That year the Fab Four dominated the Billboard charts with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” firmly on number one; “She Loves You” on number two, and several other tunes of their making not far behind. It was reported that over 7,000 people clogged the roads near Wellington airport just to get a glimpse of the troupe as they landed.
Crowd waiting for the Beatles' arrival at the Clarendon Hotel.
“The whole thing was a big deal for a school boy! I had to beg, borrow and steal for a decent set of clothes. It was my first big flight ever, and there were not a lot of restaurants in Timaru at the time. Oh, there was that thing about meeting The Beatles… it was a biggie!”
—Chris Watson, vendor of the Beatles Menu
Young Christopher—then a fourth-former—was given tickets to one of the sold out shows (“the singing and music were drowned by screaming females,” he later reported); copies of their latest albums; and taken to lunch with the band.
The venue was The Mermaid, the in-house restaurant at the White Heron Lodge where icons from the era—like the rival band The Rolling Stones and industrialist heir Henry Ford the Second— would later stay.
The hotel was said to be the first modern accommodation venue of the time, and the restaurant— fittingly for the 60s— included an open kitchen; furniture with curvy cushions on tapered legs; and organically shaped, recessed artworks on the walls.
Pictures of the visit show John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr with trademark longish hair, loose skinny black ties and wide smiles. Young Christopher, sat down with all four, and later referred to the band as “friendly but hard to talk,” he says, “one of the biggest things was trying to understand their accents, its like they had a special language that no one understands.”
Nonetheless, the four lads from Liverpool took the menu from The Mermaid (which amongst its 60s delicacies included ‘Virginia ham steak with grilled pineapples’ and a peach melba that Chris found particularly memorable) signed it both inside and outside, and handed it back to Christopher who has since kept it as a precious memento of that fateful lunch.
“I am retired now and doing a clean up so auctioning this is part and parcel of that,” says Chris, “plus, it is really hard to divide a printed menu between my sons!”
The Mermaid’s menu has been signed in ink by members of The Beatles in two places: on the inside leaf by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr; and on the front cover by all except John Lennon.
This delightful object —with a wonderful illustration on the cover— is a piece of history, a time capsule of an era when rebellious youth would shake the more conservative attitudes of the past and—with The Beatles as their main soundtrack— go on to redefine pop culture as we knew it. “That tour was really a line in the sand,” says Chris, "it was a coming of age. The kids were saying ‘mum and dad there is a revolution coming and we are part of it!”
