Restoring the caravan

The Caravan panel

In the upcoming auction of Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach’s belongings, lot 712 of 1367 is John Lennon’s caravan panel & Photograph. The panel is depicted above. The description goes: The caravan itself was purchased by Lennon in 1967 as a gift for son Julian’s fourth birthday. Lennon had the caravan custom painted with a Sgt. Pepper theme by The Fool who also painted his famous psychedelic Rolls Royce in a similar motif. Lennon and family reportedly used the caravan for vacations before it made it’s final journey back to the garden of Tittenhurst Park in Ascot where it remained until Lennon’s assassination. Starr acquired the caravan and had it fully restored in 1983 by John Pockett. This portion of the caravan features a back window with drape, and the chains that originally held the back gate, but most iconic is the bold Sgt. Pepper logo featured on the back panel. Together with a framed image of the caravan as it was kept at the Starr’s English country home in Surrey.

The opening bid for this item has been set to $3,000, and it has been estimated to reach around $6-8,000.

As regular readers of this blog may recall, Ringo left his caravan behind when he sold his house, and it was left to decay. The remnants of the caravan was rediscovered in 2012 and a restoration project has been launched to have the caravan ready for the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band in 2017. We think that Ringo probably never heard about the rediscovery of the caravan and the restoration project, or else he would probably have donated the panel to the charity project, don’t you think? If any of my readers have a way of getting in touch with Ringo, please alert him to this project and suggest for him to pull the item and give it to the worthy cause. Thank you.

Links:

Auction site

The restoration project

Our blog post about the caravan

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