Pattie Boyd: Hurtwood Edge was in the most terrible state when I arrived [in 1974], but it felt much more like real life than Friar Park had. It was beautiful: it had a square tower and a huge hall with a black-and-white marble floor, and big arched windows overlooking the terrace. It looked rather like an Italian villa, with a garden designed in the thirties by Gertrude Jekyll and views for forty miles. But everything was on a smaller scale than it was at Friar Park, and cozier: there were only six bedrooms, and some were dinky. For years the house had been a kind of commune - bats circled around our bedroom - but when I appeared, everyone, apart from the bats, was told to go.

Boyd photographed Clapton sitting on the Italianite patio at Hurtwood, playing his 1975 Fender Telecaster (Ex-Lot 19, Crossroads Guitar Auction, Christie's, New York, 1999) through a Pignose amplifier circa 1976. This guitar is probably the Telecaster that Clapton used on his second tour of Japan in October/November 1975. In an interview with the Japanese Music Life magazine during the tour, Clapton stated that the Telecaster had originally been bought for him by a friend for rehearsals in the Bahamas ahead of the Japan tour. In 1999, when the guitar was sold as part of his Crossroads Guitar Auction at Christie's in aid of the Crossroads Center, Clapton confirmed that the guitar was also used on his 1994 album, From The Cradle. In a 1976 interview with Dan Forte for Guitar Player, Clapton revealed that he recorded the song Motherless Children with just a Pignose mini-amp. A humorous cartoon of a Pignose amplifier features in a collaborative psychedelic drawing executed by Clapton with Ginger Baker and Pattie Boyd circa 1975 [lot 64].