Pattie Boyd and George Harrison received this longcase clock as a wedding gift from the Beatles beloved manager Brian Epstein on 21 January 1966. Boyd recalls that the clock stood in the sitting room of their Surrey home, Kinfauns, until their move to Friar Park in 1970, when it was placed into storage. Boyd recounts the wedding day in her 2007 autobiography Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me:
One December evening we were in London and George stopped the car and said, “Let’s get married. I’ll speak to Brian.” He stopped in Chapel Street, outside Brian’s house, rushed in, leaving me in the car, came back fifteen minutes later, and said, “Brian says it’s okay. Will you marry me? We can get married in January.” “Oh, yes!” I said. “That would be fabulous!” I was thrilled - but George had had to ask Brian’s permission in case another tour was planned.
We were married on January 21, 1966. It was not the wedding I had dreamed of - I would have loved to be married in church, but Brian didn’t want a big fuss. They all trusted him so implicitly that when he said it should be a quiet register-office wedding George agreed. He also said it had to be secret - if the press found out, it would be chaotic. I had always thought I’d have a big white wedding, as all little girls do, then have children and live happily ever after - not be divorced like my mother. As a child I thought I’d do anything to avoid divorce - I even considered waiting until I was forty to marry because by that time I would have had my fun and there would be no chance of a marriage breaking up. But there I was, at twenty-one, marrying George, who was all of twenty-two. But I was so happy and so much in love, I didn’t care. Divorce didn’t enter my head: we would be together and happy forever.... I bought a Mary Quant pinky-red shot-silk dress, which came to just above the knee, and wore it with creamy stockings and pointy red shoes. On top, because it was January and cold, I wore a red fox-fur coat, also by Mary Quant, that George gave me. She made George a beautiful black Mongolian lamb coat. The ceremony took place early in the morning at Epsom Registry Office, in Surrey, not the most glamorous place, and the room was very hot and stuffy. Brian Epstein was there and Paul McCartney, who was George’s best man. Otherwise it was family... There was no shortage of pictures of us leaving the register office. We came out into the street to find dozens of press photographers lined up outside. So much for keeping the whole thing secret.
After our wedding we had to endure a press conference that Brian had set up. It was so terrifying that I have almost blanked it from my memory. Lots of reporters asked questions about when George had asked me to marry him and our plans for the future. George said he had proposed on the day we met, on the train filming A Hard Day’s Night, and I said I hadn’t thought he was serious.
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