A pair of detention sheets which reveal the schoolday misdemeanours of a 15-year-old John Lennon are to go on sale.
The documents uncover his antics at Quarry Bank High School for Boys in Liverpool where he was renowned as a “class clown”.
Reasons for punishment given by his teachers include “sabotage”, “fighting in class”, “nuisance”, “shoving” and “just no interest whatsoever”.
On two occasions the Beatle even managed to receive three detentions in one day.
The sheets cover the periods when he was in Class 3B between May 19 and June 23, 1955, and in Class 4C from November 25, 1955, to February 13, 1956.
His surname is written by a teacher on the top left corner of each page. They were from a class detention book that was rescued from a bonfire at the school in the late 1970s, say auctioneers TracksAuction.com.
During a summer break a member of staff at the Allerton grammar school was asked to clear out a storage room. His instruction was to burn all of the books but while doing so he spotted the name Lennon at the top of some of the pages. Realising it was John Lennon, he saved some of the sheets as keepsakes, said Tracks Auction.com. A number of the pages he had taken were later accidentally destroyed. Other sheets he gave away but these pages are some of the few that have survived.
The sheets have been authenticated by Lennon’s close schoolfriend, Pete Shotton, who wrote a book John Lennon: In My Life.
Peter Beech, Lennon’s general science teacher at the time, said: “The sheet is typical of John Lennon, he was an extremely cheeky boy. He did, however, know his limits. In the classroom, if you settled John down, you generally settled the class down. His chemistry teacher Eric Oldman said that John could actually go far.”
The detention sheets are estimated to fetch between £2,000 and £3,000. Online bidding at TracksAuction.com starts on November 22 and concludes with a live online sale beginning at 5pm on December 1.