Corrupt coppers and missed weddings: The infamous drug bust of George Harrison
March 12th, 1969, is a monumental day in the history of The Beatles for two polar opposite reasons. Just as the London police service launched a suspiciously well-timed drug raid conducted on George Harrison’s estate, his bandmate Paul McCartney was on the way to the church to marry his fianceé, Linda, on the very same day. For these two members of the band, the next 24 hours would be very different indeed.
The raid, which came shortly after John Lennon was also visited as part of a wide-scale attempt to indict as many high-profile names as possible, was directed with the attempt to gain maximum media attention in an effort to spread an anti-drug message with the likes of Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton also being targeted.
At the time of the drugs bust, Harrison was busy working at the Beatles’ Apple Corps headquarters. However, his wife at the time, Pattie Boyd, was home and remembered the visit vividly in her autobiography, Wonderful Tonight: “Suddenly I heard a lot of cars on the gravel in the drive, far too many for it to be just George,” she wrote. “My first thought was that maybe Paul and Linda wanted to party after the wedding. Then the bell rang. I opened the door to find a policewoman and a dog standing outside. At that moment the back-doorbell rang and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is so scary!’ I’m surrounded by police.”
Boyd then contacted Harrison to tell him to return home, and by the time he arrived, the house had been checked from pillar to post by the drugs squad, who, it is widely speculated, many of whom were too starstruck to approach Harrison directly. Upon arriving home, Harrison supposedly told the officers: “You needn’t have turned the whole bloody place upside down. All you had to do was ask me and I would have shown you where I keep everything.”
Boyd also recounted how her former husband was rather more relaxed about the situation and, once he returned home, took the situation in his stride: “George was calm about it,” she continued. “George is always calm—he sometimes gets a grump, but he’s always calm—and he was extremely calm that night, and very, very indignant. He went into the house and looked around at all these men and one woman, and said something like. ‘Birds have nests and animals have holes, but man hath nowhere to lay his head.’ – ‘Oh, really, sir? Sorry to tell you we have to…’ and then into the police routine.”
The search was headed up by Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who claimed to have found no less than 120 joints on their Esher estate as well as a generous portion of hashish inside one of Harrison’s shoes—the latter, coincidentally, was an aspect of the search that Harrison strongly denied.
Harrison’s relaxed mood was soon flipped when an altercation with a photographer boiled over. As the guitarist and his wife were being escorted to the station, a photographer began shooting pictures of the iconic couple, which resulted in Harrison chasing him down the street with officers trailing behind. With a turn of speed, the photographer dropped his camera on the ground, and Harrison had time to stamp on it before officers caught up with him. Despite being released on bail the same day, the couple missed McCartney’s wedding.
Why was George Harrison arrested on Paul McCartney’s wedding day?
The Beatles man’s response to Pilcher’s claims remained on record, with Harrison vehemently saying: “They chose Paul’s wedding day to come and do a raid on me, and to this day I’m still having difficulty with my visa to America because of this fella. He came out to my house with about eight other policemen, a policewoman and a police dog, who happened to be called Yogi—because, I suppose, of the Beatle connection with Maharishi. They thought they’d have a bit of fun.” Harrison then continued: “They took us off, fingerprinted us and we were busted. It was written in the papers like a fashion show: ‘George was wearing a yellow suit and his wife Pattie had on…”
The details of where Pilcher claimed to have found the hashish was an aspect that made Harrison become increasingly suspicious, suggesting that the drugs had, in reality, been planted there: “I’m a tidy man. I keep my socks in the sock drawer and stash in the stash box. It’s not mine,” he said.
The next day, the couple’s passports were seized by representatives of the US Embassy, and they were subsequently stamped with a code to say they had a criminal record for drugs. After a preliminary hearing on March 18th, 1969, the trial then took place on March 31st at Esher and Walton Magistrates’ Court.
The Harrisons were found guilty by the court of possession of cannabis and were each fined £250 plus ten guineas each in costs. However, it was the couple losing their freedom of movement rather than the financial implications that proved the real punishment. As he left court, George Harrison pleaded: “I hope the police will leave us alone now.”
Harrison wasn’t the only rocker to feel the long arm of the law. Sergeant Pilcher was a constant thorn in the side of rock and roll. The police officer became infamous among the swinging ‘60s set through a number of different busts. During the 1960s, he was responsible for busts on Mick Jagger and Keith Richards during some of their wilder raids in 1967. Fellow Stones man Brian Jones also fell victim to Pilcher’s tactics, with Eric Clapton only escaping handcuffs after bolting from a raid on The Pheasantry.
It wasn’t just stellar police work that would earn Pilcher his recognisable status. The busts were uniquely captured by the tabloid press, something that never sat well with the lawyers of the defendants. Many intimated that Pilcher was not only tipping off the press before chasing down the rock and roll elite but even planting salacious stories as he went, including the unfounded myth surrounding Marianne Faithfull and a Mars bar.
Things came to a head when, remarkably, the man behind the planned raids was later convicted of planting drugs in other cases. Pilcher left the police force before he could be sacked but was sentenced to jail in 1972. “You poisoned the wells of criminal justice, and set about it deliberately,” said the judge sentencing Pilcher to four years imprisonment. The police officer would become the focus of several pieces of culture, with Primus’ song ‘Pilcher’s Squad’ written as an ode to him, with many also suggesting that “Semolina Pilchard” in The Beatles track ‘I Am The Walrus’ also being a reference to him.