Photo Library Find Of The Week: John Lennon is exclusive at the IWM

The images above featuring John Lennon of The Beatles are from an interesting and ‘unexpected’ find at the Imperial War Museums photo archive highlighted this week to commemorate John Lennon’s death on 8 December.

The full set of 26 images, previously unpublished and not posed studio shots, were taken by an MOD photographer in 1966 at a military base in Germany during a break from filming the movie How I Won the War. The cast included John Lennon of The Beatles. IMW told PAN: ‘One of our curators says that they were filming at the BAOR base Bergen-Hohne Training Area, Verdun in 1966 and these photos would have been taken by the official MOD photographer who worked on the base at the time and used for public relations purposes. They came to us via MOD official transfer along with other photos from the same base. I think the MOD photographers’ access to the set whilst they filmed on the base makes it a unique collection.’ The images have only just been indexed with John Lennon keyword as previously just had skeleton records.

• The photographs are Crown Copyright and exclusively available for licensing via IWM.