Tragic story of Beatles legend's private island taken over by hippies before disaster dubbed 'heaven and hell'
BEATLES legend John Lennon planned to spend his retirement on an Irish island, until disaster struck.
This is Dorninish, a 40-acre island off the coast of Ireland that was both John Lennon's dream, and a colony for New Age hippies.
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“I hope we're a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland looking at our scrapbook of madness,” said Lennon, about his future with Yoko Ono.
Had Lennon not been murdered in 1980, the legend would have gone ahead with his plans to turn Dorinish Island into a sanctuary, according to his lawyer Michael Browne.
Other sources have said that Lennon was absolutely in love with the island, but that he was not yet ready to settle on the island and had wanted to wait until his career had slowed down.
So he offered it to the “King of the Hippies” for free.
This was Sid Rawle, the founder of the Digger Action Movement.
Rawle was a New Ager, with a utopian vision of self-sufficiency and communal living. He arrived on Dorninish with little more than his grand plans for raising cattle and growing vegetables.
His army of thirty hippies planned to establish a tribal community where others could come and try an alternative way of life.
But he and his hippie followers horrified local residents, a retired farmer from neighboring Westport told the Observer.
Sam Kelly, 63, said: “You could see them waiting to go out and some of them were back quite quickly too.
'It didn't suit a lot of rich, spoiled kids.
“We all thought in town that the guy was making a lot of money from it, but then we thought fair play to him for surviving that first winter.”
It wasn't until the winter of 1972, when a fierce wind from County Mayo caused an oil lamp to destroy the hippies' tepees, that the group disbanded.
Within a handful of years, Rawle had established a new tent community near Llandeilo in Wales, and continued to realize his utopian dreams.
Rawle would later call Dorninish “it was heaven and it was hell”.
In 1980, Lennon had started inquiring about the island again.
According to his lawyer, he had even started renewing his building permits – before he was shot dead on December 8, 1980.
Yoko Ono also claims that the couple would have moved there had it not been for the tragic disaster.
She said: 'It was a place where we thought we could escape the pressure and spend some undisturbed time together. But because of what happened, our hopes never became reality.
“We often discussed the idea of building a house there. It was so beautiful, so peaceful and yet so isolated, it seemed like a perfect place to get away from it all.”
Yoko Ono eventually sold Dorinish Island to Michael Gavin, a local farmer, in 1984.
A new documentary series has raised questions about whether Lennon's killer… Mark Chapman, was monitored by the FBI.
In the three-part AppleTV+ series, Lennon's friend reveals that the singer's widow asked him to investigate a possible conspiracy.
He discovered that the American secret services had followed and wiretapped the peace campaigning couple because of their radical ideas.
Confidential documents show that the FBI considered them “dangerous” and all that President Richard Nixon wanted their activities stopped.
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