McCartney school essay discovered 50 years on

An essay written by Sir Paul McCartney as a 10-year-old has been discovered in Liverpool’s Central Library after more than 50 years.

The young McCartney beat hundreds of other school children to win a prize for a 1953 essay marking the Queen’s coronation. It is thought to be one of the earliest surviving written works by McCartney.

In the essay he refers to “the lovely young Queen Elizabeth”, and compares the happy scenes expected outside Buckingham Palace with the coronation of William the Conqueror nine centuries earlier, when a massacre of Saxons took place.

He claims that Britain’s “present day royalty rules with affection rather than force”, describes a coronation cup with Elizabeth II on the front and Elizabeth I on the back, and concludes by saying: “After all this bother, many people will agree with me that it was well worth it.”

Liverpool’s Lord Mayor presented McCartney with the prize – despite the work being graded down for grammatical errors.

The library is to display the essay – found in a scrapbook – to mark the 60th anniversary of the coronation in 2013.

McCartney wrote ‘Her Majesty’ in 1969, and was knighted by the Queen in 1997.