JOHN LENNON may have left school without a single O-Level - but his drawings left a lasting impression on English teacher and housemaster Lancelot Burrows.
He kept 12-year-old Lennon's exercise book to show future generations of pupils at Liverpool's Quarry Bank High School.
Now the family of the late Mr Burrows is to cash in on the world's most expensive schoolbook - by selling it at a manuscripts auction next month.
The book in which Lennon poured out his artistic talent - and laid the foundations for one of the Beatles's most famous hits - is set to fetch up to £90,000 at Sotheby's in London on December 15.
The book, compiled by Lennon in his first year at Quarry Bank in 1952, and covered in a protective layer of brown paper, contains eight drawings in pen, pencil and watercolour illustrating verses from classic poems, copied out by Lennon.
One of the poems was Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter - later acknowledged by Lennon as being the inspiration for the famously unfathomable Beatles song I am the Walrus.
It is perhaps a coincidence that the oysters in Lennon's drawing - which accompanied by two verses from Carroll's poem in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There - look remarkably like "eggmen".
Other illustrations depict scenes from classic poems by Robert Southey, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cowper, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Michael Drayton, as well as one from Robin Hood.
The cover is marked, somewhat precociously for a 12-year-old, "My Anthology", and each drawing is marked out of ten in red by Lennon's teacher - the lowest being eight ("good").
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