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He was such a mean old man who shaved in the dark trying to save paper.

Or so goes the line from the weird lyrics written by John Lennon in the Beatles song Mean Mr Mustard.

But now, as Abbey Road – the album it appeared on – returned to the top of the charts at the weekend, the Record can reveal the Scottish inspiration behind the song.

Mean Mr Mustard was, in fact, a Scot called John Mustard, originally from Moray, who was so mean and cruel to his wife that she took him to a divorce court. And when the details of the hearing made the news – including the Record – on June 7, 1967, John Lennon spotted the article and was inspired to write about “mean” Mr Mustard.

(Image: Daily Record)

The lyrics to the song – first released 50 years ago – tell some of the story of the Mustard’s cruelness to his wife Freda, a deputy headmistress, who married him in 1955.

The pair lived in Enfield, London, after Mustard moved from his native Scotland.

The court heard he was a “mean husband” who “shaved and went to bed in the dark to save light”.

It told how he also insisted he and Freda turned the lights off when listening to the radio “because it was not necessary to see in order to listen”.

Mr Justice Rees said in the Divorce Court of London: “He was at pains to explain that he came from north of the Border, where carefulness was part of his upbringing.”

(Image: Collect)

He said Mustard was “so mean with money and frugal while using lighting and heating that he went far beyond what any wife could be expected to bear”.

He would also hide money from Freda and “in the last year before he and his wife parted he gave her a total of £1”.

The judge added: “I am satisfied that the wife has established without any ­difficulty that her husband was exceptionally mean.” The decree was granted against Mustard “because of cruelty”.

(Image: Daily Record)

Beatles history shows Lennon wrote the song in India in 1968 and in a Playboy magazine interview in 1980, he said: “I’d read somewhere in the paper about this mean guy who was hiding £5 notes, not up his nose but ­somewhere else, and so I wrote about him.”

Research by the Record has pieced together the song with articles from newspaper archives from 1967.

It’s thought the real Mr Mustard was from Elgin and died, in his 80s, in the 80s.