In April 1976, Paul and Linda McCartney were on a month’s break from the Wings Over the World tour, which would head to North America in May for Paul’s first shows there since the Beatles’ final US gig in August 1966. Photographer David Montgomery, who had also shot the cover for Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, captured the McCartney clan – including sheepdog Martha and Lucky the dalmatian – in what looks like bucolic bliss, but is in fact the back garden of their London home in Cavendish Avenue.
Animals were a huge part of family life. Paul has often said that he and Linda became vegetarian after watching lambs gambolling outside their farm window. They pushed their lamb chops aside, and that was the end of their meat-eating days. “It is because we like animals, it’s an ethical thing, not really about health,” Paul told Nigel Slater in 2007.
The McCartneys’ passion for animals didn’t stop there. Linda once had a goose delivered by taxi from Glasgow to their remote farm on the Mull of Kintyre. She would also have her beloved horses transported between Scotland and Woodlands Farm in Sussex as they moved between homes.
Mary McCartney, who was six when this photo was taken, has spoken of how being vegetarian in the 1970s and 80s was harder for the children, although “we weren’t forced into it”. “It was at the exact age where you want to fit in with all your friends. There weren’t really many options, it was just chips and beans.”
It was partly in response to this attitude that Linda published her first vegetarian cookbook in 1989, and established her own food brand in 1991. Paul, brought up on postwar British food, liked to have something to replace the “hole in the middle” where the meat used to be, and her range of pies, veggie sausages and burgers was deftly aimed at exactly that market – early TV adverts featured truckers tucking into meat-free meals. By the time of Linda’s death, 20 years ago this month, 25 million of her meat-free dinners were being sold a year.
Linda was the pioneer in the family for vegetarianism, and the children have embraced her legacy. Stella’s fashion range is entirely vegan and she, Paul and Mary together set up the Meat Free Monday campaign in 2009. Mary, like her mother, is both a photographer and a cookbook author who says: “I try and make the ingredients stuff you can get at a normal grocery shop.” Just like Mum.
