ON THIS DAY:: George Harrison and Wife, Olivia Attacked in Friar Park Henley On Thames 1999

"On this day in 1999, George Harrison and his wife Olivia were attacked by an intruder at Friar Park in Henley. At about 3.20am Olivia Harrison woke her husband to say she had heard smashing glass. While she phoned the police, George Harrison went down to the kitchen and found a window broken. He went back upstairs on to a gallery that overlooks the ground floor. Glancing down, he saw an intruder in the main hall. Harrison said: ‘He stopped in the centre of the room and looked towards me. He started shouting and screaming.’ The intruder advanced up the stairs. Harrison lunged at him. ‘We fell to the floor. I was fending off blows with my hands. He was on top of me and stabbing down at my upper body.’ Mrs Harrison began hitting the man with a brass poker. The intruder chased her and grabbed her by the throat. George said: ‘I vividly remember a deliberate thrust to my chest. I could hear my lung exhaling and had blood in my mouth..’ Mrs Harrison swung a heavy table-lamp at the attacker, who gripped the cord of the lamp and pulled it towards him. Olivia threw the lamp at him and ran downstairs to find that the police had arrived. Michael Abram, a 34-year-old man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, served just under two years in a secure psychiatric unit for the attack. "

More like this in "On this day in Oxfordshire" by Julie Ann Godson, available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=julie%20ann%20godson...