Mary Austin kept four silver trunks shut in her Kensington attic for the best part of forty years. Inside were the handwritten lyrics to some of Freddie Mercury’s biggest songs, packed away in the mid-1980s and left shut because they were too painful to face. In the week Mercury would have turned 80, Austin is publishing what the trunks held.
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What was in the trunks
Austin packed the trunks in the mid-1980s and did not lift a lid again until 2022. The first one held handwritten drafts of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “We Are the Champions”, “Killer Queen”, and “Don’t Stop Me Now”, all in Mercury’s own hand. She shut it again. The pages still felt like his, she says, not hers to read. In the end she asked her two grown sons to sort through the rest instead.
The result is a book, “Freddie Mercury: A Life in Lyrics”, which sets the scrawled pages beside photographs and Austin’s own account of the songs and the man who wrote them.
Why the estate is hers
Mercury left the lyrics, the Kensington house where he spent his final years, and half of an estate now worth about £150m to Austin. He did that instead of leaving the bulk to Jim Hutton, his partner of six years when he died. Austin denies reports that her share grew to 75% after Mercury’s parents died. She still lives in that house, Garden Lodge, more than thirty years on.
Mercury told her, by her own account to the Daily Mail in 2013, that had things been different she would have been his wife, and “this would have been yours anyway”.
How the friendship began
Austin met Mercury in 1970 at a clothes stall he ran in Kensington Market, not long after he finished his graphic design degree. She was a friend of Brian May’s. She sat in the room the day he, Mercury, and Roger Taylor argued over names for their new band. May wanted Build Your Own Boat. Mercury wanted Queen. Asked her view, Austin says she backed May’s choice out of loyalty, though she thought it the worse name.
The two moved in together within four months and split the rent. Both had lost a settled childhood early. Mercury was sent to a boarding school near Mumbai at seven and saw his parents once in the seven years that followed. Austin’s mother died when Austin was fifteen, leaving her to raise her younger sisters.
The paper trail the archives kept
A second record survives from the same years, held not in an attic but in public. The National Archives keeps the form Mercury signed at Feltham on 21 March 1969, applying to become a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies. It gives his address as 22 Gladstone Avenue and names his father, Bomi Bulsara, born in Bulsar, British India, in December 1908.
Mercury and his family had reached Feltham in 1964, after leaving Zanzibar during the revolution there, and he studied graphic art and design at Ealing Technical College before the citizenship form went through. He changed his stage name by deed poll around the time Queen formed, but appears not to have enrolled the change with the High Court, so no permanent public record of it exists.
One record sat locked in an attic for four decades. The other sits among the public records at The National Archives.
