This oriental carpet made the news in 1991 when speculation ran rife that the figures featured were the Beatles.

The carpet proved a bit of a mystery when it surfaced at the Addingham company Phillip Walton Carpets.

The brightly-coloured Belouchi piece featured four musicians with dark, mop-top hairstyles – sparking debate over whether they were meant to be the Beatles.

The debate was supported by the fact that one of the group was clearly playing a guitar-like instrument, another was holding a similar instrument, and all four had identical high collars on their clothing. But when it came to the question of whether the men were the Fab Four, Philip Walton admitted he had his doubts.

“A friend of mine swears blind that it’s the Beatles simply because no other group had such distinctive hairstyles and such high collars,” he said.

“The faces are also very much westernised and I have to admit that one of them does bear a passing resemblance to the young Paul McCartney. But I’m not convinced that the group is the Beatles.”

Mr Walton’s Oriental carpet shipper confirmed that the Beatles were very well known in even remote parts of Asia, but he was unable to establish who the four were.

The Addingham company had already made a name for itself with its unusual carpets. Only a few months earlier carpets featuring helicopter gunships and Kalashnikov rifles put them in the news.