Understanding John Lennon E-Book

Francis Kenny

• Herausgeber: Shepheard Walwyn Publishers
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 626

Beschreibung

This year marks the anniversary not only of what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday but also the 40th anniversary of his death in New York.

Understanding John Lennon takes us back to where it all began. While other writers have only touched on the ‘cause’ of John’s genius, Francis Kenny reveals its roots in the post-war nature of Liverpool, John’s family with its complex history, and the pain and hurt John felt during his childhood, revealing how his early life experiences shaped his brilliance as a songwriter and musician.

Of all the books on The Beatles, this is the only one by an author who was himself born and raised under the same influences as the band’s, in the heart of Liverpool and still lives there. From the maritime nature of the city to its blue-collar background and the Irish heritage of its people, this book provides an insight into post-war Liverpool and John’s family life, which gave rise to his brilliant but conflicted nature and traces how this ultimately contributed to the fall of The Beatles.

Covering Lennon’s life from Liverpool to New York, Kenny writes with sympathetic understanding of the confusion, pain and corrosiveness that can, at times, accompany the demands and expectations of the creative process at its highest level. With new material revealing the real source of inspiration of ‘Strawberry Fields’, we are provided with a thought-provoking insight into a complex mind and a genius in the making.

Whilst most books regurgitate the same stories about John’s childhood and his time with The Beatles, this book presents an original insight into the founder of a band that was at the forefront of a social and cultural revolution. It is the only work to reveal the true sources of John’s genius which continues to leave an enduring imprint on our everyday life and imagination.

Francis Kenny, after spending 20 years in the construction industry in the UK and abroad, was awarded a degree by Liverpool University and went on to obtain MAs in Social Policy, Urban Regeneration and Screenwriting while teaching in special education and the social sciences. With extensive research into The Beatles spanning a lifetime, he published his first novel, Waiting for The Beatles in 2006, including an associated screenplay and television work, followed by The Making of John Lennon in 2014. In Understanding John Lennon, he takes a deeper look into the formative influences in John Lennon’s life.

Leseprobe

© Francis Kenny 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd

First published in 2020 by Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd 107 Parkway House, Sheen Lane, London SW14 8LS www.shepheard-walwyn.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-85683-532-2

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NLPrinted and bound in the United Kingdom by Short Run Press, Exeter

Contents

Foreword by Bill Harry

Milestones in the Life of John Lennon

Introduction

Chapter 1;1800s: City of Outsiders

Chapter 2;1900s: Toxteth Park

Chapter 3;1940–45: Salvation Army Hospita

Chapter 4;1946–50: Wandsworth Jail

Chapter 5;1950–55: Mendips

Chapter 6;1955–57: Town and Country

Chapter 7;1957–60: Hope Street

Chapter 8;1960–61: The Wyvern Club

Chapter 9;1961–62: Great Charlotte Street

Chapter 10;1961–62: The Grapes

Chapter 11;1963–64: Liverpool Town Hall

Chapter 12;1964: Hansel and Gretel House

Chapter 13;1965: Perugia Way

Chapter 14;1965–66: Candlestick Park

Chapter 15;1966–67: Cavendish Avenue

Chapter 16;1967–68: Foothills of the Himalayas

Chapter 17;1968: Abbey Road

Chapter 18;1969: Savile Row

Chapter 19;1969 (Part 2): Tittenhurst

Chapter 20;1970–71: Dakota Building

Epilogue

Endnotes

Bibliography

Interviews

Useful Websites

Foreword by Bill Harry

JOHN LENNON could only have been born in Liverpool and Francis Kenny certainly provides an answer ‘why’ in this book, analysing John’s life and what made John Lennon become John Lennon.

It was due not only to the times John lived through and was born into, but the thread that wound throughout the city’s history, including its Celtic heritage, due to its existence as one of the greatest ports in the world.

Capturing history before it fades and disappears forever is difficult because even recent history has its many different aspects, seen from different points of view, which often distort the reality of events. However, dedicated research often continues to uncover facts which have been contrary to events that really happened, such as the fact that John was never born during a heavy air raid, which so many previous books have contended.

This isn’t a roller-coaster ride, skipping through John’s life, but a carefully prepared examination of his early years, slowly examining the general picture that surrounded John’s life, rather than focusing on one specific aspect, wrapping the surroundings of the city, the family, the friends, the music and the events which forged the young man who became a 20th-century icon into a whole.

Some of the conclusions in John’s personal story might prove controversial because time and the passing of many of the main characters, including John himself, leave us with no option but to analyse what has previously been said and documented, taking into consideration the different viewpoints made at the time.

Early in 1960 John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe, Rod Murray and I formed The Dissenters, whose aim was to make Liverpool famous! We figured that Liverpool had more than its fair share of musicians, writers, comedians, artists and sculptors. We four would attempt to do this in our various ways – John with his music, Stuart and Rod with their painting and me with my writing. (A plaque, made by my art school friend Fred O’Brien, dedicated to the place where we made our vow is to be found in Ye Cracke, Rice Street.)

Francis Kenny is another example of what we were aiming to achieve – to put the light on creative people from the city. He was born in the Toxteth area of the city and left school with no qualifications, worked for 15 years in the construction industry and then entered a vacuum of unemployment before attending Coleg Harlech, an adult residential college in North Wales, where he achieved a Diploma in Political Philosophy and Economics. This was followed by a period at Liverpool University where he completed a BA Honours in Economics and Politics and Sociology. He also qualified as a teacher after completing a Postgraduate Course in Education at Bolton University. He then completed MAs in Urban Regeneration at Hope University and Screen Writing at Liverpool John Moores University.

Francis began writing 15 years ago and has penned a dozen screenplays, a novel, Waiting For the Beatles and a crime novel, All I Ever Wanted, among other works, including a stage play.

Francis was to tell me that his book ‘aims to present a “below the surface” alternative view of John’s creative and emotional make-up’.

This work is now endorsed by a former Dissenter. Read, enjoy and learn.

Regards,

Bill Harry, Founder of Mersey Beat1

__________________

1Bill Harry was born in Liverpool and attended Liverpool Art College where he met and became good friends with John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe. While at college, Bill developed an interest in journalism which led to his founding of Mersey Beat magazine, whose first print run of 5,000 copies came out on 9 November 1961 and was an instant sellout. The magazine included articles and band dates, and became a treasure trove of information to all those interested in the rock ’n’ roll scene on Merseyside.

Bill’s role in the ‘birth of The Beatles’ was crucial, not only in his support in Mersey Beat but also through his relationship with Brian Epstein via the selling of his magazine in Brian’s family music store NEMS, and later encouraging Brian to attend a Beatles gig.

As the success of The Beatles took on global proportions, Bill partnered up with Brian to produce a national music paper, The Disc & Music Echo. As the 1960s drew to a close, Bill moved into PR and came to represent some of the biggest music artists around, including David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

Bill is the author of over two dozen books, most of these publications dealing with John and The Beatles.

Milestones in the life of John Lennon

1940John born on 9 October to Julia and Freddie Lennon in war-torn Liverpool.

1941John lives in Newcastle Road, Liverpool with his mother and maternal grandparents.

1942John’s seafaring father Freddie is still away at sea.

1943Julia begins a relationship with a Welsh soldier stationed in Liverpool, Taffy Williams.

1944Julia gives birth to a girl (Victoria) with Williams the father; the child was given up for adoption.

1945Julia and John move in with Bobby Dykins.

1946Due to the intervention by Social Services over the common-law living arrangements of Julia and Bobby, John goes to live with Julia’s sister Mimi and her husband George at Mendips in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton.

1947Mimi changes John’s school, which meant he became further away from his mother’s home.

1948At school John becomes ill-disciplined and aggressive.

1949John immerses himself in books, poetry and story writing, which became a refuge from his emotional turmoil.

1950Mimi takes in lodgers from the local university, meaning she and George sleep downstairs while John’s upstairs box room is flanked by rooms containing students.

1951John passes Eleven Plus exam, which gains him entrance into Quarry Bank, the local grammar school.

1952John forms a gang: he is influenced by his story book hero Just William. John is the leader.

1953John’s poor discipline, shoddy class work and bullying behaviour continue at Quarry Bank.

1954John discovers his mother lives only a mile away from Mendips.

1955A skiffle craze hits the UK and John is one of the 10,000s of youngsters who form skiffle groups.

1956John discovers rock ’n’ roll and Elvis, and while playing at a local fête with his band The Quarrymen, he meets up with Paul McCartney.

1957John starts at Liverpool Art College. John’s Quarrymen now includes Paul’s friend, George Harrison.

1958In the summer John, Paul and George ‘cut a disc’ at a local recording studio. The next day his mother is involved in a fatal car accident.

1959The group change their name from The Quarrymen to The Silver Beetles and conduct a short tour of Scotland.

1960The name of John’s band changes again to The Beatles. Pete Best joins on drums as they embark on a 12-week engagement at the Indra club in Hamburg.

1961Brian Epstein visits The Cavern Club where The Beatles had become the club’s resident band and offers to be their manager.

1962Brian secures a recording contract with Parlophone Records for the band. John marries Cynthia. Ringo Starr joins The Beatles as Pete Best is sacked weeks before the release of the group’s first single ‘Love Me Do’.

1963The second and third release of The Beatles’ singles, ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘She Loves You’, ignites the beginning of Beatlemania. John’s son Julian is born.

1964The Beatles arrive in New York for The Ed Sullivan Show and a TV audience of 73 million. The same year sees the cinema release of the group’s film A Hard Day’s Night.

1965John’s confessional song ‘Help!’ becomes the title for the band’s next feature film of the same name. The Beatles become heavy users of marijuana and begin to experiment with LSD.

1966The band stop touring and The Beatles’ music takes on a major sea change with their album Revolver, its direction being foreshadowed by its precursor, Rubber Soul, the previous year.

1967The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is released against the backdrop of the counterculture hippy movement and general alternative lifestyles of young people.

1968The Beatles immerse themselves in Indian culture and meditation. In July of this year Brian Epstein dies due to an overdose of barbiturates. John takes a strong interest in the avant-garde and meets Yoko Ono. The band produce a double album commonly known as the White Album.

1969The personal and musical differences in the band along with complex financial issues means that the last two Beatles albums come out in reverse order, the last album Abbey Road appearing before the previously recorded Let it Be. John marries Yoko and uses his honeymoon as a vehicle to promote his new-found support for world peace.

1970John continues to go his separate way from The Beatles socially and musically, committing himself more to Yoko and his solo efforts. On 31 December, Paul applies to the High Court for the dissolution of The Beatles.

1980John shot dead outside the Dakota building in New York.

Introduction

JOHN LENNON was one of the most radical and controversial musical icons of the 1960s. Even forty years after his death, he still remains celebrated around the world as a figure of musical genius, and one of deep contradictions. Despite his global fame, John’s ‘real identity’ has been notoriously difficult to pin down. His famously challenging and confrontational attitude can be readily linked, however, to his formative years in his hometown of Liverpool. John’s life began, and tragically ended, in two different port cities – Liverpool and New York – each facing each other across the Atlantic Ocean, each on the edge of their own countries, ports whose histories were defined by the contradictory cultural norms of their home country – edgy cities, sister cities, bonded together by a transatlantic trade route and an Irish diaspora.

As a child, John’s mind seems to have been a fog of confusion, ‘rejected’ by both parents and forced to accept life under an aunt who was, by all accounts, a dictatorial head of household. This left him isolated and constrained. For the young John, the restrictive and critical atmosphere during his time being brought up at his aunt’s home, Mendips, fashioned emotional scars that never fully healed. From almost the time of his separation from his mother Julia, John began to develop defensive, hostile and aggressive behaviours. Even with the long-awaited success of The Beatles, he still couldn’t shake off the dread of being unloved that he had carried with him since his early years. Although he was known to wear his emotions on his sleeve, shown with brutal transparency in songs such as ‘Help!’ and ‘Nowhere Man’, to a large extent his childhood memories were so painful that most of the bruises remained on the inside. He may have remained forever hostage to his childhood, but it was during this time that the young John learned to use his talent as a barrier against the intermittent periods of despondency.

It was at Mendips that the apprenticeship of his creativity was to be found in the self-defence mechanism of isolation, of story writing, books and poetry. This insular but creative lifestyle was to nurture his art, and later, the studio would make this creativity available to a wider audience. In many ways, John fits neatly into the stereotype of the tortured artist. As John himself declared:

All art is pain expressing itself. I think all life is, everything we do, but particularly artists – that’s why they’re always vilified. They’re always persecuted because they show pain, they can’t help it. They express it in art and the way they live, and people don’t like to see that reality that they’re suffering.1

As a musician and artist, he displayed a fierce independence and marched to the beat of his own drum, but at the same time he was dogged by insecurity, pessimism and depression. For all his musical and artistic success, John was forever haunted by fears, living most of his life shadowed by doubt. On meeting John, Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister Pauline was to comment that ‘John’s whole history speaks to a desperate kind of nurturing’.2

As a teenager, John’s character and musical creativity were strongly influenced by his attempts to gain access to and acceptance in a culture of rock ’n’ roll. For John, this culture was to be found in a largely blue-collar teenage population in Liverpool’s inner city. He was determined to shed a background in the leafy boulevards and manicured parks of Woolton by adopting a smokescreen of rebelliousness, sarcastic wit and belligerence. He desperately needed to have a grounding to support his vulnerable self-esteem. It was in rock ’n’ roll that he found an identity which was to be crucial and life-saving. John’s life support of music and writing was also to be supplemented by the cultural impact of the city and port of Liverpool. John desperately needed and wanted the raucousness, spontaneous humour and vibrancy that could be found in Liverpool’s blue-collar life.

As a teenager, his early trips into inner-city Liverpool found John intrigued and in awe of the locals with their sharpness, wit and streetwise dialogue. He adopted a Scouse accent, which came into conflict with John’s surrogate mother from the age of five, Aunt Mimi, and the conditioning of John towards King, Country, Empire and the linguistic fabric of these in the shape of ‘BBC English’. John’s conservative upbringing by his aunt left him ill-equipped for validation within the local rock ’n’ roll community, and to win acceptance by his peers he proceeded to adopt an exaggerated toughness that he never fully abandoned.

Liverpool has always had a deep-seated historical Celtic connection – the city sits with its back to mainland Britain, looking out instead to the Atlantic Ocean, so much so that the Mersey was viewed as an inland river of the Irish Sea. This, combined with its sense of otherness and the outlook of defiance that existed in Liverpool’s inner-city population’s irreverence to status, bolshiness and verbal gymnastics, fitted John like a glove. His search for rebellion was nurtured by his embrace of Liverpool’s Irish influence and the dynamic effect of the city’s seafarer culture via the movement of ideas across oceans. ‘We came from Liverpool,’ John declared, ‘and reflected our past.’3

As The Beatles were catapulted into worldwide fame, John increasingly found himself battling a deep-rooted range of emotional and psychological issues. The greater The Beatles grew into a global phenomenon, the greater John’s uncertainties about his own talent and the greater his abrasiveness and volatility. Perhaps it was just a coincidence on the part of the film’s screenwriter, or insight into John’s belligerence, that while in Yellow Submarine the character of Ringo is presented as a typical local Liverpool lad, George as an Indian mystic aficionado and Paul as a self-assured music hall performer, John is introduced as Frankenstein’s monster! Understanding John Lennon traces the restrictive conformity of John’s Aunt Mimi’s narrow-mindedness and its clashes with John’s pathological aversion to authority. It examines his inner turmoil and salvation through art, as well as the complexity of values found in his childhood that would aggravate him and hurl him towards inhabiting a self-contradictory persona. John’s life is too often airbrushed. Some accounts have been distorted with a view to making the Lennon ‘story’ acceptable to the reader, presenting a saintly, refined version of John at which he would have baulked.

Understanding John Lennon challenges the ‘Beatle version’ of John that has become mainstream.

An obvious example of these contradictory, standard versions of the John Lennon Story is in John’s place of birth: Liverpool. Outside The Cavern Club in Mathew Street, where The Beatles played 292 times, is a life-size bronze statue of John, resplendent in his heavy leather boots, standing with one foot hooked behind the other, leather trousers, leather jacket and … a Beatle haircut. Fine, except that the Beatle haircut is normally associated with the Pierre Cardin ‘bum freezer’, ‘Beatle suits’ and tens of thousands of screaming fans: not leather, definitely not leather. But when this statue was first unveiled, it had a DA Teddy Boy slicked-back hairstyle – just like The Beatles had when they played Hamburg, when they wore leather suits. Those responsible for the statue’s commission, upon viewing this accurate depiction of Lennon at a particular time in his development, decided that this wasn’t what they wanted. History was rewritten, and, despite the statue being modelled on a photograph taken in Hamburg, which was later to become the cover for John’s 1974 Rock ’n’ Roll album, the ‘greaser’ look head was removed and replaced by the more familiar ‘mop top’ image.

This book is a challenge to such obvious historical rewrites. As the only writer on John Lennon to have spent all his life in Liverpool, I am uniquely placed to challenge orthodox versions of the ‘Lennon Story’. Understanding John Lennon presents a journey into the confusion and pain that lay behind one of popular music’s most researched – yet most misunderstood – geniuses. What follows is how John Lennon came to be John Lennon, musical genius. And it all starts in Liverpool.

chapter 1

1800sCity of Outsiders

JOHN LENNON was born in 1940 in wartime Liverpool. His music, his persona and his beliefs were formed through the varying influences of his home city and its port, people and culture. The city represents the single most powerful influence on John’s life. Indeed, after the break-up of The Beatles, having moved to New York’s Dakota building, John still kept a sea trunk inscribed with ‘Liverpool’, which was full of mementos from his city of birth. His feelings for Liverpool were often ambiguous and, at certain periods of his career, the city’s deep-seated blue-collar ethos became an obstacle and a source of friction to his later musical success. Nevertheless, Liverpool was passionately championed by its favourite son.

It is only by coming to understand the impact of his home city on John, the place in which his (paternal) Lennon and (maternal) Stanley families were born and nurtured, that it becomes possible to gain a valuable appreciation of one of the 20th century’s greatest musical talents. The thread of passion for Liverpool’s culture, music and people would run throughout John’s life. He came to love the edginess of a seaport with a workforce more comfortable in Barranquilla, Boston and Buenos Aires than Bolton, Bury or Blackburn. In some ways, though, the influence of the city could be a double-edged sword. Much of his personality and strength came from his affinity with Liverpool’s Irish culture. The most obvious characteristics of this culture that John embodied were humour and accent, but also the seeming Irish tendency towards defiance and argumentativeness, together with a healthy irreverence for authority and cant. His own view of his hometown was candid and revealed the depth of feeling for what would be the prime mover in shaping his life and music:

It was going poor, a very poor city, and tough. But people have a sense of humour because they are in so much pain, so they are always cracking jokes. They are very witty, and it’s an Irish place. It is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it’s where black people were left or worked as slaves or whatever. It is cosmopolitan, and it’s where the sailors would come home with the blues records from America on the ships.1

John was fully aware of the unique nature of his hometown. Liverpool’s influence on John and the rest of The Beatles is self-evident, not just in their accent but in their outlook, spirit and stoic determination to survive. The sense of being an outsider, of mutual support and the ability to laugh at one another was drawn from the city; it was this that kept them together in the whirlwind of Beatlemania and beyond. Liverpool was ‘a transitional place looking out over the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean while turning its back on the rest of the country’.2

It was in 1699 that the Liverpool Merchant became the port’s first slave ship to sail for Africa, docking in Barbados with 220 Africans before making its return trip to Liverpool. In 1799, ships sailing out of Liverpool transported 45,000 Africans into bondage. The commercial success story of Liverpool and its relationship with the slave trade saw a rapid growth in port-related activities. This matched the growth of the British Industrial Revolution, in which the demand for imports and exports seemed insatiable on the back of that slave trade. At this time of mercantile expansion, Liverpool sailors were soon gaining a particular reputation and character. Indeed, novelist and sailor Joseph Conrad would comment: ‘That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It’s my experience they always have.’3

This growing development of trade routes to and from the port meant that large numbers of sailors were drawn to the city from all corners of the globe. This encouraged the opening of numerous pubs and gin houses, lodging houses and brothels. Seafarers began to be seen as an important mainstay of the port’s industry. Liverpool had become the first capitalist commercial boom town, as novelist Herman Melville observed in his novel Redburn:

Of all the sea-ports in the world, Liverpool, perhaps, most abounds in all the varieties of land-sharks, land-rats and other vermin, which make the hapless mariners their prey. In the shape of landlords, barkeepers, clothiers, crimps and boarding-house loungers, the land-sharks devour him, limb by limb; whilst the land-rats and mice constantly nibble at his purse.4

The importance of the port and port-based activities would constitute the main driving force behind Liverpool’s economic development for two and a half centuries. The city’s function as a port turned it into a commercial rather than an industrial centre. The capital invested in the city made it the major distribution centre and importer of raw material. Liverpool’s confidence in itself and sense for innovation was such that it pioneered the world’s first electrically powered overhead railway system, stretching seven miles along the dockland zones, which both New York and Chicago later emulated.

Trade with the Americas proved to be a huge attraction, not just for those in Britain, but all over Europe. The city and port were booming. But while Liverpool was generating itself into a boomtown, across the Irish Sea a disaster of biblical proportions was taking place:

As far as the Famine goes, we are dealing with the most important episode of Modern Irish history and the greatest social disaster of the nineteenth century in Europe …5

When the 1847–49 potato famine hit in Ireland, the exodus of Irish emigrants towards the city, in terms of its social fabric, was enormous. In 1847 alone, 300,000 people crossed the Irish Sea, fleeing the famine to live in England, with many starting a new life around the port. By 1851, 25 per cent of Liverpool’s population was Irish-born. An alternative set of values, beliefs and religion was developing, and the Catholic enclaves along the north end and south end dockland zones were becoming a city within a city.

The steady expansion of the city and its Irish contingent meant that by the 1890s, Liverpool had become the largest Roman Catholic diocese in England, with over 400,000 Catholic citizens, one-fifth of the total Catholic population of Britain. Between 1851 and 1911, the city also witnessed the arrival of 20,000 people in each decade from Wales. The ‘Celtic nations’ were never so well represented in one city. These Irish and mercantile influences on Liverpool have played a major role in defining its literature arts, music, culture and social fabric. Indeed, in the case of The Beatles, John, Paul and George shared Irish ancestry. The Beatles’ backgrounds were also inherently tied to the port, with John’s and George’s fathers being seafarers and Paul’s father working in the cotton industry, which relied on the port for shipping.

Liverpool had become a terminal for people, not just goods, and had established itself as the port par excellence for the mass movement for those seeking a better life – particularly for emigrants to northern and western Europe and the Americas. Between 1830 and 1930, some nine million emigrants sailed from the Mersey into the Atlantic. In 1886, London Illustrated News described Liverpool as ‘the New York of Europe; a world city rather than merely a British provincial’.

At beginning of the 20th century, Liverpool was at the peak of its commercial power and was considered the world’s first global city. In response to this, it celebrated and declared its position as second city of the world’s largest empire. The mercantile elite decided to create what would later be known as the ‘Three Graces’ – the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building – set on the Pier Head looking out to the Mersey Bar and Irish Sea. Tipping their hat towards the port in their film Yellow Submarine, we see The Beatles sailing off for their series of adventures in the Sea of Dreams, departing from their home city’s Pier Head.

The vibrancy and cut and thrust of a large seaport like Liverpool was to have a profound effect on John, as would his family life, which had its own Celtic roots to add to the influence of the city’s own home-grown Irish culture. This influence on his music, however, has to a large extent been overlooked. John’s rebellious nature has been attributed to the early absence of his parents and the death of his mother, Julia. But if one looks at the history of rebellion in the city, we find that this particular characteristic is rooted in the port and the mix of blue-collar workers, large numbers of Afro-Caribbean people (the largest community in the UK) and a Chinese community, the oldest in Europe. The influx of Irish immigrants, Welsh and Scots seeking work in the port, as well as African and Chinese seamen, led to an eclectic cultural community. The word Scouse, for example, comes from the word lobscouse, a Scandinavian stew. John’s Aunt Mimi was to take particular exception to John’s adoption of a Scouse accent upon forming The Beatles. To many, the garrulous, sharp-natured ‘Scouser’ can on the surface be seen as caustic or delivering a certain truculence, but this is not the full story. It is no coincidence that Liverpool, Naples, New York and Kingston have always had much more in common with each other than their own particular country. They are populated by outsiders fully aware of their sense of otherness.

The cultural make-up of the city encouraged a particular tendency to puncture pretension and defy authority, while its internationalism and multiplicity created an accent tailored to support the case: dese for these, dat for that, giz forgive us, youse as a plural for you, all of this interchangeable with the accent of Brooklyn or New York. The transatlantic shipping lines between Liverpool and New York conveyed not just people, but cultural and social discourse.The nature of both dock work and seafaring demanded teamwork and good communication skills. In factory jobs, the noise of the shop floor or the gaze of the foreman limited socialising via the spoken word. With seafaring, however, signing on for a trip meant bringing to the job the ability to compromise, and an understanding of the needs of others. This was especially true on a deep sea trip, where there was a more intensive need to communicate, to give and take, gain acceptance and generally get on. This centred on dialogue concerning common values and interests. In order to gain acceptance, maintain a shipmate’s welfare and aim for a ‘good trip’, there needed to be a sense of comradeship. It was this ability to ‘rub along’ that formed a seafarer’s profile. And these traits were transferred over to land jobs, when gangs were formed on the docks. From this casual type of work and the Celtic fondness for the craic emanated the image of the Scouser.

As a suburban teenager, John’s first ventures into inner-city Liverpool would have been one of intrigue and awe at the unfamiliarity of the terms and the machine-gun delivery of dialogue. To John, this was a different country. This provoked clashes with his Aunt Mimi over, amongst other things, his previous Received Pronunciation sliding into Scouse. But when The Beatles achieved world fame, John declared:

The first thing we did was to proclaim our ‘Liverpoolness’ to the world, and say, ‘It’s all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this’. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it … had to lose their accent to get on the BBC … After The Beatles came on the scene, everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.6

John’s father Freddie recalls ringing up from dockside Southampton when John was five years old: ‘He spoke lovely English’, Freddie enthused. ‘When I heard his Scouse accent years later, I was sure it must be a gimmick.’7 It wasn’t a gimmick – to John it was much more important than that. It was a matter of survival.

Having nailed the accent, John was quick to pick up on the ‘Scouse attitude’, seen at times as a split personality of argumentativeness and extreme bonhomie. The Liverpool accent, it must be remembered, was in many ways the product of influxes to a port city, much like its far-flung sister port, New York. Turn-of-the-century Liverpool and New York essentially grew up together, their working-class cultures resembling each other more than they would the English Home Counties or the oil fields of Texas. Playwright Eugene O’Neill’s work dramatically reveals the closeness of his Brooklyn characters with that of the Scouse accent, most notably in his 1911 play, The Iceman Cometh. His character Rocky’s delivery, spoken in a waterfront Brooklyn dive, could easily be found in any bar in Liverpool’s own Scotland Road or Park Lane:

‘De old anarchist wise guy dat knows all de answers! Dat’s you, huh?’ ‘Why ain’t he out dere stickin’ by her?’8

This is Scouse set in a Brooklyn bar: an Irish accent and demeanour that ran through both cities’ histories like a thread.

John’s view of his hometown was that ‘it was less hick than somewhere in the English Midlands, like the American Midwest or whatever you call it’.9 In the same interview, John ‘regrets profoundly’ that he wasn’t born in New York. It gave further resonance to the similarities, attractiveness and pulling power of both cities to John’s idea of himself. Due to its seafaring internationalism, Liverpool was open to exotic, non-English ideas, to the extent that the Mersey was paradoxically viewed as an inland extension of the Irish Sea. As a port of world status, it had the confidence to ‘choose’ its own nation state. It wasn’t only England. Although young John was not a Scouse in the true sense of the word, he readily threw himself into a world of poverty, sheebeens and communities of sharp-tongued, hard-faced, generous, quick-witted and quick-tempered people. A world that was sensitive to injustice, a rowdy, rock ’n’ roll world, the world of dockland Liverpool. This was the life he wanted. It was not what his Aunt Mimi wanted for him, which couldn’t have been further from rock ’n’ roll: listening to the sound of the establishment in the shape of the BBC Light Programme, being in bed by 12 o’clock, with a bookcase full of Just William and Mimi’s Encyclopedia Britannica beside him for company.

It was time to move on, and he had the perfect place on his doorstep. John was confronted with fast-speaking young men his own age ‘talking with their hands’ and fashioning new language patterns around themselves, pounding the ears of the listener with a language of street slang and ruthless Mickey-taking; and this was the world for him. The verbal street corner duals must have amazed him, encouraging him to listen and learn, to add to his own armoury and develop speech as a weapon to beat an opponent. If he was going to lead this group called The Beatles and provide a platform for his musical goals, he needed to have the audacity to step up to another level of wit and guile. This was demanded in inner-city Liverpool: fight not only with fists, but with verbal putdowns, with cunning and, above all, the ability to get one over while out-flanking your opponent.

Throughout his life, John used Liverpool as an anchor to give stability to the maelstrom of Beatlemania, the persistent mental health and drug problems and the final break-up of the group. What mattered to him was his identification with music and this first came with his own burst of independence, as a teenager on the streets of Liverpool. His creative, artistic flourish was nurtured against the backdrop of the edginess of a bustling multicultural seaport.

The whole notion of being an outcast in a city full of outcasts – located in a last refuge seaport, no less – nurtured a sense of otherness that appealed to John. In the year of his Aunt Mimi’s birth in 1906, the City Council Health Committee revealed that:

there was not a city in this country, nay in Europe, which could produce anything like the squalor that … officials found in some of Liverpool’s backstreets.10

Like the ‘Famine Irish’, another group of people that faced impossible suffering at that period were Afro-Americans. Like the Irish, Afro-Americans were also inclined to develop an aspect of their culture that was derived from prejudice and derision and to reflect this defensively in their language. Afro-American writer Stanley Crouch argues that:

Negro Americans are not predisposed to follow people. They aren’t. That’s why there’s always a certain element of chaos in the Negro world, because … from slavery onward, we didn’t like to listen. No.11

If we draw a comparison between Crouch’s understanding of black resistance and that of the history of the Irish, who suffered and died of hunger by the millions and who were subject to extreme social prejudice in England and America, one gets an insight into the outlook of the ‘belligerent’, non-compliant Liverpool-Irish identity from which John derived his character.

The link between Crouch’s Afro-Americans and the Irish of Liverpool is the sense of shared oppression and the innate need for respect through independence and nonconformity. Crouch continues:

So someone telling you over and over you gotta do this, you know … I’m not doing that, just because you said so. ‘Yes but it’s right.’ I don’t care if it’s right, I ain’t doing it anyway. Why am I not doing it? For the same reason that Dostoevsky said ‘I’m not gonna do it’, so that I can tell you that I exist. I’m just gonna mess yourself up.

If conforming and being like everybody else supports and validates the whole system of oppression, don’t conform. The influence of Liverpool on John was to follow this advice, protecting his individuality by using his music and art to challenge; to ‘mess yourself up’.

chapter 2

1900sToxteth Park

AT THE turn of the 20th century, Liverpool was still a vibrant port and an integral part of the British Empire. It was a bustling city of 750,000 people and rising, and it was in this environment that John Lennon’s parents, Freddie and Julia, were born – a city culture that was in the north of England but in many ways not of it.

Freddie and Julia had a stormy relationship of 14 years, during which they expressed a love of life and a rejection of society’s norms, set against the fraught backdrop of the Great Depression and the Second World War. It was a marriage that took place despite opposition and interference from both families.

Meanwhile, the cultural influence of Ireland that infused the city was now joined by an American one, in which thousands of cargo ships and hundreds of liners annually crisscrossed the Atlantic to and from the United States. What entered the Port of Liverpool was a multitude of fresh ideas, innovative music and challenging attitudes, which then fanned out into the city.

But the new century heralded little change with regards to the poverty, squalor and adversity for many people in the city. As is often the case when groups of people are faced with injustice, there developed a strong sense of solidarity and in 1911 the city saw a series of strikes and industrial action, climaxing in a general strike by transport workers in and around the port. This involved carters, railwaymen, dockers and seafarers, lasted 72 days and involved 70,000 workers. Tens of thousands of troops were called in and barracked on the city’s outskirts. The conflict which followed between the strikers and the police and military resulted in two strikers being shot dead. The then Home Secretary Winston Churchill ordered gunboats into the Mersey and stated that:

You need not attach great importance to the rioting in Liverpool last night. It took place in an area where disorder is a chronic feature.1

Such bias was deeply ingrained, nurtured by a long-standing xenophobia towards the Irish immigrant community. Indeed, in 1866 The Anthropological Review and Journal claimed that the ‘Gaelic man’ was characterised by:

his bulging jaw and lower part of the face, retreating chin and forehead, large mouth and thick lips, great distance between nose and mouth, upturned nose, prominent cheekbones, sunken eyes, projecting eyebrows, narrow elongated skull and protruding ears.

Scientific xenophobia was common in the 19th century, directed not just towards the large immigrant Irish population but also towards Jewish and African people. Punch Magazine was not averse to portraying the Irish in cartoon form as Neanderthals dragging their knuckles along the floor. The bias against those who made up a significant part of the Irish diaspora only served to firm the sense of otherness of those within the city. The fact that the city was the only one in Britain to elect a representative to the Houses of Parliament (T. P. O’Connor, served 1885–1929) who was a member of the Irish National Party, which supported Home Rule for Ireland, only furthered the notion that Liverpool was a law unto itself. The communion with Ireland meant that Liverpool was to endure a degree of negativity and discrimination not seen by other English cities. But then again, Liverpool wasn’t just another ‘English city’.

The discrimination against Liverpool found an easy target in the city’s distinctive accent. But during Beatlemania, it seemed that half the teenagers living within a 30-mile radius of Liverpool spoke with a ‘plastic’ Scouse accent in emulation of their idols. This became a complete turnaround for previous views on Liverpool people’s accents. Cilla Black made the point that:

People hated us because of the way we spoke, especially the fellas, who were very guttural. If you asked for a drink in a pub in Blackpool or North Wales, they’d throw you out.2

As a teenager, John was aware of this prejudice and fought a constant battle with his aunt in his attempt to declare his independence by adopting a local Scouse accent. To him, speaking in a distinct Liverpool accent was a badge of rebellion and freedom. Paul McCartney was also conscious of his accent and has expressed this sense of otherness:

Liverpool has its own identity. It’s even got its own accent with about a ten-mile radius. Once you go outside that ten miles it’s deep Lancashire, lad. I think you do feel that apartness, growing up there.3

Paul became one of the three most important people in John’s life. He impacted upon him as a friend and as a musician. Other major influences on his formative outlook and beliefs were his Aunt Mimi and his mother Julia. They were all Liverpool born and bred. Yoko Ono certainly influenced John later in his life, but by the time they met, he was already a blend of his hometown’s history and character.

John’s Aunt Mimi (christened Mary Stanley) was born in Head Street in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, where the influence of Catholicism surrounded the non-Catholic Stanley family. At the top of the street stood St Patrick’s Mission Church, home to the largest parish in the south end of the city and mother church to half a dozen other Catholic churches in the area. At the other end of Head Street stood the Dexter Street laundry, one of 300 or so whose main purpose was to service the transatlantic liner trade. They cleaned tablecloths and bed linens and a whole host of other items for recently docked liners. A liner in port for an overhaul could well employ 2,000 people for over a month. The Stanley family’s home in Head Street was thus sandwiched between the two most influential dynamics of the city – the Irish and the sea.

Mimi’s parents, George (known as Pop) and Annie, had Irish and Welsh ancestry. The couple had five daughters, Mimi being the first, born in 1906, followed by Elizabeth (nicknamed Mater), Anne and Julia, who was six years younger than her eldest sister and sometimes known as Judy. Finally there was Harriet. The Stanley family had been left an endowment by a well-off aunt in Wales. The money was invested in the purchase of half a dozen small properties around the area of the Anglican Cathedral. Pop Stanley was a sail maker by trade, and the nature of his job entailed accompanying ships around the world. With the decline in the shipping industry, he later took employment at home, working between the Mersey and Irish Sea with the London, Liverpool and Glasgow Salvage Company, which specialised in the salvage of submarines. His position meant status. When Pop spoke, people were expected to listen. He addressed work subordinates using their surnames, while he in turn expected to be addressed as ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr Stanley’. In the workplace, Pop was a skilled and influential artisan; in the home he could be a hurtful and spiteful head of house.

Being the oldest daughter, Mimi developed a close relationship with her father. She was given the major responsibility of looking after her four younger sisters. This mother model developed a strong air of the disciplinarian in her, which carried over when she became John’s ‘new mother’.

The area where Mimi and Julia lived was essentially solid upper-working-class/lower-middle-class. As a rule of thumb, the further you lived up and away from the river and the docks, the better the housing and status of the area; dock workers, on the other hand, needed to be near their place of work. The casual nature of such work meant a precarious living based on being selected for a gang from a ‘pen’ of men seeking work. This humiliating act of selection is vividly captured by Marlon Brando’s Terry Molloy in the Brooklyn-set film, On the Waterfront. Some of the ‘lucky’ chosen dock workers owed their selection to buying a drink for the foreman in the pub, commonly known as the ‘blue eye system’, while those unfortunate enough not to be picked would go home and later return to the pen for the afternoon selection, hence the importance to live as near as possible to the riverfront.

The four-mile stretch from the Pier Head that made up the north end and south end dockland zones contained at this time 250,000 people, the most densely populated area in either Europe or America.

Pop was intimately familiar with the dockland neighbourhoods. He regularly made his way through the narrow walkways and dismal courts on his way to work, an experience that instilled in him the desire to provide a better standard of living for his own family. No daughter of his was going to work in a seed cake mill, margarine factory, or as a sack maker or soap wrapper. Mimi, as the eldest daughter, would be fully indoctrined by Pop into being self-regarding, status-conscious, thrifty and thick-skinned. She learned, as a second mother to her sisters, to make certain she would better herself as soon as possible and move up. Whereas Mimi was thus constantly looking to climb the social ladder, Julia was content to pick up the new wisecracks of Mae West in her latest movie at the local picture house. The conditions of housing in Toxteth made living ‘cheek-by-jowl’ the norm, and John’s parents were both living in these conditions in streets that were less than a ten-minute walk from each other. But this short distance represented the difference between the free and easy casualness of the Lennons in Copperfield Street and the skilled disciplinarian atmosphere found in Head Street.

Alf Lennon (more commonly known as Freddie) was six years younger than Mimi and lived with his brothers and sister at the family home at 27 Copperfield Street. The red-bricked terraced houses were built to accommodate skilled and semi-skilled workers mainly from the port-related industries, such as shipyard, marine engineering or transport workers. From Copperfield Street, where Freddie lived, it was a short walk to Head Street down the district’s main thoroughfare of Park Road, named after the path taken to King John’s medieval royal hunting ground of Toxteth Park. This is also the walk Freddie’s Irish-born dad, Jack would have taken to the Flat Iron pub, which sat in front of Head Street at the junction of Mill Street and St James Place.

When Jack died of liver damage, Freddie was seven years old. Shortly afterwards, he was placed with his sister in an orphanage. Freddie was in some ways lucky insomuch that the children’s home turned out to be the local charitable Blue Coat School, which was well considered and had a good standing, being located in the Wavertree suburb of Liverpool – less than half a mile from Penny Lane.

While Freddie and Julia grew up, the pressures to find work increased as the recession of the 1930s continued. Freddie was at a distinct disadvantage here, having suffered from rickets as a child. This condition forced him into wearing callipers, which resulted in stunted growth (5ft 4in) and bandy legs. But any physical disadvantages were more than made up for by an exuberant personality and the ability to perform a song at the drop of a hat. This came together with a strong sense of humour and wit. As a youngster he would give Saturday ‘shows’. This would consist of taking in a few pennies from friends for a performance which included songs and imitations of Charlie Chaplin and the latest hits, which he played on his harmonica.

While at Blue Coat School, Freddie, with his older brother Sidney, visited the local Empire Theatre to see the children’s spectacular, Will Murray’s Gang. He was immediately bitten by the showbiz bug. Backstage after the show, Freddie approached Will Murray with the less-than-subtle declaration of ‘I’m better than your leading boy’.4 Taken in with the young Freddie’s confidence and smart Blue Coat School uniform, Murray offered him a place in the troupe. His delight was shattered when he was told in no uncertain terms by the headmaster that this would not happen. Undeterred, the rebel in Freddie made him decide to write his mother a farewell letter and make his own way to Glasgow – the next venue for the show. Within a few days, Freddie’s world collapsed. Blue Coat’s headmaster turned up at the Glasgow venue and escorted him by train back home. Worse was to follow when the same headmaster ridiculed him in a full assembly at the school. He derided and goaded him with such comments as: ‘You thought you were going to be a star’, and ‘Which part were they going to give you, Tom Thumb or perhaps one of the Seven Dwarfs?’5 The assembled boys laughed on cue.

If this was an effort to break Freddie’s spirit and make him conform, it failed. He was determined to make his own rebellious and unorthodox way in life and turned a deaf ear to those who criticised him. The showbiz bug in Freddie was to find inspiration in two places. The first was the opportunities that a life in the merchant navy could offer and the chance to give a ‘turn’ to both the ship’s crew and passengers. Freddie would spend many hours down at the Pier Head gazing enviously at the cargo ships and liners passing through the mouth of the Mersey, making journeys to places such as Valparaiso, Cape Town and Shanghai. A local journalist at the time described the Pier Head as ‘a threshold to the ends of the earth’.6 The second source of inspiration turned out to be the free-spirited – and some might say the slightly eccentric – Julia Stanley. The problem for Freddie was simple: life at sea and being with Julia weren’t compatible.

Julia Stanley was a nonconformist during a time of mass unemployment and political uncertainty, a period when one couldn’t really afford to be as unconventional as she was. The 1930s were witness to unprecedented economic depression and extreme austerity, but she did not worry. The vagaries of trade for the port left it particularly vulnerable to high unemployment. The largest area of work for women in the city, and still a reflection of the wealth, was domestic service. Thousands of household servants found employment in the richer sections of the city. The attitudes of a nonconformist like Julia to a position ‘in service’ as a parlour maid or scullery girl was incredulity and disdain. At her first job in a printer’s shop in the city centre, she lasted only a week before being sacked due to her indulgence in horseplay and practical jokes. Freddie’s own first job, by coincidence, was as a bellboy at the Adelphi Hotel, the same hotel that was to employ Julia’s common law husband, Bobby Dykins, as wine waiter. While Julia was in many ways an easy-going type of person, often described as happy-go-lucky and good company, Mimi was assertive and aggressive. The sisters could not be more opposite. Mimi looked towards social mobility and the skills she had gathered in her role as ‘second mother’. This brought authority and obedience over her younger sisters. Mimi was all for pulling oneself up by the boot straps. She was a social climber of the first order. She lived by a code in which accent was one of the first indicators as to how she would treat a person.

These values would be exercised on the young John Lennon in later years at Mendips. The effects of the ‘hungry thirties’ increasingly moulded Mimi’s already powerful personality into a burning need for status, career and a comfortable niche in life. Julia’s reaction towards a career, by contrast, was not to have one. Because she liked films, she instead found herself a job in the local cinema as an usherette. Mimi, meanwhile, moved from the discipline of dealing with her siblings to the discipline of dealing with patients: she became a trainee sister in the Woolton Convalescent Home, situated in an affluent suburb of Liverpool. She was also personal assistant to an industrial magnate who made his fortune in biscuits in Manchester. Mr Vickers invited Mimi to become a personal secretary at the family home in Betws-y-Coed on the North Wales coast. Here she enjoyed the life she craved. She was treated as one of the family with trips on Vickers’ yacht around the coast. For reasons that remain unclear, this was only to last a year. While Mimi had her goals of self-advancement, Freddie found his size and frame disqualified him from the manual work of the docks, but his education at a well-respected school led him to the position as bellboy at the Adelphi. Eventually, when the Great Depression hit really hard and unemployment in the city reached 30 per cent, Freddie found work as a ship’s steward. Julia, much to the concern of her family, was content to continue work as a shop girl or usherette.

One escape from the gloom of the depression was the cinema. Cinema was glamorous, warm and cheap, while working-class homes were in the main cold, damp, overcrowded and uncomfortable. Just as people had their local pub, so many neighbourhoods had a network of cinemas in the 1930s; they were geared to accommodate just how far the person could afford to travel to their ‘local pally’ (palace). A network of neighbourhood cinemas existed in Liverpool and other major cities, and picture palaces were in walking distance for most city dwellers. American films of the period depicting hard-nosed, wisecracking Irish-American actors such as Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien and James Cagney were much preferred to those featuring their English counterparts: Basil Rathbone types, decked out with a pair of brogues and a three-piece Harris Tweed suit, who solved and explained mysteries in oak-panelled drawing rooms with a clipped Oxbridge accent. But the Liverpool audiences could identify with streetwise people like Cagney as ‘one of us’. Cagney’s persona of tough guy, underdog and cynical wisecracker showed what could be achieved by a second-generation Irish family. The previous decade of Celtic influence in Liverpool gave way and morphed into an Irish-American perception of how the world should be run. The sense of apartness from England and of being connected to Ireland was, perhaps, finally on the wane. But, if anything, the severity of the depression and lack of government support in the 1930s gave cities like Liverpool an added insularity, something that persisted into the 1950s, 1960s and beyond.

In the dockland area where the Stanleys lived, an integral part of community life was the ability to get on with one’s neighbours. This was essentially the ability to live and let live. The proximity of living and working arrangements called for, if not a public spirit, then insight into the importance of some sort of very basic, intertwined collective network – a community. You either got on with those in the community or, if you had the funds, got out. The Stanleys got out. Nearby, neighbours who were stokers, carters, porters and dock labourers were not seen as part of a community the Stanleys wanted to be involved with. In the case of the slow middle-class drift from the centre of Liverpool, the Stanleys’ move was to take them further up and away from the river to upmarket Berkley Street, running adjacent to the premier location of Princes Avenue. Here the ‘bookends’ of Head Street and Dexter Street laundry were replaced by Berkley Street and St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. This was a church modelled on St Theodore’s in Constantinople, the second only of its type in Britain and a symbol of the cosmopolitan nature of the city.

At Berkley Street, the Stanleys could take satisfaction in the traditional Sunday morning walk along the boulevard of merchants, cotton brokers and ship owners who occupied the four-storey red-brick townhouses complete with servants’ quarters. This was an affluent area where, as locals would say, ‘a man wouldn’t be seen outside without his hat’. To accommodate the religious needs of Liverpool’s elite, grandly designed churches and places of worship were spaced along the avenue, designed to promote the wealth and status of the captains of industry and commerce that funded them. Jewish, Greek and Congregational churches were all part of this rich fabric.

Freddie and Julia would eventually meet and begin their courtship when he was 16 and she 14 at Sefton Park boating lake, which lay to the south of the city, a few miles from each other’s homes. On Sunday afternoons, families would take their children there to feed the ducks. Young men and women would dress up in their best clothes and parade themselves for each other’s approval in the hope of finding a date. In Liverpool parlance, Freddie and Julia ‘copped off’ in an unusual way. Although small, Freddie was handsome, with jet-black hair and the gift of the gab. He spotted Julia as she sat on a park bench, and the attraction was easy to see – she could easily be mistaken for the movie star Ginger Rogers, petite in size and with a mane of flaming red hair.

Julia had noticed what seemed to be a small ‘boy’ wearing a black bowler set at a jaunty angle and a cigarette held inside a cigarette holder. The ‘boy’ was Freddie. As suavely as he could, he asked Julia if she may be so kind as to permit him to sit on the bench with her. Julia turned slowly, studied the bandy-legged, bowler-hatted Freddie and screamed with laughter. She told him to take his hat off, for he looked daft. Instead of taking umbrage, as most young men would, Freddie did as he was told and skimmed the hat across the boating lake, nearly decapitating a duck. This act of going against the grain, spontaneity and zaniness instantly endeared him to Julia.

Their relationship immediately ran into problems with the total lack of approval and contempt of Freddie from Pop and Mimi. That Freddie was a bellboy, and came from a ‘less acceptable part of town’, had been in an orphanage and was stunted in size, left Pop and Mimi in no doubt that he would not be welcome over the Stanleys’ doorstep. ‘I knew he was no good to anyone, certainly not [for] our Julia’,7 judged Mimi. Freddie’s family view of the courtship was that of a seven-day wonder, just like his dreams of showbiz stardom.

Over their long period of courtship, Julia was constantly discouraged by her family from having anything to do with Freddie. On Freddie’s side, his older brother Sidney regularly cast aspersions as to the strength and ‘sense’ of the relationship. Such was Pop’s antagonism against the young Freddie Lennon that he conspired with Mater’s husband, his son-in-law Captain Charles Parkes, to arrange a two-year trip for him on a whaling ship. Sometime later, Pop had to be restrained by Julia from beating up the pint-sized Freddie for the crime of knocking over a radio speaker.

After a long and sometimes tortuous courtship, Freddie and Julia were married on 3 December 1938 at the Liverpool Registry Office, Mount Pleasant. They did so without informing any members of their respective families. After a desperate search for a witness for Freddie, a last-minute call was made to his elder brother, Sidney. Their honeymoon consisted of going to the Forum Cinema in the city centre, where they bought tickets to watch Dr Barnardo’s Homes, starring Mickey Rooney. This was followed by a return to each other’s respective family homes. Within the week, Freddie shipped out on a liner for a three-month trip to the West Indies. If Freddie couldn’t believe his luck in obtaining such a good post, it was because it wasn’t luck. It was Pop Stanley again, who had worked behind the scenes with son-in-law Charles Parkes to arrange Freddie’s absence. Even when married, Freddie was to be kept as far away as possible from his daughter.