John Lennon’s Secret
David Stuart Ryan
‘They’re going to crucify me’
The Ballad of John and Yoko 1969
John Lennon’s Secret
David Stuart Ryan
Copyright by David Stuart Ryan
Smashwords Edition
A
First published in print by Kozmik Press
1982. © David Stuart Ryan 1982.
Reprinted 1982, 1983 (twice), 1984, 1990
2010
The text of this book may not be copied - except for review
purposes - without the permission of the publisher. All rights
reserved.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to...
Anna Maria from Brazilian TV who gave me the first leads in my
research.
Bob Wooler for a marvellous night out. Bob Eaton for letting me
see his play.
Eddie Bishop, Pat and Monica for their insights.
Allen Williams for a memorable lunchtime session.
Brian Southell for getting me inside Abbey Road studios.
Brian Brooks of Brooks, Davies and Nicholas Ltd, Hove, for the
genealogical research aided by that of Achievements Ltd.
Pauline Lennon for her help and consultation of Freddy Lennon’s
manuscript.
Aunt Mimi for her patience.
Paul McCartney, Peter Brown, Clive Epstein and Eric Clapton
for their good wishes.
Captain Botting of Strawberry Field children’s home for an
inspirational visit.
Jeff Marsden and Peter Jacobsen for the design help.
Pam Ayscough for the word processing.
The Time Inc librarians in London and New York for the daily
clipping of the newspapers all those years ago.
Arthur Ballard and Mr Pobjoy, Lennon’s teachers, who still give
encouragement today.
Ladies and Gentlemen, direct from Pepperland... John Lennon!
I arranged to meet the young Dutch poet, Christian Konstadt, in an old church in London’s East End which had been converted into a community theatre. There was going to be a Beatles Revival Evening I told him, it would be an interesting side of English life - a little different from the Institute of Contemporary Art where we were sitting waiting for the performance of his play about Nazi occupation and the function of the artist in totalitarian regimes. And yet the artist is always the needed voice in any modern landscape. Articulating the dreams, fears, hopes, lives of an increasingly inarticulate public. A public which has become used to being entertained and manipulated, whose ideas are inevitably drawn from its few information systems. It is surprising that the voice of the artist is allowed to percolate through - but more exactly the public search out the expression for themselves.
Just such an expression was the voice of John Lennon. By the time the Dutch poet arrived m the murky streets of Hackney, the party had been in full swing for some time. The large hall was packed to overflowing, a stage at the far end was surrounded by a mural of the four Beatles in white suits just as they had appeared in Magical Mystery Tour. In flight from the increasingly gloomy job prospects and drop in living standards outside, the crowd in their 60s’ geometric patterned dresses, their swirling coloured shirts and beads, seethed with excitement.
The songs were all known, even by those who could only have been babes in arm when they were written. ‘Yesterday’, ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘A Day In The Life’. Songs that were a part of the lives of everyone there, the new folk songs. Seeing the show live, with a Beatles lookalike band, the magic of the group was there to be felt and sensed, the inexplicable phenomenon that had entranced the world. It was the Edwardian music hall reincarnated, an expression of a people with belief in the future, it was the backslapping bonhomie of a predominantly working-class Liverpool where the four lads had grown up. The music of Paul McCartney and the poetry of John Lennon captured the optimistic mood of that town and then the whole country as Britain emerged from the long austerities of war. Such was its infectiousness that it spread round the world and became part of the fabric of a whole generation.
That magic has not entirely faded. As midnight came and went I felt the initial reluctance to plunge back into a ‘golden age’ drop away, the rhythms and the songs overwhelmed and forced exuberance upon you. The whole hall joined in singing ‘Hey Jude’ while the only song that drew even more applause and participation was ‘Imagine’, Lennon’s hymn to the future. Now as the night advanced and the dream once again took over, it was the music that fascinated. I found myself fulfilling the dream of being a drummer in the Beatles band, the power of the music was flowing through me, it was so natural, so full of life. Reflection reminds how ruthlessly the real Beatles’ drummer was dropped on the brink of stardom. John Lennon claimed that to succeed you had to be a bastard. That is too simple. The demons that drove him - and his prolific partner, Paul McCartney - were the demons of genius. This book is an exploration of how that genius manifested itself in the life of one man, John Lennon. In searching his soul, you are also searching your own. But what he found there was both revealed and exceptionally well hidden behind the persona of a pop star. Now has come the time to fully draw back the curtain . . . Ladies and Gentlemen, direct from Pepperland, John Lennon in person!
David Stuart Ryan London
1 ‘I’ve Married Him’
As we all tend to forget, John Lennon’s life story begins well before he was born. With the verbal fluency of this singer, song-writer and mystic, with his unfailing capacity for audacious imagery, with his natural reverence for the world of nature, it should come as no surprise to learn that he was, by ancestry, more than half Irish. Jack Lennon, born in Dublin in the 1850s, had emigrated to America where he sang professionally most of his life with an early group of Kentucky Minstrels. However, in the early 1900s, he came to Liverpool and in 1912 was working as a freight clerk when, in his mid-50s, he had a son Alfred by Mary Maguire on December 14. There is no record of a marriage. Jack Lennon, professional American singer, passed his name to John Lennon, and an exquisite singing voice. There were six children in the household which played and sang as happy as the day is long. At the age of 9, in 1921, Alfred Lennon became an orphan when his father died of liver disease. He and another brother were ‘farmed out’ to a Blue-coat school in Liverpool, until the age of 15.
Lennon is the anglicised version of 0’ Leannain, a clan to be found in the Cork, Fermanagh and Galway area of southern Ireland. John’s mother, Julia, was born on March 12, 1914, in Liverpool, youngest of five daughters to George Ernest Stanley and Annie (nee Millward). George worked for the Liverpool Salvage Company as a deep sea pilot and was often away on salvage work. Curiously, though, his father had been a musician and was called William Henry Stanley, though at the time of George’s birth he was working as a book-keeper. William Henry was also the son of a clerk, in Victorian times a far more respected occupation than now. The Stanleys, in fact, did not like to think of them- selves as ‘wackers’ - working-class Liverpudlians - and as is the way with the lower middle-classes there was a strong consciousness of their elevated (slightly) status. Julia’s mother, Annie Millward, was the daughter of a solicitor’s clerk, John Millward, further reinforcing the claims of the family to middle-class respectability - a very important attribute in the unemployment-racked Liverpool of the 1930s. What Julia’s father, George Ernest, was less keenly aware of was that his mother, Eliza Jane, was the daughter of Charles Gildea, an Irish immigrant fleeing from the terrible famines that swept Ireland in the 1840s. However, the gene pool, with its tendency of like attracting like, was sufficiently Irish in Julia’s blood for an instant attraction to develop when she met John Lennon’s father in the heady days of 1927 - the Jazz era. She was just 14. Alfred, clad in the new suit his prestigious school had thoughtfully pro- vided him to find his way in the world, had also acquired a bowler hat and his first job in an office. To go with his newly-found status, he wanted a girlfriend. His friend urging him on, Alfred paraded importantly past the daugh- ter of a long line of clerks - the errant musician decently buried in family memory. ‘You look silly,’ said Julia, too young not to reveal her attractions. The scent in the air was of fun. The terrible war of 9 years before and its ghosts, all one million of them from England’s green and pleasant land, were being laid to rest. The realisation was dawning that there was an alternative to a Victorian sense of duty now that its accompanying wealth had disappeared in 4 years of mad dissipation. The ethos, felt by the young most of all, was to live out the today and follow whatever whim came along. And in the late 1920s, the whims were becoming wilder, along with the hopes. The war to end all wars had been fought and had been won. Now the victory celebration! ‘You look lovely’, said Alfred, boldly joining the girl, who was at least a year younger, on the bench. ‘If you want to sit down with me, you’ll have to take that stupid hat off.’
Alfred did. His status as a proud clerk whizzed out across a shining lake, and sank into the waters. He was never to wear a hat again, the waters and their irresistible lure were to claim him as their own.
By the age of 16 he had signed on as a ship’s waiter. Over the next 10 years, during his spells on terra firma he larked about with the fun-loving Julia. A lot of their best fun came from singing together, in fact the musical Alfred taught Julia to play the banjo almost as well as himself. He had risen to head waiter and was much in demand on the luxurious, dream-filled cruises as a singer during the non-stop celebrations that rocked the sumptuous ocean liners and dazzled their privileged passengers.
One day in 1938, the 24-year-old Julia suggested in her joking way that she and Freddy get married. It is a rare woman of 24 who does not feel the urge to marry and pro- duce one of her kind, especially if the year is 1938. The storm clouds of war - a distant German dictator called Hitler, a piece of paper signed in Munich - have begun to move into the corner of vision. Much to her family’s disgust, Julia married the orphan Irishman and after a honeymoon in the back row of the Trocadero Picture Palace she triumphantly returned home to tell her parents. Her mother had a soft spot for the cheery, handsome Alfred. Her father thought his youngest had thrown herself away. Her older sister, Mimi, thought he would be no good for her. But a marriage was a marriage in 1938. Mimi, in any case, married an older, more prosperous man - George Smith. He had his own farm and small dairy business in the smart village of Woolton on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was a step up in the world. Alfred was allowed to stay at the Stanley home on his return from each voyage. George Stanley could not see how Alfred, on his wages as a head waiter, would be able to find accommodation for Julia, at least for some time. Even places to rent were not easy to find; Liverpool had been steadily decaying from its Victorian prosperity when the slave trade, then the cotton mills and commerce had brought a rush of fine public buildings and a certain pride to the town. The port was still very busy, but it was not the centre of a vast trade as it had been at the time he was married in 1906 at the age of 21.
Then the unthinkable happened. War, which they had all believed would never be allowed to take place again, was declared. At first little happened, now that England had called Germany’s bluff, the invaders of Poland would have to be content with that remote gain. In January 1940, Alfred was home on leave at the Stanley house. His part- ner from the fun days of the 1920s clung to each hour of their time together before Freddy set out across a very dangerous sea. By the time she found out she was pregnant he was far away. He was still at sea as the time drew near for his birth. Early in October there was a total eclipse of the sun. In the ancient sayings of astrology it is recognised that those born at or near an eclipse will enter a very changing world which will also provide exceptional opportunities.
2.‘Do You Want To Stay With Mummy Or Daddy?’
The evening John Lennon was bom on October 9, 1940, at 6.30 p.m. in Liverpool’s Oxford Street Hospital, there were not - as he liked to imply - any bombs falling. There had been an unexpected interruption which was quickly shattered by the following evening when the docks were again hammered by German bombs around Pier Head - from where the ferry across the Mersey departs.
At the Stanley household, George Stanley was informed by Mimi, who quickly visited her younger sister, that ‘it’s a boy, and he’s beautiful.’ ‘He would be,’ replied George, still very doubtful of laying full claim to this half-Irish child as one of his own. The Republican war was of recent memory.
Julia duly brought the baby back home where all four of her sisters took a hand in looking after him, Mimi most of all. It was as if she knew her husband George Smith would not father any children.
The subject of Freddy was not brought up too often in the Stanley household. At least his steamship company regularly paid Julia the housekeeping money he sent. But they were never sure with the blackout of news on all ships’ movements where Alfred was, or when he should be expected back. Julia, like many of the women of England, had lost her man to the Government, there was an unprecedented amount of regulation in everyday life with instructions on what should be done in each eventuality - from a gas attack, to a mass evacuation. In fact, all the young children were being evacuated from the prime target of the Merseyside docks area, but Julia decided to stay in the bosom of the family.
The young John Winston Lennon was the centre of attention. His first name honouring the legendary singing grandfather Jack, who Alfred had eulogised to Julia on many an evening during their long courtship, the middle name in honour of the only obstacle there appeared to be in the all-conquering path of Adolf Hitler.
There was little to distract the family during these dark hours. France and the Low Countries had fallen. The previous month the Royal Air Force had lost hundreds of men and machines trying to push back the Luftwaffe. Fresh attacks were expected daily, and the pummelling of the docks, stunning in its ferocity, was an indication that a new phase of warfare existed - total war. As was inevitable, it was people’s houses which were hit and with the Oxford Street maternity hospital little more than a mile from the docks, Julia was glad to be back in the apparent safety of the family home, Newcastle Road, Wavertree, with faces she knew.
Further out still from the city in what was then the village of Woolton, Mimi lived in a spacious new semi- detached house with a large garden and plenty of greenery all about. Just down from Menlove Avenue was a turn- ing which led even further into the undisturbed countryside - called Beaconsfield Road. In this road was a fine country house with several acres of tree-covered grounds - the owner had left the property in the 1930s to the Salvation Army. They had turned this magnificent bequest into a childrens’ home called Strawberry Field. Sometime previously it was said it had been a field where strawberries were grown. At this time, its name seemed merely picturesque, but then most of the houses in prosperous Woolton - soon to become a suburb of Liverpool - had picturesque names. Indeed, George and Mimi named their house ‘Mendips’ after a mountain range in Wales.
Early on Mimi decided that John would be far better off living with her and George. But it was not until Julia went to collect the money that the shipping line office passed on to her from Alfred, and found there was none, that it ever seemed possible.
Alfred, caught up in a world war, had been told in New York to report for duty on a Liberty Boat bringing in much- needed supplies to a beleaguered Britain through the submarine infested waters of the Atlantic. To his dismay he was told that instead of being a head waiter, as on the passenger ship he had sailed with to New York, he would be an assistant steward. Alfred rebelled at the loss of rank; his captain came up with a solution, ‘miss the Liberty Boat’. Freddy - who needed little encouragement duly did so. In a war there is no room for such acts of defiance. Freddy was duly despatched on the next Liberty Boat out after being interned. When his boat reached North Africa he was jailed for three months on a charge of stealing a bottle of vodka from the stores - it was a put-up job. Freddy, ever the outsider, had been singled out to be made an example of after the ship’s crew had broken open the cargo. So Freddy’s money to Julia stopped. He had none. Magnanimously, he wrote to Julia from his cell advising her to get out and enjoy herself. As he had previously discovered, there was a war on. Julia - in her turn - needed no encouragement. She had been used to living life as a lark, it was what she and Freddy had always done, and in the early months of 1942, she went out when she could. It was, for Britain, the darkest days of the war. Nothing was going right anywhere. Russia was crumbling under the mechanised might of the Nazi war machine. America had just come into the war, but few troops had arrived. In North Africa the British armies were being relentlessly pushed back by Rommel. Crete had been lost, along with Greece; Singapore had fallen, symbol of all Britain’s empire in the East. There was, in reality, very little to celebrate. Food was rationed, money - even if you had it - could buy precious little. All resources were being channeled into the war effort. Fashion for women, glamorous places of entertainment, stockings, make-up, all had ceased to exist. Liverpool, grey and grimy at the best of times, now appeared in unrelieved monotones. The ‘Prince Charming’ Julia found was deficient in the qualities Walt Disney would have given to a hero. He was a Welsh soldier.
Julia continued to live at home, and eventually Freddy re-appeared, only to go off to sea again. He sent back happy sounding letters to cheer up the family on the grim, monotonous home front, including ship’s concert lists where Alfred Lennon would be announced as singing ‘Begin the Beguine’. In a war, it was the closest you could get to glamour, and all through the 30s he and Julia - like so many millions of others - had lived out their lives v icariously in the Hollywood dream of rich, indulgent living. John Lennon’s earliest memory was of a song from one of the dream merchants - Walt Disney - as his mother sang
‘Do you want to know
a secret?
Promise not to tell.
You are standing by a wishing
well.’
Significantly - as we will find out - this treasured memory turned into a song was given by Lennon to George Harrison to sing as his first ‘B’ side on a Beatles single. It is an early example of how precious any association with his mother’s memory was to become.
At the age of 4, John Lennon remembered walking with his grandfather, George Stanley, by the Pier Head. In 1944 the signs of victory were palpably in the air. The devastation and bleakness could be viewed with some hope. American servicemen, several million of them, were preparing to launch the invasion of Europe, and a flourishing black market had developed in anything American. It had become synonymous with quality. For war weary Britain, a new low water mark had been reached when one of the many ministeries which ordered every detail of the people’s lives had invented the ‘utility’ mark as a sign of qual- ity. It really meant that the cheapest possible materials had been used in the most mean way. Any concept of elegance or beauty of line had been buried under the debris of the bomb sites, the air raid shelters where miserable nights were spent in the company of a jostling crowd, the ration books, the drab clothing, the unchanging fashions year after year, the chronic housing shortage.
John complained to his grandfather that his new shoes hurt. The lifelong sailor drew out his penknife and slit the heels. That was one instant cure for shoddy goods. He wondered what sort of chances the fatherless 4-year-old would have in the entirely new post-war world, with his mother involved with another man, and now - worse - a baby on the way. American money flooding in had undermined all morals he thought bitterly to himself. The Yanks only had to produce a pair of silk stockings and promise a girl a good time, they were that deprived. His own children and their generation were undoubtedly the casualties of war. It would be up to the little mite and his generation to try to put some order back into the world when all the killing and butchery had stopped, and when the country woke up from the frenzy of the moment to find that there was nothing - absolutely nothing - left in the coffers. Yet 40 short years ago when he had married, Britain was the unchallenged ruler of the world; with a vast amount of the exports Britain sent out to the dependent colonies and the former colonies of the Americas being channeled through the Liverpool docks. He looked about him, all that was left were blackened bomb sites. It was going to be a ruinously expensive victory.
John spent more and more time at Aunt Mimi’s. As far as she was concerned, Julia’s marriage had come to an end when Freddy had stopped sending money at the time John was 18-months-old. Certainly, the outward forms had been preserved for another year or so, but she could see that Alfred Lennon would never be any good for Julia, who in any case had given birth to a boy in the spring of ‘45.
The war had taught people a new ruthlessness. The baby was adopted by a Norwegian sea captain and his wife, money was very very tight. It was a good home.
Then at last the war was over. John spent as much time with Mimi as he did at his grandparents’ house with Julia. He liked the big garden at Mimi’s. Once or twice, his Uncle George had taken him to the dairy farm very early in the morning where he milked his cows before selling their produce at his dairy. One benefit of the war had been to put a premium on home-produced food with the shipping lanes in so much danger. George Smith - and his wife Mimi - had been one of the war’s winners. Alfred Lennon was one of its many losers. Now, after his three-month stint in jail on a technicality, he had learnt the ways of the black market in stockings and at war’s end found himself for perhaps the first time in his life with some ready money.
He was told by his son’s grandfather that John was at Mimi’s. Julia seemed unwilling to try to make a go of it. A plan formed in his mind. He went round to the forthright Mimi, who he knew as one of his keenest critics, and asked if he could take John off to Blackpool for the day. Reluctantly, she said yes.
John, now 5, was thrilled at the prospect of making sandcastles, paddling in the sea, eating candyfloss, all the trappings of a British day out at the seaside. He found out when he got to Blackpool, 45 miles to the north, that Freddy - on the profits of his trade in black market stockings - was planning to emigrate to New Zealand with a friend. They stayed at his friend’s flat for several weeks making the final preparations.
Julia arrived unannounced at the flat. She said very firmly that she wanted John back now she and a waiter friend had a nice home (accommodation at this time was almost impossible to obtain).
Freddy tried turning on the Irish-inherited charm. ‘I can tell you still love me Julia. This is our chance to start all over again. The war’s gone, that was the villain. This man, he’s only to fill in time, one of the civilians, doing very nicely while we were fighting the war.’
‘You’ll never get to New Zealand,’ Julia replied flatly, so unlike her usual musical voice. ‘No, I want John.’
A 5 year old boy came into the room. The parents stop ped arguing briefly.
‘John,’ Freddy said, a flash of hope breaking through the sudden gloom in his mind.
John bounded up to the father he had become used to having around in the last few weeks. He, at least, had never given up waiting for Freddy to return when the war was finished.
‘Is she coming back with us?’ he asked his father, look ing short-sightedly at the beautiful auburn-haired Julia across the room. She radiated in his sight.
‘No. You have to decide if you want to stay with me or with Mummy,’ Freddy said, as brightly as he could make the dread words sound. It was an awful but logical decision. He would stay with his father.
‘Now John, are you sure about that? You have to choose. Do you want to go to another country with Freddy? or stay here with me?’ Julia asked.
‘With Daddy,’ said John, beginning a deluge of tears.
‘That’s enough Julia, you’ve had your answer, leave him alone, can’t you see you’re upsetting him, haven’t you upset him enough while I was away at sea, giving away his brother?’
Julia turned with her usual grace, and walked out the door. John heard the door shut, the person he had spent all his life with was leaving him. The thud of the door had a deadly echo to it. He ran, as though possessed. Down the street he ran crying out ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy, don’t go.’ But Daddy couldn’t come home to live with the waiter Julia had now moved in with.
3. ‘This boy’s as sharp as a needle’
Something had cried out to follow Julia when she quietly and with finality walked out of the Blackpool ‘digs’ of the would-be emigrant to New Zealand. As the servicemen came home, many thousands, hundreds of thousands in fact, decided that they would start all over again in a new place; South Africa, Rhodesia, New Zealand, Australia, America. If nothing else, the war had opened people’s eyes to what was possible, the dreary war-scarred landscape they returned to in Britain was not, they were determined, to be the end of the dream. However, inexplicably to the young boy who was 5, it was not with Julia that he spent his days, instead he was taken to Aunt Mimi’s. He became even more confused. He tried calling Mimi mummy. ‘You can’t have two mummies’, she explained. Thereafter she was Mimi.
Julia, intent on consolidating her relationship with waiter Twitchy, found that all she could manage were occasional visits to her son, reminder of a failed wartime marriage which she hoped to put behind her in the new Socialist Britain. It was a time of enormous hope, in spite of the evidence of desolation all around. The austerities of the war persisted, the same ration books for food, the niggardly allowance of half a dozen eggs per week, the rare treat of more than a dubious mince or stew for meat. A Labour Government had been returned by a landslide with talk of a wholesale nationalisation of key industries so that the people could share in the country’s wealth. The only problem was that the country had no wealth. By 1947, the situation was grim in the extreme. A savage winter co- incided with a huge shortage of coal, the country’s foreign currency reserves were finished, thousands were starving to death in occupied Germany, France looked as though it would become Communist, Russia continued to annex and retain the Eastern block countries it had ‘liberated’. At this critical juncture an American launched what became known as The Marshall Plan. The pound was devalued, in exchange American money propped up the British and European economies, it was a shoring up of the status quo. America had done very well out of the war as manufacturer of the West’s armaments and - with payment for these arms - the world’s banker. The war had solved that vast country’s problem of over capacity in industry and unused natural resources. Now a ravaged world cried out for its products from the wartime factories. And America - its treasury loaded with money - could afford to supply on credit. Indeed, with The Marshall Plan it freely gave to build up Europe from the ruins. It was a wholly generous and enlightened move by the young American nation - but it did provide assured markets for American goods for a decade and more. The framework was being built for the consumer goods boom that was to propel the democracies to an undreamt of height of prosperity by the year 1960.
The grand plan was less obvious in war-ravaged Liverpool. Julia had her first child by Twitchy (as John Lennon immortally named the very nervous man) followed by a second. She had problems coping on Twitchy’s waiter’s wage, life was extremely hard, especially if you would rather dream and live in a world of make-believe as her Piscean nature dictated.
John appeared to be settling down with Mimi, he had in any case spent a great deal of time at the house in Menlove Avenue even before permanently moving in. He had started to go to Dovedale Primary School and with the help of his ‘Uncle George’ - Mimi’s dairy farmer husband - he could read and write after five months. At Mimi’s house he was on his best behaviour: quiet and sensitive, distrusting of all adults, aware that he depended on his aunt and uncle now that his parents could not look after him. Mimi, strangely, never mentioned this, it was just that he felt obligated, expected to be grateful.
After his third day at school, he insisted that Mimi let him go there by himself. She resorted to the subterfuge of following him at a discreet distance. The’ first school medical revealed that John had weak eyesight and his first glasses soon sat on his nose. In those days the wire-frame model of spectacles was the only one available - it was to take 20 years before they had become quaint. John hated the glasses and would only use them as a final resort. The last thing he wanted to be thought of as was a ‘cissy’. From day one at school, he fought for dominance. Woolton, being more village-like than tough city school, was not prepared for the explosion of energy and devilment that the ‘orphan’ boy unleashed upon them.
Unbeknown to Mimi, the sensitive child who at home liked nothing more than to disappear into his own world of drawing, crayoning and reading, turned into another char- acter at school.
He had a super-abundance of energy which led him to always seek to be in charge of his peer groups. He quickly formed his own gang and struggled for supremacy. At the same time his headmaster was particularly impressed by his versatility.
‘He can do anything he chooses to do, that boy’s as sharp as a needle’, Mr Evans, the headmaster, told Mimi, ‘but he won’t do anything stereotyped’.
It was in those days called ‘high spirits’ - today a child psychologist might call the behaviour disturbed. But in post-war Britain it was still considered quite normal for children to be allowed to get on with their own games - just as long as they did not disturb the adults who had plenty of problems of their own. So John Lennon quickly teamed up with two other boys who lived near Menlove Avenue - Peter Shotton and Nigel Whalley. Nigel knew John from the Sunday school and church choir at St. Peter’s, Woolton. In fact, John, as he later admitted, was always religious in his own impish way.
And it was at a St. Peter’s church fete that he was to meet another friend, but that was later. . .
At this time, the ease within the church community showed itself in an irreverent awareness of the vicar’s idiosyncracies. At one fete organised by nuns, he was even found dressed as a monk talking in an unintelligible language to other monks seated on a bench.
The addition of another boy, Ivan Vaughan, formed - significantly - a foursome of miscreants. And from then on, egged on by Lennon, they roamed with an enviable freedom around and about Woolton. Hurling clods of earth at the passing train at the tunnel in Garston, riding on the back of trams in towards the big city - that scared Lennon, but he wanted to prove how tough he was to the world, it hadn’t paid, he had found, to be too trusting in the world of adults, they would pick you up and drop you down at the call of some unexplainable whim.
His aunt only realised what a handful she had taken on when one day near Penny Lane (the road Menlove Avenue led into on the way towards the Liverpool city centre), she came upon a group of boys urging on two others engaged in a ding-dong fight. Mimi was relieved to see the boys were not from Dovedale when suddenly the ruck parted and out came Lennon, his smart blazer askew.
For some reason, even then the young Lennon lived a charmed life. The plot to derail a tram was not discovered, since luckily it failed. The day the police chased them off the golf course for hitting balls across Menlove Avenue, no names were taken. The girl who lived nearby and taught John lots of dirty jokes, never let on. The woman whose shop they visited to surreptitiously remove dinky toys while asking her for the hardest-to-reach sweets, came up with the answer - she put a glass screen in front of the toys. The old wartime spirit of ‘we’re all in the same boat’ was, she realised, not something the children shared. They viewed the adults as lost in a grim world, peopled by harsh memories. The pig swill dustbins disappeared, as the worst economy measures of the war years eased. By the end of the 1940s everyone wanted to take part in mass entertainment. The football matches were always filled. The dogs. The speedway.
Mimi did not restrict John’s movements in the Woolton area. Not much harm would come to him there among the garden parties, the parks and golf courses, the rubbish tips and quarries. She did not, fortunately, know about his gang’s essays into pulling girls’ knickers down, the dang- ling of their legs from a tree above Menlove Avenue to see who could actually knock the top of the big new double- decker buses.
Mimi restricted the visits to Liverpool itself to twice a year. Once to the Christmas Pantomime at the Empire, and once in the summer holidays to a suitable children’s film. These visits proved an inspiration to the already active pen and crayons of J. W. Lennon as he described himself. He filled books with characters and cartoons based on what he had experienced. But his greatest inspiration was a small boy called William who, in the early 1920s had - good- naturedly - terrified his genteel neighbourhood with a gang of boys. The ‘Just William’ stories of Richmal Crompton found fanatical devotees in a latter-day gang.
But the high spot of the school holidays for the gang was when the childrens’ home round the corner from Menlove Avenue held its garden party. As soon as the Salvation Army band struck up, John whooped for joy. He and the gang would sell bottles of pop for a penny a piece, help in the good cause of supporting the abandoned children, and in the seven or eight acres of grounds, thickly grown with trees, it was possible to entirely lose oneself in play - in another, altogether better world. The young John dimly remembered he was himself abandoned.
The freedom of childhood began to fade, John passed his ‘11 plus’ examination with no trouble and he was selected as one of the top 20% of pupils who the 1944 Education Act in Britain had ordained were to be the high flyers. The bright ordinary boys who would be given the very best education, and in return would regenerate the country from its sorry state.
In his first year at Quarry Bank Grammar School, just a mile from 251 Menlove Avenue, through winding lanes, John Lennon in his specially tailored blazer came near the top of his year. He had been joined by Peter Shotton at Quarry Bank and the two friends were soon inseparable.
However, in John’s second year tragedy struck. Uncle George died from cirrhosis of the liver. The quiet kindly dairy farmer, John’s secret ally in his battles with the stern discipline of Mimi, had suddenly gone. Mimi did not believe in physical punishment, but in ignoring the offen- der, or sending him to his room to solitary. Uncle George would then smuggle a bun to him, or in some way show the boy he was not entirely out of disfavour.
It was like the time Julia had come round after some accident with blood on her face and John had retreated to the garden rather than see the evidence of pain. Now on hearing the news of George’s death he retired to his bed- room, sharing the strange ‘hee hee’ sardonicism he felt with his cousin from Scotland who was visiting. Even well- ordered lives came to a scrappy, unpredictable end the two conspirators in glee hysterically realised.
4.‘He Only Failed By One Grade In 8 ‘0’ Levels’
At about the time George Smith, John Lennon’s closest male relative, passed out of his life, Julia re-entered it. He suddenly realised that she was living no more than a short bus ride away from Woolton. Soon John took to visiting her, sometimes cutting school to see her - and taking along his trusted friends, Ivan Vaughan and Pete Shotton. Julia - in sharp contrast to her older sister - liked nothing better than a good laugh. The pangs of guilt she felt at not being a better mother were transformed into a jocular elder sister-younger brother relationship. Her ‘live for today’ attitude, which had never completely left Julia from her formative years in the twenties, was passed on to John and his friends. She bought him his first coloured shirt - in 1954 white along with grey were the only colours for shirts - she told him not to worry about increasingly bad school reports. By his second year at Quarry Bank, John together with Peter Shotton had decided to take the rebel’s road, they were in constant trouble for minor acts of insub- ordination - such as throwing a blackboard rubber out of the window, going AWOL, gambling on the school playing field. First the school and then Mimi discovered John’s penchant for obscene verses and drawings. The rows between Mimi and John became more frequent and with both being indomitable characters, the rows were bitter while they lasted but would end with both erupting into laughter. Julia, in contrast, did not consider it part of her function to castigate, but rather to encourage. Mimi one day threw out a lot of John’s poems. He realised that she - like the schoolmasters - was totally unable to see that he was different; in his own estimation he was an isolated genius, he would see what no one else could see, look at himself in a mirror and see his face turn from a sensitive, withdrawn, frightened person into a figure flowing with all the energies of the universe. He would walk through the woods in Strawberry Field, climb the trees and be in his own created world, a world at once lyrical and utterly removed from the constraints civilisation tried to place upon it. It was unfettered, how he wished to be. On visiting his cousins up in Scotland he would walk on the hills surrounded by the deep tang of the heather and feel himself fully alive in this natural world which cared nothing for regulations. By winning Julia over gradually, John established a bolt hole for himself when the relationship grew too tense with Mimi. On one occasion he returned to find Mimi had got rid of the dog - Sally. She said it was because there was no one to take it for walks. John recognised the cruelty and broke down in tears. Something he previously only did in the privacy of his room when he fell into thinking about his lost parents. He was proud of the way his friends took to Julia, who like him had a macabre sense of humour. She would walk along the street with a pair of woolly knickers on her head pretending to be unaware of the source of merriment as people stared and stared on the semi-detached streets. Another favourite trick was to wear a pair of glasses without lenses. She would fix someone with her gaze in conversation and then nonchalantly push her finger through the frame to rub her eye.John could relate to her his larks at school. He had quickly decided he would have to fight his way through, but the boy who felt the need to protect himself with a show of toughness lost his first fight at secondary school. He sharpened his tongue, so that any sign of weakness would be immediately seized upon - a characteristic he was never to lose. The famous Lennon caustic ‘wit’ had been born.
Somehow, he survived at the school. Expulsion would have been a case for the Liverpool Education Authority, Lennon needed to go just as far as the cliff edge and look down. He did receive a week’s suspension, and innumerable canings, but this helped to confirm him in his tough guy persona.
Year by year, he descended from the top form, until he was twentieth in the C stream, bottom of the school, by his fourth year. At this point a way of escape filtered through to the confused angry man. He would go off to sea just like his dad had at 16. Mimi received a ‘phone call from the shipping line’s employment office. She advised them strongly against taking the young Lennon.
Mimi had never thought John had the discipline for learning the piano, so she was hardly aware of the ease with which he had won his first musical instrument. She took in student lodgers to help with the house-keeping, and one had bet John that if he could learn a tune on it by the following morning, he could have a harmonica. John learnt two tunes.
On another occasion, he had travelled to Scotland by bus - as he did each Christmastime - to stay with his cousins and aunt in Scotland’s Highlands. On the way he had been playing with his harmonica. The bus conductor had been sufficiently impressed to say that if John met him at the bus garage the following morning, he would give the boy a really good harmonica.
But music was not John Lennon’s first love, nor was writing. He liked nothing better than to go fishing, here he could tune in to the peace all about, but that was a private side which would have shocked his masters at school; Lennon in league with Peter Shotton was considered the school’s leading trouble-maker, although it was his wicked humour that troubled them most. Lennon in his turn considered all but one or two masters as stupid - for not recognising his talents.
In 1955, with the war 10 years behind, Britain was learning of the good life - mostly through American films which were even glossier and more dreamlike than they had been in the 1930s. There was the big daddy of them all with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong in High Society - it represented the ultimate dream of the rich life - even if it was a life utterly lacking in taste. Frankie Lane and Johnny Ray provided more of the heart throb that women appeared to be demanding - indeed Johnny Ray was sensitive enough to even cry on stage. In the late 1940s there had been bee bop, but by the early 50s the crooners had taken over. The British radio, still an important institution with its monolithic coverage of the country and many households still not possessing television, concentrated more on singalongs of popular tunes. Music While You Work was still played - as it had been in the war to keep the production wheels humming. There were diary programmes, the most famous being Mrs Dale’s Diary - a doctor’s wife who every afternoon could be heard wondering and worrying about Jim - her husband, we hasten to add. The BBC took its task of providing moral uplift for the nation seriously. The only time it dropped its guard of earnestness was in comedy - and this was one area where Liverpool had provided a rich source of talent - Arthur Askey and Ken Dodd hailed from the port. All the great comics came to the Liverpool Empire, for the old splendid Edwardian theatre days of variety were an unconscionably long time dying. By the mid fifties in more risqué places than Liverpool, the reviews had turned blue with nude women who by some quirk of the Lord Chamberlain’s office were deemed not obscene if they stayed stationary. In retrospect, entertainment had reached a dead end, something new would have to come in its place. Television, with the introduction of a commercial channel in 1955, was about to mop up all the old devotees of the theatre. It happened, naturally enough, in America first: the discovery of a new customer called a teenager who wanted to go out and be entertained, who had money to spend - but it was the film industry which responded immediately. In 1954, in America, Rock Around the Clock starring Bill Haley and the Comets was premiered. It caused riots. The theme song found its way over to the 51st State by 1955. Rock Around the Clock was like nothing the young had heard before. It had the raw jungle rhythm that stirred the senses and set the feet tapping, it was an explosion of fresh energy in a world stuck in inertia where the young went off to be conscripts in armies preparing for Armageddon - indeed it later transpired that the world had come the closest ever to all-out nuclear war in 1955, though typically the news-managed masses knew next to nothing about it. The cinema newsreels simply appeared to be showing an awful lot of hydrogen bomb explosions in the atmosphere. Radioactive pollution was barely understood in its enormity - and there was little organised resistance.
Teenagers instinctively recognised the clarion call of rebellion against the old conformity. The young Lennon went to see the film; ready, not to say eager, for the destruction of cinema seats the film inevitably, he had read, provoked in its audience. He saw a chubby middle-aged white American with a kiss curl hanging down over his forehead and was baffled that such a man could produce such music. What he did not know was that Haley - an old pro of 20 years - had indeed learnt a new syncopated beat. It was natural rhythm, descendant via the American blacks and their slave forebears of the sensual, rich, free music of Africa. The wheel had come full circle, a port which had grown rich on the profits of the slaving ships, was rediscovering a naturalness altogether foreign to the regimen- ted life. Rebels like Lennon had never fully taken on board the stiffness and alienation of the post-war world, and he along with many thousands of others was about to embark upon an odyssey which would let the western civilisations rediscover their own bodies, instead of the awkward shells they presently inhabited. Such freedom of the body would demand its accompanying freedom of the mind . . . but that was all much later.
After Bill Haley, ‘If a Body Digs a Body Rocking Through the Rye’, came early the following year of 1956 a skiffle craze, of which one of the leading proponents was an Irish-Glaswegian called Lonnie Donnegan.
‘Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bed post overnight? If your mother says don’t chew it, do you swallow it in spite?’
He showed that anyone could make music, all you needed was a washboard, and a tea chest and a broom handle with a piece of string. Skiffle groups were formed up and down the long narrow shape of the British Isle by the thousand. Including a group called the Quarrymen. John badgered his mother into buying him a guitar ‘on the drip’ - weekly instalments paid through the post by mail. It cost £10, and was a Spanish guitar guaranteed not to split. One of the happy results of Julia and Freddy’s relationship was her ability to accompany him on the banjo - an instrument used to great effect by another worthy Lancashire comedian/singer, George Formby.
‘I’m leaning on a lamp-post at the corner of the street watching all the pretty ladies go by . . .’
Sung with a perpetually beaming, impish face. It could almost have been an early version of the Beatle public persona. Indeed on one Beatle song, ‘Hey Bulldog’, John Lennon went into a Formby impersonation - too late to get it on record.
Although Julia could, she claimed, play any stringed instrument, she taught John banjo chords. It made no difference - the public was not musically discerning, and thought skiffle a passing fad like pogo sticks, hula hoops, and yo yos. The young wanted to play again.
But the first Quarryman group - comprising John Lennon on guitar, Peter Shotton on washboard and four others: Len Garry, Colin Hanson on drums, Eric Griffiths on guitar, Rod Davis on banjo - were influenced by the moody, sullen tones of a white American from the South who sang with a sultry sex appeal. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley grabbed hold of the young 15-year-old Lennon who had been drifting for over a year and gave him a purpose in life. He modelled himself on Elvis’ version of young manhood, his hair sprouted a quiff, the sides of hair were swept back and hung down low at the back. Elvis, for Lennon as for countless other teenagers, was the King. The Idol.
But the first song Lennon learnt to play right through was by the high-voiced leader of The Crickets, a bespectacled slight young man called Buddy Holly, whose music was both catchy and easy to play. On Empire Day, 1956, the Quarrymen gave their first concert in Rose Street from the back of a lorry. No fee was paid, but a good time was had by all. John’s friend, Nigel Whalley, set about trying to get the group gigs, at fetes and parties. The personnel, under the pressure of approaching ‘0’ levels changed frequently but the standard was sufficient for them to get the odd gig and even on occasion actual payment. Lennon had begun to experiment turning his shoulder towards the audience and leering at the young girls, already some of the palpable psychic magnetism of his stage persona was starting to emanate from the moody 16-year-old.
‘0’ levels were finished, it was the summer of ‘57. John entered for 8 ‘0’ levels, he failed them all, though he had, noted his new headmaster Mr Pobjoy, only failed each subject by one grade. Mr Pobjoy, a young 35-year-old in his first headmastership, spoke to both Lennon and Mimi. To Lennon he was forthright. ‘You’ll either be an artist or a labourer,’ he bluntly told him, recognising that the boy’s only real interest seemed to lie in art. (He had failed ‘Art’ ‘0’ level too, illustrating the subject of ‘travel’ for instance with an inspired picture of a hunchback covered in warts.
Mr Pobjoy now called in Mimi. Was she prepared to finance John through his first year of art college until he was eligible for a grant? Mimi agreed, she wanted her nephew to have some career, all too aware of how his father had drifted, superstitious of the effect of the inherited genes.
Mr Pobjoy wrote as good a reference as he could in the circumstances. The school, founded in 1922 by a grandson of the aristocracy who was educated at Eton, had modelled itself on the house system of public schools with masters in gowns, prefects and canings. Even with an apparent ‘ne’er do well’ like Lennon, Pobjoy felt a headmaster’s duty to do something for the chap. On the strength of Pobjoy’s claim that Lennon had lately changed for the better, and on the basis of a striking portfolio of work, John Winston Lennon was accepted by the Liverpool School of Art for an Intermediate Course of General Study followed by two more years of specialisation. Aunt Mimi, who accompanied the suit-clad rebel to the interview, was relieved. The normal minimum requirement was 5 ‘0’ Levels. The right background, the right school, even Uncle George’s old suit had done the trick. John at home with Mimi had always spoken properly, without much trace of the ‘Scouse’ accent he was later to adopt in public
.
5 ‘I’m Afraid Your Mother’s Dead, Son’
In the summer of ‘57, things were beginning to look up for John Lennon. Entrance to Art School meant he would not have to work for a living, and although Mimi had tried to encourage John to do chores about the garden, if he wanted more than his strictly regulated pocket money, he resolutely refused any such deal.
The great summer occasion in Woolton was at the social centre of the village, St. Peter’s Church, when the Annual Fete was held. In 1957, the date set was July 7. On the rising slopes above Menlove Avenue, marquees were erected in the church grounds, the procession that would wind through the streets to the church was prepared. The Quarrymen - being well-connected through John - had naturally been booked for the young people, not as a star turn, more as a side show. The main spectacular came from the band of the Cheshire Yeomanry.
Ivan Vaughan, a friend of John’s from their days at Dovedale Primary, used the occasion of Woolton’s big day to invite along a fellow student at the Liverpool Institute, a prestigious grammer school in the city centre, which was literally alongside the Art School, to which John had - by some beneficient guiding hand - just obtained entry.
Two years previously Ivan’s friend, Paul McCartney, had moved to Allerton from the more industrial area of Speke. Allerton had plenty of open space - it was where Quarry Bank School was situated. McCartney had just turned 15 and felt curious about neighbouring Woolton’s big day. As far as he was concerned Woolton people were snobs and very well off. His recently widowed father had been very lucky to obtain their Corporation-owned small terrace house with a few yards of garden. It was definitely a step- up. Since his mother had died the year before he had begun to play guitar more and more seriously and felt with one parent dead -very old for his years. Ivan had mentioned this great band; Paul McCartney felt good enough to become part of them - first he would check them out.
John was in full cry - never one to be able to take his drink he had drowned his frayed nerves after Mimi had seen him for the first time in full ‘Teddy Boy’ regalia - more exactly a heavily padded jacket across the shoulders, long and cut lean at the hips, with extremely tight, suggestive trousers - it was the uniform of the ‘King’. And just like Elvis, Lennon had greased his hair back at the sides.
McCartney got in close to the stage so that he could study John’s technique on lead guitar - although the sound was raunchy, there was something strange about the way he played his chords, it didn’t matter, this guy couldn’t even remember the words, so he made up dirtier ones. Thus ‘Come Go With Me’ had become –
‘Come little darling, come and go with me’
Nevertheless, the band seemed unpretentious enough even if they were all Woolton people. Paul was taken to meet them backstage in the church hall by the prescient Ivan Vaughan. Lennon was not over friendly to McCartney but they were introduced and talked.
They quickly discovered they shared an admiration for Eddie Cochran - still one of the most under-rated of the early rockers - whose driving energy and power was something different again from Elvis’ sultriness. McCartney offered to write down all the words of Cochran’s new number ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ after he had played the song on a borrowed guitar. John was impressed, even though well under the weather after having begun drinking early in the morning. The young auditionee - for they both understood it to be that - launched into Gene Vincent’s, Be- Bop-A-Lula’ and again he knew all the words. Lennon remained silent, McCartney played a couple more standards from his repertoire. The audition came to an unannounced end. John showed his appreciation by thanking Paul for the words of the song.