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chapter 2

1900s

Toxteth 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.

If Freddie and Julia felt that their courtship was beset with pitfalls and emotional hardships, then Freddie being ‘lost at sea’ and the arrival of a baby in war-torn Liverpool would test their love for each other to breaking point.