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chapter 4

1946–50

Wandsworth Jail

JOHN’S NEW home was now 251 Menlove Avenue, a three-bedroom, bay-windowed, pebble-dashed semi-detached house, complete with lead-glassed quarter-light windows and the name plate of ‘Mendips’. John’s bedroom was the small box room over the vestibule. He would stay there throughout his childhood and into early adulthood.

Mendips was a sign to Mimi of having ‘made it’ – no more living next to butchers’ shops, drapers or costermongers. Here at Mendips, Mimi could look over a golf course a hundred yards away and was surrounded by a variety of mansions built by the great and the good, whose money had been made in trade from the port. Woolton should have been an ideal place to bring up a child with its woods, green spaces, its golfers and a village with a history going back to the Vikings. For post-war Liverpool families living with their bomb-damaged houses, cluttered inner cities and decrepit housing stock, Mendips was a dream. For five-year-old John, it would be anything but. The post-war world of Britain in which the young John was brought up was in a period of social revolution. A war-weary population was demanding a better way of life to the deprivation suffered during the 1930s. The 1945 General Election produced a shock at the polls in the shape of a landslide victory for the Labour Party, which ran on a mandate of addressing issues of poverty, social class and the fairer distribution of wealth. The formation of the Welfare State was to be the vehicle for this change.

The 1945 General Election radically changed the country’s political landscape, with newly elected Labour MPs singing ‘The Red Flag’ on the first day of Parliament, which caused more than a hint of concern to the British Establishment. The General Election result was seen by many as a kick in the teeth to the Conservative Leader, Winston Churchill. His supporters were amazed that the electorate should see fit to jettison the nation’s wartime leader. Upon hearing the election result, Arthur Marwick relates how an upper-class supporter of the Tory party announced: ‘But this is terrible – they’ve elected a Labour Government and the country will never stand for that.’¹

The Welfare State was to provide a clear divide between those in favour of the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ ideology and those in favour of collective support. The Welfare State was to deliver cradle-to-grave provision of social care. This included the need for decent housing. Many, like Mimi and her family, had already followed the route of the ‘respectable working classes’ in moving steadily further afield from inner-city Liverpool. Indeed, not long after Mimi took John to Mendips, the following item appeared in the Liverpool Echo regarding a home in Mimi’s old neighbourhood, Head Street: ‘A Beaufort Street family were awakened at one in the morning by a loud crash to find a hole five foot square [in diameter] had opened in the side of their home.’² The reporter concluded with the view that this was not an uncommon incident.

Berkley Street in Toxteth, where the Stanley family had moved, was sliding towards decline just as the family moved further afield again to Newcastle Road in Wavertree. Sociologist J. B. Mays’ research into the once prestigious Princes Road area of Toxteth area noted that:

It is significant that Negroes serving in the United States Forces stationed in the Merseyside area find their way to the Berkley Street region in search of recreation and companionship. There is little doubt that one reason for the visitation of coloured and white men is the attraction of certain dubious clubs where illegal pleasures may be bought. According to reliable information, there were a great number of brothels in the area during the war years.³

Liverpool’s Berkley Street was the area where Stanley Crouch’s ‘Negro chaos’ met ‘Scouse chaos’ and lindy-hopped the night away. Like many factors of life, housing and where you lived in Liverpool could be a seen as a badge of honour or shame. Liverpool’s rented housing stock always had a history of being extremely poor in quality. In 1954 the National Building Association estimated that Liverpool had around 88,000 unfit dwellings which housed approximately 90,000 families. This meant almost a third of the city’s population had to live in slum housing.

When John commented on where he lived, he insisted it was not the poor kind of slummy image that was projected in all The Beatles’ stories. In the class system, it was about half a class higher than Paul, George or Ringo, who lived in government-subsidised houses.⁴

He was fully aware of how distinctly housing differentiated people. This was why the council estates where Paul and George lived brought out all the snobbery in Mimi. During John’s time under her ‘mentorship’ there would be frequent and varied references to both Paul and George as ‘scruffs’ and ‘common types’. Indeed, when a young Paul McCartney came calling for John, he was made to wait by the side entrance of Mendips and, after being given a slow, deliberate once-over by Mimi, she would call to her nephew: ‘John, your little friend’s here!’ Paul noted:

She’d smile. I’d know what she’d done. She’d know what she’d done. I would ignore it. It was very patronising … she was very aware that John’s friends were lower class. John mixed with the lower classes, I’m afraid, you see. She was the kind of woman who would put you down with the glint of an eye.⁵

‘Common’ and ‘lower’ seemed to be her regular terms of reference, and Paul McCartney was aware of this clash of cultures from very early on:

John, because of his upbringing and his unstable family life, had to be hard, witty, always ready for the cover up, ready for the riposte, ready for the sharp little witticism. Whereas with my rather comfortable upbringing – a lot of family, lots of people, very northern, ‘Cup of tea, love?’ – my surface grew to be easy going …⁶

Social hierarchies and the shifts they were subject to were certainly significant at this time. In response to a commissioned Gallup Poll in the early 1950s which asked ‘What do you think [the] Labour [Party] stands for?’ responses included: ‘More money for less work.’ A headmaster’s wife: ‘Giving the working classes power they are not fitted to use.’ A commercial traveller: ‘They say social security but I think class war.’ A solicitor’s wife: ‘Pampering the working man.’ A dentist: ‘Class hatred.’ An engineering technician: ‘Revenge and grab.’ A butcher’s wife: ‘To keep down the people with money.’ The same set of interviews revealed the views of a housewife who believed that ‘the chief value of the middle classes is that their way of life represents a standard which the working class can emulate’.⁷ Many of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy that the Labour Party sought to help lived in poor housing and welcomed the demolition of the slums, which were to be replaced by central government-supported council house estates. But in post-war Britain, Mimi and many others felt under attack by the Welfare State’s New Jerusalem. The issue of financially supporting social, educational and economic provision in the country at large became a battleground for left and right. Mimi saw herself as a ‘get up and go’ type of person and believed that giving people state money only made them ‘soft’.

The consensus of the post-war period in many ways hid a build-up of resentment on both sides of Britain’s class divide, with the upper and middle classes resenting the ‘uppity’ working class for not recognising their betters, and the working class equally resentful for not having their part in the recent World War recognised or being provided with sufficient provision for a decent quality of life.

Woolton was where Mimi’s husband George was born and brought up. Such a village existence – quiet, slow-paced and seemingly unchanging – may have contributed to George’s laid-back approach to life. It could be argued that inner-city Liverpool had much more in common with New York than it did with Woolton. Mimi’s courtship with the man who was to be father to John for ten years began with him delivering milk from atop a horse and cart from his family’s dairy business to Woolton Convalescent Home, where Mimi worked as a nurse. Though George was well thought of, he liked a drink and a bet with his friends. He was good-looking, six feet tall, and his constant requests for a date were rebuffed. Eventually, after years of George’s overtures, Mimi agreed to go out with him.

During their dating, mild-mannered George fared no better than Freddie in being bullied and harassed by Pop. In Berkley Street, Pop had a habit of bursting into the front room where Mimi and George held their courtship nights and demanding that polite, middle-aged George leave Now! Even Mimi was to comment that Pop ‘was a bit of a bully’. She was to learn from this, though.

George had by this point suggested marriage to Mimi many times, but she stalled. Mimi’s view of George was that he was no more than a stop-gap or fall-back – when someone let her down, she’d call George. According to Mimi, she had already been engaged to a doctor at the hospital who died from an infection that he caught from a patient. Then she was engaged to a doctor who left for Kenya and finally she had a relationship with a RAF fighter pilot who later died in the war. Mimi’s accounts of these Mills & Boon romantic interludes made the role of a milkman’s wife less than attractive. But there was the not insubstantial matter of George’s intended inheritance of the farm, surrounding land and its buildings. Mimi was 32 years old; George ten years older. Mimi was in danger of becoming what her father Pop cruelly labelled his youngest daughter Harriet – ‘an old maid’. With war looming and a man shortage on the horizon, Mimi had a choice of George or continuing employment as a spinster in Woolton Convalescent Home. Finally, after another delivery of milk, George proposed once more and Mimi accepted. To him it was a marriage of respectability.

To Mimi it was a marriage of convenience.

Pop’s support of Mimi was based around the notion of getting Julia to move back in at Newcastle Road and take care of him. When approached, Julia refused. She wouldn’t move in without Bobby. The birth of Victoria, whose father was Taffy Williams, along with the constant pressure by her family not to keep the child, left her in a depressed and debilitated state. She spent almost the entire pregnancy indoors. Bobby was her only means of emotional support and refuge. She wasn’t going to leave him just to provide Pop with a housekeeper. Pop’s old age and physical frailty had made him reconsider his previous righteous indignation and rants. Julia and Bobby moved in with him.

When Julia and Bobby arrived at Mendips and attempted to get John to come and live with them at Pop’s home at Newcastle Road, it ended in crushing defeat for his mother, who was categorically told that John would not be leaving. John’s older cousin, Leila Harvey, witnessed Mimi flinging John behind her and screaming at Julia: ‘You are not fit to be this boy’s mother!’⁸ A combination of postnatal depression, the loss of Freddie and her new dependence on Pop for the roof over her head all led to Julia becoming an emotional shell. She was finally worn out by the uncertainties of life. This included Freddie’s seagoing escapades. The birth of John without her husband’s support, the pressures and judgement that surrounded the illegitimate birth of Victoria and the almost immediate demands for her to be adopted had left Julia no match for Mimi, whom Julia Baird describes as a ‘Rottweiler’ and a ‘bulldog’.⁹

As part of the ‘deal’ for John living at Mendips, he was brought to Pop’s by Mimi to visit his mother only on a Saturday afternoon. Mimi refused to let Julia call at Mendips. It is also worth noting that had Mimi really wanted to, she could well have adopted Julia’s daughter, Victoria. Why didn’t she? She didn’t want a newborn baby for adoption, even in the shape of her own niece. Newborn babies are a full-time, high-maintenance job. Mimi, it seems, wanted one off the shelf, one already ‘housebroken’. Her complex psychological make-up reveals a permanent clash between her extreme, independent, confident and narrow outlook on life and her unquestionable deference and admiration for those she saw as her betters. A curious aspect of Mimi’s attitude towards Julia’s ‘stain of shame’ and the dishonourable shadow this cast over the Stanley household is that she was herself an illegitimate child. Mary Elizabeth Stanley was born on 24 April 1906; her parents married in a Liverpool parish church on 19 November 1906. Perhaps the child Julia gave birth to in a Salvation Army hospital would be, if the child remained inside the family, a reminder to her oldest sister, Mimi – a sister who spent the best part of her life moralising, and who was herself born out of wedlock.

Regardless of her motives, Mimi had emerged triumphant over Julia. All that remained was to eliminate the unwanted input or presence of Freddie. Freddie’s particular lifestyle made it easy for Mimi to do this. It was the simple matter of a threat. When John started school, seafaring Freddie found himself docked in London, eager at the prospect of travelling to Liverpool to see his son for the first time in nearly 18 months. ‘He was immensely excited at the prospect of being united with his son’, Freddie’s second wife Pauline recalled, but couldn’t face the idea of meeting Julia in the home she shared with Bobby and in order to gain some ‘courage’ for the forthcoming visit proceeded to go a massive bender with five of his shipmates.¹⁰

The group ended up on a central London street admiring the expensive gowns in an exclusive women’s clothing store late at night. Before anyone could utter ‘it wasn’t me, guv’, a shop window was smashed. His shipmates ‘legged it’. With typical Freddie logic, he stepped inside the store, withdrew a mannequin off its stand and proceeded to dance around with it in the middle of Bond Street. The same Freddie, who wouldn’t dance with his own wife to save his life and had stared blankly at Julia as she entertained a stream of new dance partners at the local dance hall, now plucked up the (Dutch) courage to engage in a quick foxtrot down the streets of the West End. As with most of Freddie’s escapades, it ended in tears, or, to be more accurate, in his arrest by two passing policemen. He was sentenced to six months in Wandsworth Prison.

But behind the farce there were severe repercussions for John. Not only would he not see his father again until he was an adult, but Freddie compounded his arrest by making the fatal mistake of writing a letter to Mimi, with the intention of seeking her advice with regards to his time behind bars and how best to get out. Mimi’s view of her brother-in-law had always been coloured by embarrassment and contempt. On his marriage to Julia, Mimi’s view was blunt and unambiguous: ‘Why she picked him I’ll never know. I couldn’t believe she ended up with a seaman. He was a good for nothing.’¹¹ But Freddie wasn’t to know the extremely low opinion that his sister-in-law held of him; he also wasn’t fully aware of the role Mimi had played in taking John from his mother. Now in Wandsworth Prison, he had made it game, set and match as to where John was to spend the next 17 years of his life. Mimi’s return letter to the prison told Freddie exactly where he stood – that he had better start a new life well outside of Liverpool, unless he wanted John to find out his father was a jailbird. Essentially, Freddie was blackmailed out of his son’s life.

Julia had originally placed John in Mosspits Infant School near Newcastle Road. When Mimi took John away from his mother, she placed him in Dovedale Infant School, which was nearer to Mendips, and further away from Julia. The move was not, as some have stated, due to John’s bad behaviour, but was intended to isolate John further from his mother and to make him more dependent on Mimi. This ruse backfired when the generation gap between those mothers of John’s fellow classmates and Mimi became a barrier to friendship or networking.

A major problem in trying to untangle what really went on in John’s childhood is that most information on John’s early years relies almost entirely on Mimi’s own recollection. Yet the exaggerated accounts of John being surrounded by the love and affection of a mother figure, with his education and all his leisure and social needs addressed, are largely fabricated. The reason behind Mimi’s rose-tinted view of John’s time at Mendips was to mask the reality of what happened with Julia and the destabilising and emotionally harmful upbringing that John received. Mimi prided herself as the standard bearer of a puritanical discipline whose rallying cry to any of young John’s protests would be: ‘It’s for your own good.’ Mimi herself stated: ‘I had no time to go playing ducks in the bath with him.’¹² This in many ways speaks volumes about her, the message seemingly being that not only was she indifferent to the needs of her young nephew, but she was a busy woman. That was in spite of the fact that Mimi had one child to look after, a husband, whom she would make sure looked after himself, and no full- or part-time job of her own. Such unwillingness to take voluntary or paid employment, along with Mimi’s own misanthropic attitude, left her socially isolated and John gradually became an unnatural focus of her attention.

Mimi lacked maternal instincts, but had the confidence to fake it. It was Uncle George who came to John’s rescue – he understood the confusion and emotional turmoil that, at such a young age, John had gone through. It was Uncle George who spent endless hours teaching the young John to read, starting with the headlines of the local paper and then helping him all the way through to picture books. This eventually grew to classic children’s books such as The Wind in the Willows, Swallows and Amazons and the Just William series. It was George who played the parental role. With studied indifference to the effects of the absence of other family members on young John, Mimi would declare: ‘George would see him to bed with a smile most nights.’¹³

John’s older cousin Leila recalled that, notwithstanding George’s night-time security job, ‘he took us all to the pictures [and] to the park’, and he allowed the children to have a picnic in the garden shed.¹⁴ George loved John in a way that Mimi could never dream of. Maybe it was George’s own insight into Mimi’s destructiveness that gave him some semblance of understanding towards what young John Winston Lennon had to endure. Mimi had always had herself at the forefront of her thoughts. She may have developed this attitude from having to take on the responsibility of looking after her four younger sisters, demanding deference and obedience from them.

Mimi needed the reassurance of acceptance from those she felt were her peers, those who were professionals, self-employed, those of independent means – the cultivated and university educated. Those who fell outside this circle were ‘common’. In essence, Mimi was a snob. After George Harrison’s first visit to Mendips, Mimi was to comment: ‘You always do go for the low-class types, don’t you, John?’¹⁵ She needed John to gain acceptance into the magic circle of friends whom she saw as the better half of society. The problem was that she had gained serious black marks on her venture into middle-class suburbia. She had made herself and George look like a pair of common house-breakers with Mimi’s hunger for a better and more prestigious house. The sight of the pair spending hours humping furniture over a backyard fence from one house to the other must have proved a shocking scene for those who viewed it – think a 1940s version of The Beverly Hillbillies, minus the humour. Because of her greed for the house, Mimi didn’t consider how she and her husband might have looked to others. She never considered the housing shortage of war-torn Liverpool.

Mimi’s lack of acceptance from her neighbours also came in the shape of her husband George. He was a quiet and decent man, liked by all who met him. But he was also a functioning alcoholic and compulsive gambler. George, still a relatively young and attractive man when he married Mimi, had at that time some degree of standing in the community. He had a pleasant personality and was deemed a gentleman by those around him. He was presented with an inscribed tankard by the landlord and patrons of his local pub, such was his sociability. But a pleasant personality was not enough to hide his reputation as a hard drinker. Mimi wasn’t fully aware that his twin diseases were public knowledge before they married. In Mimi’s eyes, George now became ‘damaged goods’, which goes some way towards explaining her constant putdowns of him. The final nail in the coffin for George’s credibility was his failed effort to become an entrepreneur in the shape of independent bookmaker, a venture carried out from the confines of Mendips. Historian Ross McKibbin has described the area of George’s ‘employment’ as ‘a large and sophisticated industry [which] was constructed to meet the demands of the small better’. A press with a huge circulation told him (more rarely her) what he needed to know to make an informed bet; an army of tipsters was at hand to assist him further; and, above all, in most pubs and clubs, in nearly every factory or workshop and on the streets of every working-class community, there was a bookmaker with whom he could make that bet. There was only one problem: it was illegal.¹⁶

Illegal bookmaking was made possible in working-class areas due to a team of ‘bookies’ runners’, a lookout or two, a safe place (usually a crowded pub) for the bookie to operate from and the safety of being surrounded by a supply of gamblers provided by the densely populated area. But George’s bookmakers in Woolton, which operated out of his own home of Mendips, stuck out like a sore thumb.

A major factor in Mimi’s permission for Mendips’ use as a bookies’ shop was greed. Her student lodgers complained of ‘paying over the odds’ for their rent, at least by comparison to similar student digs. Cynthia Lennon, who lived with Mimi after she and John were married, believed that ‘Mimi loved three things: money, Lennon and her cats, in that order’.¹⁷

Essentially Mimi married a man whom she could dominate, and with the added promise of a hefty inheritance. When this didn’t materialise, she was prepared to risk the negative and criminal consequences of running a bookmakers at home. Even with her background in nursing, at a time of labour shortages and plentiful opportunities for people with her experience, she never worked in paid employment when she was married. For women in her position, it wasn’t the thing to do. She would rather witness a stream of dubious strangers make a beeline to her front door, but not before furtively glancing around for plainclothes policemen or nosy neighbours, than go out to work herself. The Beverly Hillbillies nature of Mimi’s arrival at Mendips, her marriage to a known chronic alcoholic and gambler, and their use of Mendips as a substitute for Royal Ascot led to the total ostracism of Mimi by her neighbours. Her cold manner didn’t help to persuade her neighbours that she should be given a second chance.

Mrs Bushell, a neighbour who shared a common garden fence, would have an occasional chat, but in the ten years as her neighbour, Mimi was never invited in for a cup of tea. Mrs Bushell described her as ‘unfriendly’. According to Mrs Bushell, the neighbours’ views of Mimi and George were that they were merely ‘working-class folk’, a view that was reaffirmed by George’s job as night watchman in a factory. What Mimi needed was a remedy to this outcast situation. She believed she had found it in the shape of John.

Mimi would always maintain that she needed to bring John up due to the need to save the boy from the shameless lifestyle his mother was leading. Indeed, she would later refer to Mendips as the ‘House of Correction’ and her sister and Bobby’s house as the ‘House of Sin’. Mimi had a penchant for theatrics, but behind this hyperbole was the cruel and stark assumption that John’s mother was nothing short of a ‘fallen woman’ and his father a ‘good for nothing’. John was constantly told by Mimi he was wanted by her, but not by his mother, and that she was ‘the parent of last resort’. She deserved John.

John’s move to Mendips should have provided him with the stability that was missing from his life with Julia and Freddie. Instead, he was faced with a bitter matriarch who tried to mould him in her own image. This would cause internal conflicts that would last John a lifetime. At her home in Toxteth and, to a lesser extent, Newcastle Road, it was enough for Mimi to play the part of acting like ‘a person of quality’. Her place in Woolton Convalescent Home helped support her view that she was a solid member of the middle class. With the addition of John, she was able to demonstrate to ‘those that mattered’ in the Woolton community that she was committed to traditional family values by taking care of her nephew and removing him from the influence of his dysfunctional parents. Mimi’s view that you only get out of life what you deserve was motivated by what she wanted and by what she didn’t want to be. She had lived in the inner city and knew its problems of poverty and poor housing – she wanted better. She was not a subscriber to the view of George Bernard Shaw that ‘if you don’t get what you like, like what you get’. Indeed, she would constantly refer to Paul and George as ‘those scruffs’. Anyone talking in a local Scouse accent was seen as being on the lowest social rungs: ‘I had high hopes for [him] and I knew you didn’t get anywhere if you spoke like a ruffian’, remarked Mimi of John. Emphasising her view on the role of Queen’s English, she revealed:

I remember once he came home from town on the bus and he’d heard these Liverpudlians talking to each other – Scouse, you know. And he was shocked he couldn’t understand what they were talking about … I told him he should avoid people like that. He was a country boy … he would never meet [them] except if anyone came to the house to mend something.¹⁸

Some insightful points come out of Mimi’s comments. Firstly, her reference to ‘these Liverpudlians’ suggests that Mimi considered herself and John as being outside of this culture. Then there’s the label of ‘country boy’ for John. This conjures up images of John with straw in his hair taking the family cow to Lime Street Market and coming back with five magic beans. The top and bottom of Mimi’s problems were that she was a puritanical snob and wasn’t a contented person. Despite the husband and the semi-detached house and the child, she wasn’t acknowledged by those from whom she most wanted acceptance – her suburban community, her neighbours. Whatever ideals she had towards being ‘a lady of the manor’ at Mendips slowly dissipated as the real middle classes ignored the upstart from Liverpool 8 who was married to a drunken ex-milkman. The doctors and teachers that Mimi so desperately wanted validation from turned their backs on her the moment she started her life as a squatter. Her visions of an idyllic middle-class life were finished before they had even begun.

John’s arrival at his new school halfway through the school year only served to further distance Mimi. The introduction of John was intended to provide Mimi with the much-needed legitimacy of family values, her entry into the network of parents waiting outside the school gates of the infant and junior schools. But these friendships had already been formed at the school, starting early in September. The arrival of Mimi and John did not take place until April – a not insignificant gap – and with Mimi at this time being 38 years old, she was too old to be seen as a credible friend and confidante of those mothers who were a decade or so younger than her. The next ten years of picking up John consisted of curt nods to other mothers along with a doorman’s smile, which hid a murderous desire for a lightning bolt to come down and strike this gaggle of unfriendly modern mums. George would fare no better. Being nearly 50 years old, he was in the ‘grandparent range’ and his appearance at the school gates with his shock of white hair and security guard uniform would only confirm what the mothers at the school gate would have already known – too old, not our ‘type’. In the terminology of the day, Mimi was in a pickle. John was no use to her and she couldn’t give him back without making a complete and utter fool of herself, so she was left with having to grin and bear it.