Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Julia worked through the 1930s as an usherette at the Trocadero, one of several sumptuous film palaces newly built in the center of town. With her lively personality, iridescent appeal to men, and a job that brought her into constant contact with many of them, it’s not credible (though it’s been claimed) that Julia resisted all male overtures because Alf was her one true love. When they married, it was for a dare, a lark. He’d later recall how Julia goaded him, claiming that, through sheer cowardice, he’d never propose.2 That did it. Alf popped the question and Julia said yes. He fixed the wedding for Liverpool register office on December 3, 1938, just before he had to sail off to the West Indies. Their first married hours comprised an afternoon at the pictures (watching an awful Tommy Trinder comedy called Almost a Honeymoon), then Alf took his wife back to 22 Huskisson Street and went home to 57 Copperfield Street.†

  The news was poorly received at the Stanleys, as Mimi later remembered: “We were all shocked. She just thought it was clever to defy the family. She soon regretted it when she realized it was not so clever. Julia was a beautiful girl, headstrong. I loved Julia. She was so witty and amusing, always laughing. We all make mistakes. Julia’s was not realizing the seriousness of a defiant ‘prank.’ The only good thing that came out of it was John.”3

  PAUL MCCARTNEY—family background

  McCartney isn’t an English name, but efforts to establish when this specific line of the family arrived in England have proved fruitless, so many are the possibilities. Genealogists ascribe the name’s journey to a start in Scotland as the Mackintosh clan, followed by a migration to Ireland, during the course of which they switched from Catholic to Protestant.

  A clear and traceable line in Liverpool begins in 1864 when James McCartney (Paul’s great-grandfather) married Elizabeth Williams, he the son of an upholsterer who may have fled the Great Famine, she the daughter of a boilermaker. They lived on Scotland Road, that heaving thoroughfare with Catholic and Protestant immigrants packed into dingy properties, from airless cellars to gusty rafters, unturned cheek by bloodied jowl. Their first child was Joseph (Joe), and by the time he came along, in 1866, they’d the misfortune to be in the despicable court housing on parallel Great Homer Street.

  From the leaving of school until the leaving of his life, Joe McCartney worked for Cope Brothers & Co., importers of tobacco and manufacturers of all its related products. He was a journeyman cutter and stover for almost fifty years—hefty labor in hot conditions. A quiet and likable man, teetotal, he blew the huge E-flat bass tuba in his works’ brass band—warm and nurturing north-country music played at church fetes and on park bandstands. Joe was the first in the still-continuing line of male McCartney musicians to perform in public.4

  In 1896, Joe married Florence (Florrie, Flo) Clegg, whose family were from Onchan in the Isle of Man, and they settled in Everton. There was the usual heartbreak: two of their nine children died in infancy. Paul McCartney’s father, James—known to all as Jim—was the fifth, born in July 1902. The McCartneys were a no-nonsense, close-knit family and would always remain so. The seven surviving children—known as Jack, Jim, Joe, Edie, Mill (or Milly), Annie and Gin (or Ginny)—lived and looked out for one another and spoke with down-to-earth Liverpool wit and wisdom. Several could sing well, and Jim’s favored instrument was the piano. Around 1916, the McCartneys bought a secondhand upright from a nearby music shop called Nems, and Jim—self-taught, and despite being almost deaf in one ear—had natural flair, good rhythm and the ability to pick up all the popular tunes.‡

  Jim McCartney exuded courtesy and civility all through his life, being someone to whom charm came naturally. (Paul remembers him habitually raising his hat to women at the bus stop and bidding them “Good morning,” and insisting Paul raise his school cap similarly. “Oh Dad, do I have to?” “Yes son, you do.”)5 A keen reader, and a self-schooled whiz at crosswords, he entered employment at 14, doing well to get work as a sample boy for A. Hannay & Co., cotton brokers annexed to Liverpool’s great Cotton Exchange.

  It was at a Hannay’s staff soirée that Jim first played music for the public. The year was 1919 and the latest musical explosion in America, ragtime, had crossed the Atlantic, landing first in Liverpool because this was where the great ocean liners came and went. The immense popularity of ragtime, swiftly followed by jazz, fueled and fed a boom in dancing and the evolution of the gramophone record into a standard format—typically ten-inch, made of shellac and spinning at 78 revolutions per minute (rpm), so harnessing the length of a song to about three minutes. Together with family and friends of family, Jim Mac’s Band played Merseyside’s many dance/music venues until 1924, though not very often. Were they any good? Jim had a pat and typically self-deprecating answer. “Band?” he’d say. “Band? I’ve seen better bands around a man’s hat.”

  They played all the great tunes coming out of New York’s gold-laden Tin Pan Alley, and also a more modest piece of music Jim made up, the first-ever McCartney composition, an instrumental piano shuffle he called “Eloise.” A wife for Gentleman Jim, however, was not so easy. He went through his teens, twenties and almost all his thirties before finding her.6

  Paul McCartney’s mother was Mary Patricia Mohin, born in Fazakerley (north Liverpool) in 1909. She was of strong Irish stock, Roman Catholic on both sides; though she married outside her kind, Catholicism was significant in her life.

  On her father’s side, the genealogy is almost comical, undergoing three arbitrary changes of a similar-sounding surname in rapid succession. Her father, Owen Mohin, was born Owen Mohan, and his father before him was Owen Moan. Born about 1880 and known as “Ownie,” Owen Mohin was one of nine born into a poor rural farming family in County Monaghan. At 12, the boy escaped and got to Scotland, where he lived in a Glasgow inner-city tenement and worked as a coal delivery boy, which must have been exceedingly rough. In 1905, he married Mary Theresa Danher in an RC church local to her home in Liverpool; how they met isn’t known. Born in 1877, Mary was the daughter of John Danher, who’d arrived in England from Limerick (on the west coast of Ireland) in the 1860s.

  Ownie and Mary brought four, almost five, children into the world. When giving birth to the fifth, Mary succumbed to pneumonia and died with the baby. Mary Patricia was the second. The distress of losing her mother at the age of nine was then compounded by her father suddenly taking her and her two brothers to Ireland, where he made a failed attempt to get back into farming—and when they all returned to Liverpool, broke, he had a new wife and stepchildren, all of which was strongly opposed by Mary and her siblings.

  The first time the Danher and McCartney families got together was in 1925, when Mary’s cousin Bert (one of Jim Mac’s Band) married Jim’s sister Annie. Mary and Jim must have met at the wedding, but it would be another sixteen years before they began their relationship. Mary knew all the McCartneys and liked them as they liked her, and by the end of the 1930s she’d moved in with Gin, the youngest of the breed but soon to become matriarch. Now in her twenties, the daughter of an uneducated and poor man, Mary was determined to work hard and elevate her station in life. Set truly on the path of self-improvement, she went into nursing, with midwifery her specialty. She reached 30 as a ward sister and what people always called “a spinster.”

  GEORGE HARRISON—family background

  Down the male line at least, the Harrisons were Liverpool English through and through: Protestant, bright, laboring class and, from the end of the nineteenth century, citizens of Wavertree. Once a self-governing authority, with its own history and fine Gothic municipal buildings, it bridges factory and greenery and has a foot in both. Though much of the housing was drab and basic, there were plenty worse places to live in Liverpool.

  Despite being illiterate—like many others, his mark was an X—Edward Harrison (George’s great-grandfather) was an artist with his hands, practicing the trade of stonemasonry on public buildings. In 1868 he married Manchester girl Elizabeth Hargreaves and they had a substantial family; one of the boy
s was Henry, known as Harry, who also went into the building business. As his grandson George would appreciatively explain, “My father’s father, who I never knew, built all these great Victorian, or maybe Edwardian, houses in Prince’s Road in Liverpool, which used to be where all the doctors lived. And in those days they knew how to build: good masonry, good bricks, good timber.”7

  When Harry was killed, fighting for his country in the Great War, it didn’t only forestall the continued Harrison imprint on Liverpool architecture, it widowed a wife, robbed seven children of a father and caused them all great financial hardship. He’d married Jane Thompson in 1902, whose father was Scottish and mother from the Isle of Man; the fourth of their seven offspring, born at home in Wavertree in 1909, was Harold Hargreaves Harrison, father of George. With no assistance for bereaved families, everything was threadbare.

  Harold, known to all as Harry, was by nature quiet and resolute, with a dogged strength and wry sense of humor. After leaving school at 14, he lied about his age and joined the merchant navy. From 1926 he was a steward with the White Star Line, plying the same routes and doing the same job as Alf Lennon. He first visited the United States in 1927; America was seen enviously as “the land of plenty,” because it was, and the Harrison household soon began to accumulate American gear, including a radio, wind-up gramophone, records and a guitar. Then, at home between voyages, Harry met a vivacious 18-year-old called Louise French, and by 1930 their lives were entwined.

  On George’s mother’s side the influence is Irish—the known history stretches back to the Norman knights who sailed from France to Ireland around 1169 and settled as powerful Catholic landowners in County Wexford. The peasant locals called them French, which came to be misspelled Ffrench. These landowners received a brutal shock in 1649 in the form of the Parliamentarian invasion from London. When Oliver Cromwell’s bloody conquest was complete, and Ireland part of the British Empire, huge tracts of land had been confiscated, and for the next 250 years the Ffrench toiled in the soil they’d once owned.

  George’s grandfather, John French, was born in 1870 into a family that doesn’t appear to have been as destitute as those around them, or even too badly stricken by the potato famine. Still, he left and settled in Liverpool in the late 1890s, where he met the woman who’d share his last four decades.

  Louise Woollam, the grandmother George knew until he was almost six, was Protestant, not Catholic, and hers wasn’t a Liverpool family but a Shropshire one, gardeners and farmers. Her parents lived rurally—in Little Crosby, north of Liverpool—and Louise, born in 1879, was their third child. From 1905 to 1924, she and John French had seven children, all raised as staunch Catholics, but they weren’t married. “Mr. and Mrs. French,” poor but respectable folk of Wavertree, were the proverbial dark horses, free to marry but not bothering. Born in March 1911, the fourth of the seven was named after the mother, Louise.

  It’s not clear if all this was known to their offspring, but John and Louise’s efforts to keep their status secret had ramifications beyond the point where its origin was necessarily remembered. So concerned were they that their situation should not be exposed, they maintained a marked suspicion about “nosy neighbors,” guarding information about themselves. Their daughter Louise—George Harrison’s mother—always felt strongly about anyone knowing more about her family than she wished, and passed it down to her children.

  Louise and Harry Harrison always said they married in 1930, putting distance between this and the 1931 birth of their first baby, another Louise. The actual interval between the two events was three months, and no doubt the domestic circumstances were heavy. The oil and water mix of Catholic and Protestant was always a major problem, to say nothing of the fact there had clearly been “relations” before marriage. They put their name down for a Liverpool Corporation house but knew they’d have to wait, and in the meantime rented a tiny terraced house at 12 Arnold Grove, a standard British “two-up-two-down” typical of all these lives: downstairs was a small front room (used maybe three times a year) and a kitchen, upstairs were two small bedrooms. No heating, no bathroom, and no toilet except the privy in the minuscule and drafty backyard.

  Louise gave birth a second time in 1934, to Harold (known as Harry, maintaining a generations-long confusion of names), and then Harry quit the White Star Line in 1936 so his wife wouldn’t have to raise the children alone. He struggled for almost two years to find work: it was the Depression, and times grew very tough for the Harrisons. The guitar was pawned, never retrieved. At the end of 1937, though, Harry passed some exams to become a Corporation (“Corpy”) bus conductor, and by 1939 he’d qualified to drive and was behind the wheel—a quiet, rock steady, punctual character flashing his genuine lopsided smile at those he met.

  RICHARD “RICHY” STARKEY—family background

  Above the last docks in Liverpool, on the streets that take the hill from the Mersey, the nineteenth century brought petroleum stores, gas works, factories, chimneys and a hundred different manufacturing eyesores, swiftly accompanied by block after block of narrow streets and alleys packed tight with cramped terraced houses built to poor specifications. The area was known as the Dingle. Not everything here was bad—there was an authentically strong community, people pulled together and took care of their own, and housewives were as house-proud as could be. But there was no hiding the infestations, the damp, the decay and subsidence, or the malnourished and barefoot children. A high proportion of the Dingle’s adult population—generally Protestant, few Irish, and entirely working-class—was jobless and penniless, drinking and singing their lives away in its many pubs. In Liverpool, where you’re never far away from a run-down area, the Dingle—the “South End”—had a reputation for roughness and alcoholism all its own.

  Richy Starkey’s family were Dingle through and through. Dot an old map with the addresses of his ancestors and they’re all within a square mile. On official documents this isn’t the Dingle at all but Toxteth, or Toxteth Park, Liverpool 8, and these places are within the same precinct of poverty as the Lennons on Copperfield Street and the Stanleys on Berkley Street … but the Dingle is just a bit farther south and more depressed. That word “Toxteth” wasn’t used in everyday conversation. Lads were “Dingle boys”—a phrase that could spark fear in others, such was the violence and vandalism of its gangs of deadbeat youths. Other Liverpudlians generally kept away.

  A key distinction between Dingle men was those who were unemployed and those who were unemployable, the work-keen versus the work-shy. Richy Starkey’s family, on both sides, were workers, and generally had some. His father’s father, a journeyman boilermaker, was born John (Johnny) Parkin in 1890. At some point between 1903 and 1910, his mother took up “living in sin” with a married man named Starkey, a situation considered so sordid that, to avoid difficulties and gossip, Ma Parkin switched her surname to that of her new man, and her son, to maintain the illusion, changed his too. Johnny Parkin became Johnny Starkey overnight, just like that.

  Johnny Parkin’s father was a seaman working a lightship at Formby, up the coast from Liverpool. He was also John Parkin, born in 1865, and he in turn was the son of a seaman born about 1823 in Hull, across the other side of England. This man, yet another John Parkin (there were at least three generations of them), was married to a Hull woman and they moved coasts to settle in the Dingle about 1862.

  The young man who flipped from Johnny Parkin to Johnny Starkey was married in 1910 to Annie Bower, born 1889, whose father was a tinsmith. They had four children together, the second of them—Richard Henry Parkin Starkey—arriving in October 1913. Known as Richy, he was the father of the boy born twenty-seven years later who, against inconceivable odds, would force his way out of a dreary dead-end Dingle destiny in the most spectacular fashion.

  Johnny Starkey would play a crucial role in the raising of his grandson, and by all accounts he was a full-on “wacker” (a much-used word for working-class Liverpool men and boys), being a drinker, laborer, gambler and
brawler. No pushover herself, Annie was something of a twentieth-century witch, invoking the name of the devil and concocting her own remedies and potions when tending the sick. The Starkeys’ was quite a household—noisy and poor. Their boy Richy became a confectioner, making sweets and cakes, and it was while working in a bakery in 1935 that he met the woman he’d marry, a doughty Dingle girl by the name of Elsie Gleave.

  The Gleaves had been in the Dingle over fifty years before Elsie’s birth in October 1914. They lived in all the same streets and her family line was also steeped in boilermaking, that dirty but vital ancillary industry in a city of ships. Her father John was one, his father too, and his as well, by which time the documents have stretched back to the middle of the nineteenth century.

  Elsie’s mother provided a little more variation. Catherine “Kitty” Johnson was of Dingle parents but her father was the son of a mariner born in the Shetland Islands, off the north coast of Scotland, and her mother was the daughter of a gardener from Mayo—the only trace of Irish in this genealogy. They could have been Catholics, but it’s unlikely: the Gleaves were street-marching Protestants in Liverpool, Elsie included.