Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Long before the city was ravaged by the war, the prevailing Liverpool character carried a chip on its shoulder, conveyed in an embittered, comic language studded with class antipathy—the perfect incubator for John’s personality. Dockers spoke a thickly accented brogue called Scouse, immediately recognizable as a working-class tongue, rich with suggestive street slang, its own obscenities and many colorful non sequiturs. Often mistaken for London Cockney, a garden-variety low-class accent, Scouse more resembles the rich tonal inflections of its Irish ancestry. The ends of declamatory sentences often rise up like questions, which lends Scouse conversation musicality and innate self-mockery. As an adult, even though he had not grown up on the docks and his accent was far less pronounced, Lennon often spoke Scouse to “take the piss out of” someone whom he thought ridiculous. Like most Scousers, he enjoyed confirming people’s worst assumptions about low-class northerners. All Scousers nursed a fierce local pride—one that Lennon adopted as his own.

  During Liverpool’s shipbuilding heyday, which lasted from 1881 to 1921, the local elite had erected an array of monumental public buildings proclaiming the respectability of the city and its leading citizens. During those same decades of prosperity, Liverpool sprouted a ring of leafy suburbs, claimed from fallow fields that had been overfarmed for two centuries and no longer supported the dairy trade that had anchored the region’s economy since the Middle Ages. With prosperity, the city’s population grew, spawning a new class of teachers, accountants, tailors, clerks, watchmakers, and grocers who strove toward a higher standard of living—and to separate themselves from the nation’s common image of working-class Liverpudlians.

  George Stanley’s brood joined this great social migration toward middle-class respectability, but fun-loving Judy had no interest in abiding by the rules of decorum that governed “respectable” people. Self-confident and self-absorbed, small-boned and pretty, she cut a striking figure with her high heels, gleaming red nail polish, and auburn hair cut in stylish imitation of the movie stars of the day. “People used to turn back for another look at her,” John’s cousin Leila Harvey reported. “When some cheeky boy gave her a wolf whistle, she would say, ‘Hmmm, not bad yourself.’ ”8 Judy Stanley was determined to do as she pleased, and one thing she liked to do was provoke her parents. Alfred Lennon, a young man with no skills, no connections, and no “class,” was ready-made to outrage the Stanleys’ carefully wrought propriety.

  Alfred was born in 1912, the fourth of six surviving children of Jack Lennon Jr., an Irish shipping clerk. Jack was musical, and had spent the 1890s touring the United States as a singer with Andrew Robertson’s “Kentucky Minstrels,” a traveling act that played vaudeville venues and country fairs. Although little information survives about this troupe, the act donned blackface to perform popular minstrel material to American audiences for an uncanny musical foreshadow.

  Around 1900, John’s paternal grandfather moved back to Britain with an American wife, whose name has been lost. Rather than return to Ireland, Jack Jr. found work as a shipping clerk in Liverpool, which by then was known as “Little Ireland.”9 After the death of his first wife, Jack married his Irish housekeeper, Mary “Polly” McGuire, who bore him eight children, six of whom survived. In 1917, after a life spent clerking, singing, touring, and drinking, Jack fell dead at sixty-two from “liver disease,” the era’s polite euphemism for advanced alcoholism. Polly was overwhelmed. Alone now, with four children to support (her eldest, George, was sixteen and old enough to work) and another on the way, she gave five-year-old Alf and his two-year-old sister, Edith, over to the Blue Coat Orphanage, a charitable institution for children of the poor, in an act of desperation that would be repeated a generation later. From then on, young Alf and Edith saw their mother and other siblings only on holidays, although their brothers Sydney and Charles remained constant figures throughout Alf’s life. Although no Dickensian workhouse, the Blue Coat adhered to strict regimens—especially tough by today’s standards—which prompted Alf to attempt more than one escape.10

  From the start, young Alf also had health problems. As a boy playing in the soot-darkened streets of industrial Liverpool, he’d developed rickets, a disease caused by inadequate exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays and made worse by poor diet. Rickets shorten and deform the weight-bearing limbs, and the orphanage put Alf in leg braces for straightening until he was twelve. Even so, as a full-grown man he was only five feet, two inches tall, six inches shorter than his famous son, and both his legs curved outward (think Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, whose bowlegs symbolized privation).

  Like his father, Jack, Alf loved to sing. When he was fourteen and out on a weekend pass from the Blue Coat, his brother Sydney took him backstage after hearing the Will Murray Gang, a song-and-dance act at the Liverpool Empire. Alf plunged into a rendition of “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside,” and his plucky presentation persuaded Murray to offer him a slot in the show. The next day, Alf grabbed his harmonica, fled the orphanage, and headed to Glasgow to join the band.

  Orphanage officers quickly caught up with him and dragged him back, berating him in front of his classmates. None of this quenched Alf’s thirst for freedom and fun, which marked the rest of his life and echoed down into his son’s persona.11 In this break from the narrow confines of his childhood, Alf, the stunted child, the unwanted boy who’d been sent away and locked into leg braces, ran, as his son later would, toward all the things that his life at the orphanage lacked—adventure, independence, music. He would be on the run, more or less, for the rest of his days, chasing a long string of small-time scams, always looking for the “big break” that would free him from a perpetual hand-to-mouth existence.

  Alf met Judy in 1927, when she was thirteen and he was fifteen. Their meeting, though entirely accidental, seemed almost foreordained. He was strolling in Sefton Park, one of Liverpool’s ample expanses of public green, south of the Toxteth Park Cemetery near the Penny Lane roundabout. After ten years and two escape attempts, he’d finally left the Blue Coat for good and found work as a bellboy at the Adelphi Hotel. He was taking a stroll, seeing what else the world had to offer. “I had just bought myself a cigarette holder and a bowler hat and I fancied my chances,” Julia’s daughter and namesake quotes Alf as saying in her memoirs.12

  A friend was teaching Alf how to pick up girls when they spotted the pretty redhead lounging on a bench by the boat lake. Before Alf even had a chance to try his new moves, the girl called out to him, telling him he looked silly. He responded that she looked lovely and sat down on the bench. If he wanted to sit next to her, the girl said, he’d have to take off his hat. Without hesitating, Alf Lennon stood up and threw his new hat into the lake, which made Judy Stanley laugh. With that impulsive flourish, he won her over.13

  They suited each other’s needs. Besides sharing a wayward sense of fun, they were both trying to eclipse their pasts: Alf was on the lam from the deprivations of the orphanage, while Judy wanted to slip free of the claustrophobic, post-Victorian embrace of her respectable parents. What better way for Alf to exercise his independence than by hooking up with a stylish, fun-loving girl determined to defy her family? The Stanleys saw themselves as much higher-class than an orphan-bred boy with no family to speak of. To Judy, this only made Alf more desirable. She enjoyed his irreverence and off-color sense of humor while at the same time taunting her family. They dated on and off for the next several years, touring the pubs and dance halls (although Alf’s crippled legs meant he more often sang than danced), including several near the docks that were frequented by sailors—establishments where “nice girls” just didn’t go. Pops Stanley forbade their courtship for a time, but this didn’t deter Judy—it just prompted the two of them to be more ingenious and secretive about their rendezvous.

  In Liverpool in those years, a loafer could always find work as a merchant seaman by lining up at the dockyard gates (“the pools”) every morning to see if any boats were hiring. With no engineering training, navigation exper
ience, or ability to manage accounts or track inventory, the best Alf could do was scramble for jobs as cook and steward. He never knew until he’d signed on whether he’d be at sea for three weeks or three months, and the work was strictly job-by-job—steady employment was rare. After every voyage, he had to start from scratch, hanging out at the pools or going from one shipping office to another looking for his next assignment. With no job security and lousy pay, Alf quickly learned to supplement his income by gambling and by smuggling hard-to-find goods to sell on the black market.14

  After eight years of peripatetic dating, Alf and Judy were finally married on Saturday, December 3, 1938. He’d saved up for three weeks to pay for their marriage license. Why they finally decided to marry is unclear. Alf’s second wife and widow, Pauline Lennon, edited Alf’s memoirs after he died and published them as Daddy Come Home in 1990.15 As she tells it, Judy dared him to “put up the banns”—the old practice of publicly announcing one’s intention to marry three weeks ahead of time. This allowed any interested party a chance to object. Alf supposedly took the dare. Beatle historian and Lennon’s art school classmate Bill Harry suggests another reason: with work scarce, Alf needed a marriage certificate to get on the dole.16 Whatever the prompt, Alf and Judy tied the knot at the Mount Pleasant Registry Office with Alf’s older brother Sydney as their witness. Afterward, they went to the Trocadero Cinema on Camden Street, where Judy worked off and on as an usherette, and watched Mickey Rooney in The Boy from Barnardo’s (as Lord Jeff was called in England). They laughingly called this their honeymoon. She was twenty-four and Alf was twenty-five.

  “That’s it! I’ve gone and married him then!” Judy announced as she made her entrance at the family house in Toxteth that night. While the length of their courtship testifies to the strength of their bond, Alf and Judy’s whimsical nuptials suggest that what each prized most about the other may have been a shared love of frivolity and a deep aversion to being serious.

  Judy and Alf made unconventional newlyweds, even for England on the cusp of World War II. Alf shipped out soon after the wedding while Judy continued to live with her parents, working sporadically as a waitress and as an usherette at the Trocadero. In 1939, with an almost empty nest, George and Annie Stanley relinquished their Toxteth home for a more modest apartment at 9 Newcastle Road in Wavertree, near Alf’s Blue Coat Orphanage, and Judy moved in with them. With Alf at sea, the Stanleys may have figured that he wouldn’t be sharing the space much, and their other four daughters had already married and moved out. Although Judy had no apparent interest in becoming a mother, John was conceived “on a cold January afternoon in 1940 on the kitchen floor,” Alf recalled, just as rationing became a way of wartime life.17

  Nine months later, Judy went alone to the hospital to have her baby. Whether she didn’t tell her family where she was going or they stayed home because of the bombing (or they didn’t want to risk their necks for Alf Lennon’s child), no one held her hand or sat in the waiting room, worried about her safety, or expressed any interest in greeting her child. The following evening, October 9, at 6:30 P.M., after thirty hours of difficult labor, Judy—alone and exhausted—finally gave birth to a healthy seven-pound, eight-ounce boy. It’s hard to imagine the complicated feelings she must have felt when, bereft of her husband, she first held her son. She was twenty-six and liked her freedom—what was she going to do with a baby? She named him John, after Alf’s father and grandfather. With Churchill’s radio speech from the day before ringing in her ears, she selected “Winston” for his middle name. “Winston” spoke to Judy’s ambivalent class attitudes, only to confound her son’s “Working Class Hero” legacy.

  Later that night, a nurse called the Stanley house to announce, “Mrs. Lennon has had a boy.” Galvanized by this news, her oldest sister, Mimi Smith, raced to see the infant. Mimi later wrote:

  I was dodging in doorways between running as fast as my legs would carry me. . . . I was literally terrified. Transport had stopped because the bombs began always at dusk. There was shrapnel falling and gunfire and when there was a little lull I ran into the hospital ward and there was this beautiful little baby.18

  Mimi’s memory might be the only place in town where bombs actually fell that night—there was certainly a curfew, and the buses were not running, but records indicate bombs fell on London and another “north-west town,” but not on Liverpool.19 Nonetheless, Mimi’s memory defined Lennon’s story: he grew up believing he was born during an air raid, and felt branded by Churchill’s name as a reminder. Regardless, as soon as Mimi picked John up, the air-raid sirens screamed again. The hospital staff insisted that she go down to the basement or go home. Mimi chose to go home. Judy, worn out, stayed put. “John, like the other babies, was put underneath the bed.”20

  In the brief moments, however, when she held him, Mimi literally fell in love. Whether it was because she was one of five sisters and he was a boy, or because she herself, the oldest Stanley daughter, was childless, John’s arrival answered some need in Mimi. It was a need that she would play out—often at the expense of the boy she believed she was protecting—throughout her nephew’s childhood. For the rest of her life, she claimed that the moment she saw John in the hospital she knew that she was supposed to be his mother, not Judy. “Does that sound awful?” she asked when she related this story to Bill Harry. “It isn’t really,” she explained, “because Julia accepted it as something perfectly natural. She used to say, ‘You’re his real mother. All I did was give birth.’ ”21 Judy, though she had little appetite for motherhood, didn’t hand him over outright—not yet. After the standard week of “lying in,” she took her son home to the family apartment on Newcastle Road to meet his grandparents. On October 12, the Liverpool Echo ran the following birth announcement: “Lennon—October 9th, in hospital to Julia (née Stanley) wife of ALFRED LENNON, Merchant Navy (at sea), a son. 9 Newcastle Road.”

  Three weeks later, the Empress of Canada docked in Liverpool, and Alf Lennon met his son for the first time. He spent several weeks with his wife and child before leaving again, and those first few weeks of John Lennon’s life were the only time that he and his parents lived peacefully together under the same roof—albeit with Judy’s parents. During the next five years, Alf would spend barely a total of three months in Liverpool, and much of that time he spent in air-raid shelters with his wife and child or at the docks “fire watching” during raids.22

  The Nazi bombing peaked the following May, when the Germans dropped 2,315 high-explosive bombs and 119 other incendiaries on Liverpool, putting half the docks out of action, killing 1,741 people, and injuring 1,154. On May 3, the Germans blew up the Makaland, docked in Liverpool and loaded with more than a thousand tons of bombs and explosives. When the dust cleared, 2,500 Liverpudlians had been killed outright, and more than 50,000 more were homeless; another 50,000 were relocated outside the imperiled metropolis. The children who remained in the city, many of them orphaned, grew up amid ruins. John remembered playing in bomb craters.

  In June of 1941, Judy’s mother, Annie, died at age seventy, leaving George—“Pop”—alone in the Newcastle Road apartment with Judy and John.23 Despite the presence of her father, Judy continued to take a lackadaisical approach to raising her son and honoring her marriage vows. With soldiers and sailors streaming through the city and wartime romances commonplace, Judy found various opportunities to escape the rationing, divert herself from the air raids, and shrug off the war’s gloom. Although Alf sent home most of his wages to support his family, he often returned to find John stashed at Mimi’s and to discover traces of other men. Having told his wife to “go out and have a good time” while he was gone, and probably not averse to the standard merchant marines’ “favors” in foreign ports himself, Alf at first took Judy’s infidelities in stride.

  The following year, when John was two, Mimi invited Judy and John to move into her Woolton cottage at 120A Allerton Road, behind the house called Mendips where she had settled with her husband, George Smith.
Judy jumped at the chance to get away from her father’s disapproving presence. But Alf’s next visit was rocky. Judy had become accustomed to her routine of trolling the pubs and dance halls each night, and soon after Alf’s return she left John behind with him—“for a change,” in her words—and went out by herself. Brushing past the protesting Alf, Judy left the house with her friends.24

  The next morning Alf confronted her: her mother, he said, would have been ashamed of her behavior. Judy poured a cup of hot tea over his head, and Alf responded by slapping her across the face—the only reported account of his striking her.25 Alf’s blast gave Judy a nosebleed, and he called to Mimi to “set things straight.” But things were never quite the same again. His next job brought Alf a promotion: to chief steward on the Berengaria, bound for New York. Although he thought his career was on the upswing, this trip turned out to be a prolonged disaster. It would be another eighteen months before Alf saw Liverpool, or his family, again.

  Shortly after Alf left, for reasons that remain unclear, Pop Stanley relocated with other relatives, and Judy moved back into a previous apartment at 9 Newcastle Road with John, by then an active three-year-old. For the rest of the war, Judy remained in this apartment, and at some point she even had her father’s name on the lease replaced by Alf’s. Mother and son lived on the money Alf sent home, and Judy continued her rambunctious pub life, often coming home drunk. She seems to have had no compunction about bringing men home and sleeping with them with her son in the house, perhaps even the same bed. “Mummy being Mummy, she naturally just tucked him in beside her each night in their large double bed,” John’s half sister, Julia, later explained.26