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‘Soon I forgot about my father. It was like he was dead’

Had he ever been told, he would have liked the idea that he was conceived on the kitchen floor of a terraced house in the Penny Lane area of Liverpool one January afternoon in 1940 – just a few hours after his father’s ship had docked. That, according to a memoir written by his father, Freddie Lennon, was John’s beginning. But, like much of what Freddie Lennon said, it might or might not have been entirely true. John was a war baby, for sure, but how could his father have known the exact moment of conception, since he would be at home and sleeping with his wife, Julia, for several more weeks? He didn’t say. It was, however, a good story to tell about the origins of a son who was to become one of the most famous men of the twentieth century – and Freddie (sometimes known as Alfred – ‘the ignoble Alf’, to John – but, more usually, as Freddie) span a good yarn – as one day would his son. Whether or not the tale is true doesn’t really matter, other than that it tells us something about the circumstances of the couple involved.

Freddie Lennon was sixteen when he first met Julia Stanley in 1929, just a few weeks after he left Liverpool Blue Coat School. He had been placed there as a semi-orphan at the age of seven on the death of his father, when his mother had been unable to provide for him. Now that he had a job, he was living at home again.

Julia, who had also just left school, was fifteen. Freddie, who had suffered from rickets as a child, was a little fellow, never more than five foot three inches tall. Wearing the new bowler hat he’d just bought to go walking, as teenagers then did, in Liverpool’s huge and splendid Victorian Sefton Park, he looked ridiculous. So Julia told him, anyway, when Freddie tried to get off with her. He wasn’t offended by the remark. He’d caught this pretty girl’s eye, and, in a cavalier gesture of devil-may-care, he threw the hat into the boating lake. That amused Julia, and that day they began a nine-year, on-and-off courtship.

In a city of tribes, Catholic and Protestant, and narrow gradations of status, Freddie was not only of the wrong religion, his family being nominally Catholic, but also a couple of steps down the social ladder from Julia. His father, Jack Lennon, had been born in Dublin and had enjoyed a career in America singing with a troupe of Kentucky Minstrels – white guys who blacked-up, which was the fashion in those days; think only of Al Jolson. But Jack had been back in Liverpool working as a lowly shipping clerk when Freddie had been born – one of six children. It was rumoured that their mother couldn’t read, a state not that uncommon in 1912.

Julia’s family consisted of five daughters, the eldest being Mary, who would forever be known as Mimi by her nephew, John. Julia was the second youngest, an auburn-haired, headstrong girl who liked going to the pictures so much that she became, for a time, a cinema usherette. It seemed a glamorous job to her. The rest of the Stanley family thought of themselves as working-class posh, in that their father, who, like Jack Lennon, was also involved in shipping – as were the men in many Liverpool families at the time – had become an insurance investigator after a career at sea. More to the point, eldest daughter Mimi was determinedly aspirant middle class, and, like her father, was always dead set against Freddie Lennon. ‘We knew he’d be no use to anyone, certainly not Julia,’ she would later say.

For nine years, however, as all three other sisters, Elizabeth, Anne and Harriet, married sensibly and left the family’s small, bow-fronted terraced house at 9 Newcastle Road, Wavertree, Julia withstood the sidelong looks and criticisms from her parents and Mimi whenever Freddie was mentioned. She must have seen something in the apparently unsuitable, harmonica-playing, pub-singing young man. Not that she and Freddie spent much time together. Within a year of their meeting, he had given up his office job to go to sea as a bell boy on one of the Cunard liners that in those days sailed from Liverpool.

Freddie, like his son, would become a keen letter writer, describing to Julia all the places he visited. But Julia never wrote back, or even, according to him, went down to the docks to meet his ship when he returned home. In Freddie’s account, and we only have his word for it, he seems to have been the keener of the two. So, when in 1938 Freddie was in Liverpool between ships and Julia dared him, as a lark, to put up the marriage banns, he did so the very next day. Keeping it a secret from their families, the two met outside Mount Pleasant Register Office on 3 December 1938, and, with a couple of friends as witnesses, became man and wife. For their honeymoon they went to the Forum cinema to see a Mickey Rooney film about an orphanage, before parting at the end of the evening to go to their separate families to break the news. The following day Freddie went back to sea for three months, his marriage to Julia still, he would say, unconsummated.

For the following year Julia stayed in her parents’ home, to which Freddie would return when he was, infrequently, back in Liverpool. She was still there in October 1940 when, with Freddie away at sea again, Britain at war and Liverpool under almost nightly bombing from the German Luftwaffe, she went into labour. Her baby was born on 9 October 1940 at the Liverpool Maternity Hospital during a lull in the attacks, and named John Winston Lennon – Winston, after the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill. Intended as a joke by Julia, the middle name of ‘Winston’ would be one the grown-up John Lennon would never enjoy, and which he would eventually jettison.

It was an uncertain world in which to make an entrance. Not much unbalances family life so much as wartime, and, as a little family, Freddie and Julia Lennon and their baby never really got started. According to his log book, between August 1940 and January 1944 Freddie Lennon spent a total of only three months at home in Liverpool.

Of course, the absences might not have been so long had Freddie not gone AWOL while in the United States, and then been arrested and held in New York’s Ellis Island for desertion; then, on release, sent back across the Atlantic and jailed again in Algeria for three months for stealing a bottle of whisky. Freddie would have his explanations when he finally got home, but his greatest offence was probably sheer foolishness. Maybe the drink helped there a bit, too.

But, for much of this time, Julia had no idea where he was, only that the part of his pay that she would collect from the Mercantile Marine Offices in Liverpool for her and John’s upkeep had been stopped when Freddie had disappeared. For all she knew he could have been dead; and it should be remembered that the Merchant Navy in which Freddie served lost over a quarter of its members to enemy action during the Second World War. His had become a dangerous career.

Not that it was only the war that got in the way of this marriage. As friendly and social as both parents appear to have been, neither seems to have had much ambition other than to enjoy life and amuse themselves. Freddie liked to go drinking and singing in pubs, while Julia wanted to go out dancing when he was away. ‘She never took anything seriously,’ big sister Mimi, who took everything seriously, would say. And when Freddie finally came home and Julia wanted to continue going out, the couple, not surprisingly, fell out.

John, living with Julia and her parents, was too young to have been consciously aware of any of this; or to understand anything other than that he was safe and loved by his mother and grandparents. Later in life he could vividly picture his first home in Newcastle Road as being made of red brick, with a front room that was never used – a common custom then – and in which the curtains were always drawn.

Aunt Mimi, who was also now married, but childless, and who lived with her husband George Smith, just a couple of miles away in Woolton, South Liverpool, was a constant visitor to Julia and John. From his earliest days, Mimi doted on the child, as much as she despaired of her youngest sister’s behaviour. Julia, though, was the one who amused John. She was, John would remember, ‘a comedienne and a singer . . . not professional, but she used to get up in pubs and things like that’.

For the first four years of his life, the war was all around John, but, shielded from it by adults, he would hardly have been aware of it. The air raid sirens, rationing and shortages in a city first aflame and then scarred with blackened, blitzed, burnt-out buildings and bomb sites where urchins, some bare-footed, would play in the rubble, wasn’t a world he knew. Nor would he ever have been told that in 1943 father Freddie, in the ‘live for today, tomorrow may never come’ spirit of wartime, suddenly had a change of heart and advised Julia: ‘While I’m away . . . get out and enjoy yourself.’

Julia was doing that, anyway – like lots of other girlfriends and wives who had boyfriends and husbands overseas during the war. Unfortunately, when her husband next came home eighteen months later, she was pregnant.

At first, Julia told him she’d been raped by a soldier called Taffy Williams. So Freddie, accompanied by his younger brother Charlie, who was also at home on leave, went to an army gun site in Cheshire to see the young man involved. The upshot, according to both Freddie and Charlie Lennon, was unexpected.

His story differed from hers, Charlie would delicately recall in a letter to this author four decades later. There had, the soldier protested, been no rape, but he was in love and prepared to marry Julia if Freddie would divorce her. Julia, however, didn’t want Taffy. Nor did she now want Freddie. Her baby, a girl, was born the following March and adopted by a Norwegian seaman and his wife.

The Lennons’ marriage had, in effect, been finished for a year and a half. For the next few months, John would appear to have been passed between Julia, Mimi and her husband George, and Freddie’s elder brother, Sydney, and his wife.

Then in 1946 Julia met the man with whom she was to spend the rest of her life. His name was John (usually known as Bobby) Dykins. He was at the time a door-to-door salesman, and, while Freddie was back at sea, Julia and John, who was now five, moved into his one-bedroomed flat in Gateacre, a Liverpool suburb. This was too much for the very respectable Mimi. After rowing with Dykins about the unsuitability of the situation in which a little boy was sleeping, not only in the same room but also in the same bed as Julia and her lover, she complained to what would now be the child welfare department of the Liverpool City Council.

On a second attempt she won the day. A representative of the Council interviewed both Julia and Dykins, and John was put into the care of Mimi and her husband.

The chaos of John’s young life must have seemed to Mimi to be at an end. But there was one more chapter to be played out.

Freddie, who was now dabbling, like many other men, in the black market by selling nylons, suddenly turned up at Mimi’s house suggesting he take his son out for the day. Mimi agreed, only for Freddie to abscond with the boy nearly sixty miles to the seaside resort of Blackpool. A friend, Billy Hall, lived there with his middle-aged parents, all three of whom were planning to emigrate to New Zealand. Perhaps he and John should also go to New Zealand and make a fresh start, Freddie began to think, as he and the little boy moved in with the Halls.

Back in Liverpool Mimi and Julia were desperate. No one had any idea where Freddie had taken John. They’d simply disappeared, with Freddie deliberately making no contact with his wife or her sister.

For several weeks, during which Billy Hall’s parents took on the role of carers when Freddie would go off to Southampton furthering his black market racket, John stayed in Blackpool. Eventually, discovering Freddie’s whereabouts by enquiring at the ‘pool office’ of the Merchant Navy (the organisation which kept a record of all seamen who were available for work), Julia turned up at the Halls’ front door. She’d come to take John back to Liverpool, she told Freddie. Dykins remained outside in the street as they talked.

How traumatic the negotiations over John’s future between Freddie and Julia were that day is open to different interpretations. Billy Hall would tell Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn that there was no ‘tug-of-love’ scene and ‘no raised voices’. But it does appear that John, aged five, was asked to choose between his parents – and that, after some confusion in which he went to his father, he changed his mind and ran to his mother. Too young to understand the long-term implications of his decision, John may have been old enough to later remember that whichever parent he chose would mean a rejection of the other.

The choice made, Freddie Lennon then watched as John, holding his mother’s hand, and with Dykins alongside, walked down the road away from him. It was 1946. He wouldn’t see his son again until 1963. That night he went to a pub in Blackpool and sang an Al Jolson song. It was called ‘Little Pal’. That was how he would remember it in his memoirs, anyway.

Julia might have recovered John and taken him back to Liverpool, but it was not so that he could live with her. Soon after they arrived he was returned to Aunt Mimi, and from then on there would be no more to-ing and fro-ing. It was settled. Mimi and husband George could and would offer the child a secure environment in which to grow up. ‘Every child has a right to a safe and happy home life,’ Mimi would often say. From that moment, John would have little contact with the Lennon side of his family.

When John would enquire about his parents, Mimi would refrain from her usual description of Freddie as a ‘fly by night’.

‘She told me that my parents had fallen out of love,’ John would remember. ‘She never said anything directly against my mother or father. Soon I forgot about my father. It was like he was dead.’

Forty years later when Mimi was nearing the end of her life at the bungalow John had bought her on the Dorset coast of southern England, she is alleged to have told a nurse that she was afraid of dying because she’d once ‘done a very wicked thing’. If she did say that, was she, as Cynthia, John’s first wife wondered, thinking about the time she had insisted that John be taken from his mother and handed over to her? ‘You’re not fit to be a mother,’ she had once raged at Julia. Childless herself, taking care of John was what she had wanted, probably from the moment he’d been born.

As for John, how much long-term effect did the chopping and changing of guardians and minders during the first five years of his life have on him? Did it leave him with a subconscious need for security? How much had he witnessed of the rows between Freddie and Julia, which, Freddie would admit, had turned violent at least once? And had he been aware and puzzled by what would almost certainly have been going on sometimes between Julia and Dykins when they all slept together?

He was certainly loved by whomever he was living with. But in uncertain times his situation was more fragile than that of most small children.

‘I just wanted to protect him from all that,’ Mimi told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies in 1967. ‘Perhaps I was over-anxious. I don’t know. I just wanted him to be happy.’