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On YouTube, that brief interview has attracted over half a million views, and over a thousand comments, almost all of them fond: ‘What a grand lady.’ ‘National treasure Rest in peace.’ ‘What a caring, grounded soul. She gave a legend love and a bit of discipline and wings to grow. Heaven bless the Mums and Aunties of the world.’ ‘I believe if there had been no Mimi there would not have been the John Lennon who we came to love and therefore no Beatles.’ ‘Aww, a lovely lady. I know he had difficulties during childhood, but he was lucky to have someone so kind-hearted RIP.’

Yet two women who knew her well – John’s first wife Cynthia, and his half-sister Julia Baird – have written damning portraits of Aunt Mimi. Julia – the daughter of John’s mother (also called Julia) and her waiter boyfriend Bobby Dykins – nurses a particular antipathy to her mother’s elder sister. Aunt Mimi had, says Julia, an ‘obsessive need to control the lives and actions of those around her’. In her memoir, Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon (2007), she accuses Aunt Mimi of ‘the greatest possible hypocrisy’, claiming that in 1956, at the age of fifty, this prim, upstanding woman embarked on an affair with a lodger twenty-six years her junior. The accusation of hypocrisy is due to Mimi’s appearance of propriety and the apparently sly means by which she eased John away from his mother, complaining to social services that a couple living in sin were not to be trusted with a child. According to Julia, Aunt Mimi’s last words, spoken to a nurse, were ‘I’m terrified of dying. I’ve been so wicked.’ Though, to be fair, the same nurse has been reported elsewhere as saying they were much sunnier: ‘Hello, John.’

Cynthia Lennon was no more forgiving. ‘She loved to fuel the image of the stern but loving aunt who provided the secure backdrop to John’s success,’ she writes of Aunt Mimi in one of her two autobiographies. ‘But that wasn’t the Mimi I knew. She battered away at John’s self-confidence and left him angry and hurt.’ Cynthia portrays Mimi as very la-di-da: ‘Mimi’s manner was almost regal. She spoke without a hint of Scouse and I thought John must have adopted his working-class Liverpool accent as a rebellion against her. Early on it became apparent to me that Mimi was something of a snob; she was middle-class with upper-class aspirations, and one of her favourite words was “common”. She used it to condemn most of John’s interests and friends – including, I suspect, me.’

Far from accepting the idea that Aunt Mimi gave John ‘wings to grow’, Cynthia portrays her as trying to clip them: while the other families encouraged the Beatles to go to Hamburg, Mimi ‘did everything she could think of to stop John going’.

On John’s arrival back from Germany, he presented Cynthia with a chocolate-brown leather coat from C&A Modes: ‘I felt so gorgeous in it I couldn’t wait to show it off.’ They both dropped round to Aunt Mimi’s with a chicken for lunch, but she showed no gratitude: ‘Mimi saw the coat and heard that John had bought it for me and she hit the roof. She screamed at John that he’d spent his money on a “gangster’s moll” and hurled first the chicken, which she grabbed from me, then a hand-mirror, at John. “Do you think you can butter me up with a chicken when you’ve spent all your money on this?” she screamed.’ Cynthia remembered John leaving by the back door. ‘“All she cares about is fucking money and cats,” he said.’

During the Beatles’ residencies at the Cavern, Jim McCartney often dropped by to hear them, and George’s mum, Louise, was also a frequent visitor, cheering them along. But it was definitely not Aunt Mimi’s scene. According to Cynthia, she put her head round the door only once, to see where John had been wasting his time. Louise Harrison called over to her, ‘Aren’t they great?’

‘I’m glad someone thinks so,’ Mimi shouted back. ‘We’d all have had lovely peaceful lives but for you encouraging them!’

She was filled with horror at the smell and the noise. ‘Try as I might, I just couldn’t get near the stage,’ she complained to Hunter Davies. ‘If I could, I would have pulled him off it.’

After the show, she forced her way into the Cavern’s squalid dressing room. ‘Very nice, John,’ she said sarcastically, leaving soon afterwards. ‘Her abrupt departure hurt John,’ recalled Cynthia. ‘He’d have loved her to be proud of him.’

In 1962, John played Aunt Mimi the Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’. Her reaction was uncompromising: ‘If you think you’re going to make your fortune with that, then you’ve got another think coming.’

When John finally plucked up the courage to tell Aunt Mimi that he and Cynthia were getting married, ‘She screamed, raged and threatened never to speak to him again if he went ahead with it.’

Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Everyone is agreed that Aunt Mimi was a snob. They take note of her collection of Royal Worcester dinner plates, her leather-bound collected works of Sir Winston Churchill, and the gardener she employed. Mimi objected to George’s thick Scouse accent, but she didn’t approve of Paul either, blaming him for tempting John into the unseemly world of rock’n’roll. ‘She would always refer to me as “Your little friend”,’ says Paul. ‘I’d look at her, she’d smile. I’d know what she’d done. I would ignore it. It was very patronising, but she secretly quite liked me, she sort of twinkled, but she was very aware that John’s friends were lower-class. She was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye, with a smile, but she’d put you down all the same.’

In those early days, Aunt Mimi refused to allow George or Paul to cross her threshold. ‘He [Paul] used to come to my front door. He’d be on his bike, which he’d lean against the fence. He would look over at me with his sheep eyes and say, “Hello, Mimi. Can I come in?” “No, you certainly cannot,” I’d say.’ One day Aunt Mimi appeared to relent, telling John that if George came round, she would be prepared to let him in. ‘He arrived with a crewcut and a pink shirt. I threw him out. Well, it wasn’t done. I might have been a bit old-fashioned, but schoolboys dressing like that! Up till John was sixteen, I always made sure he wore his regulation school blazer and shirt.’

After the Beatles became world famous she would rail against John for assuming an exaggerated Scouse accent. After all, she had brought him up to speak the Queen’s English. To a thirteen-year-old Beatles fan who wrote saying she had seen John on television, she replied, ‘When he came home, I said, “John, what’s all this about, what’s happened to your voice?” … He didn’t really talk like that. I brought him up properly, not to talk like a ruffian.’ While the other Beatles’ relatives remained awestruck by their celebrity, Aunt Mimi always treated John as Brian’s mother treats her son in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: ‘He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!’ On the release of Two Virgins, with its cover photograph of John and Yoko naked, she made her feelings all too clear: ‘It would have been all right, John, but you’re both so ugly. Why don’t you get somebody attractive on the cover if you’ve got to have someone completely naked?’

Soon after embarking on his relationship with Yoko, John took her to meet Aunt Mimi in Poole. It was never going to be the easiest of introductions. Aunt Mimi told James Montgomery about the encounter: ‘He came in all bright and breezy – typical John – and she followed behind. I took one look at her and thought, “My God, what is that?”

‘Well, I didn’t like the look of her right from the start. She had long black hair, all over the place, and she was small – she looked just like a dwarf to me. I told John what I felt while she was outside, looking across the bay. I said to him, “Who’s the poison dwarf, John?”

‘… Well, I didn’t know what it was all about. I wondered who it was. And he said, “It’s Yoko.” I didn’t think anything of it, you know. But I did say, “What do you do for a living?” She said, “I’m an artist.” I said, “That’s very funny, I’ve never heard of you!”’

While John was in the loo, Aunt Mimi informed Yoko that she had always brought him up to have good manners, and that was why he always stood up when a woman came into the room. On his return, she warned him of what happened to the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII. The duke had been remarkably popular, she said, but the public had gone off him when he married Mrs Simpson. ‘He lost his popularity, and John, you’d better know that.’

Mimi remembered John brushing her little homily away. ‘He laughed it off, but he knew I didn’t like her and he knew I was a good judge of character. I couldn’t see what he saw in her and I thought it was wrong and nothing good would come of it.’