Understanding John Lennon. Francis Kenny
‘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