Understanding John Lennon. Francis Kenny
As a suburban teenager, John’s first ventures into inner-city Liverpool would have been one of intrigue and awe at the unfamiliarity of the terms and the machine-gun delivery of dialogue. To John, this was a different country. This provoked clashes with his Aunt Mimi over, amongst other things, his previous Received Pronunciation sliding into Scouse. But when The Beatles achieved world fame, John declared:
The first thing we did was to proclaim our ‘Liverpoolness’ to the world, and say, ‘It’s all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this’. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it … had to lose their accent to get on the BBC … After The Beatles came on the scene, everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.6
John’s father Freddie recalls ringing up from dockside Southampton when John was five years old: ‘He spoke lovely English’, Freddie enthused. ‘When I heard his Scouse accent years later, I was sure it must be a gimmick.’7 It wasn’t a gimmick – to John it was much more important than that. It was a matter of survival.
Having nailed the accent, John was quick to pick up on the ‘Scouse attitude’, seen at times as a split personality of argumentativeness and extreme bonhomie. The Liverpool accent, it must be remembered, was in many ways the product of influxes to a port city, much like its far-flung sister port, New York. Turn-of-the-century Liverpool and New York essentially grew up together, their working-class cultures resembling each other more than they would the English Home Counties or the oil fields of Texas. Playwright Eugene O’Neill’s work dramatically reveals the closeness of his Brooklyn characters with that of the Scouse accent, most notably in his 1911 play, The Iceman Cometh. His character Rocky’s delivery, spoken in a waterfront Brooklyn dive, could easily be found in any bar in Liverpool’s own Scotland Road or Park Lane:
‘De old anarchist wise guy dat knows all de answers! Dat’s you, huh?’ ‘Why ain’t he out dere stickin’ by her?’8
This is Scouse set in a Brooklyn bar: an Irish accent and demeanour that ran through both cities’ histories like a thread.
John’s view of his hometown was that ‘it was less hick than somewhere in the English Midlands, like the American Midwest or whatever you call it’.9 In the same interview, John ‘regrets profoundly’ that he wasn’t born in New York. It gave further resonance to the similarities, attractiveness and pulling power of both cities to John’s idea of himself. Due to its seafaring internationalism, Liverpool was open to exotic, non-English ideas, to the extent that the Mersey was paradoxically viewed as an inland extension of the Irish Sea. As a port of world status, it had the confidence to ‘choose’ its own nation state. It wasn’t only England. Although young John was not a Scouse in the true sense of the word, he readily threw himself into a world of poverty, sheebeens and communities of sharp-tongued, hard-faced, generous, quick-witted and quick-tempered people. A world that was sensitive to injustice, a rowdy, rock ’n’ roll world, the world of dockland Liverpool. This was the life he wanted. It was not what his Aunt Mimi wanted for him, which couldn’t have been further from rock ’n’ roll: listening to the sound of the establishment in the shape of the BBC Light Programme, being in bed by 12 o’clock, with a bookcase full of Just William and Mimi’s Encyclopedia Britannica beside him for company.
It was time to move on, and he had the perfect place on his doorstep. John was confronted with fast-speaking young men his own age ‘talking with their hands’ and fashioning new language patterns around themselves, pounding the ears of the listener with a language of street slang and ruthless Mickey-taking; and this was the world for him. The verbal street corner duals must have amazed him, encouraging him to listen and learn, to add to his own armoury and develop speech as a weapon to beat an opponent. If he was going to lead this group called The Beatles and provide a platform for his musical goals, he needed to have the audacity to step up to another level of wit and guile. This was demanded in inner-city Liverpool: fight not only with fists, but with verbal putdowns, with cunning and, above all, the ability to get one over while out-flanking your opponent.
Throughout his life, John used Liverpool as an anchor to give stability to the maelstrom of Beatlemania, the persistent mental health and drug problems and the final break-up of the group. What mattered to him was his identification with music and this first came with his own burst of independence, as a teenager on the streets of Liverpool. His creative, artistic flourish was nurtured against the backdrop of the edginess of a bustling multicultural seaport.
The whole notion of being an outcast in a city full of outcasts – located in a last refuge seaport, no less – nurtured a sense of otherness that appealed to John. In the year of his Aunt Mimi’s birth in 1906, the City Council Health Committee revealed that:
there was not a city in this country, nay in Europe, which could produce anything like the squalor that … officials found in some of Liverpool’s backstreets.10
Like the ‘Famine Irish’, another group of people that faced impossible suffering at that period were Afro-Americans. Like the Irish, Afro-Americans were also inclined to develop an aspect of their culture that was derived from prejudice and derision and to reflect this defensively in their language. Afro-American writer Stanley Crouch argues that:
Negro Americans are not predisposed to follow people. They aren’t. That’s why there’s always a certain element of chaos in the Negro world, because … from slavery onward, we didn’t like to listen. No.11
If we draw a comparison between Crouch’s understanding of black resistance and that of the history of the Irish, who suffered and died of hunger by the millions and who were subject to extreme social prejudice in England and America, one gets an insight into the outlook of the ‘belligerent’, non-compliant Liverpool-Irish identity from which John derived his character.
The link between Crouch’s Afro-Americans and the Irish of Liverpool is the sense of shared oppression and the innate need for respect through independence and nonconformity. Crouch continues:
So someone telling you over and over you gotta do this, you know … I’m not doing that, just because you said so. ‘Yes but it’s right.’ I don’t care if it’s right, I ain’t doing it anyway. Why am I not doing it? For the same reason that Dostoevsky said ‘I’m not gonna do it’, so that I can tell you that I exist. I’m just gonna mess yourself up.
If conforming and being like everybody else supports and validates the whole system of oppression, don’t conform. The influence of Liverpool on John was to follow this advice, protecting his individuality by using his music and art to challenge; to ‘mess yourself up’.
chapter 2
1900s
Toxteth Park
AT THE turn of the 20th century, Liverpool was still a vibrant port and an integral part of the British Empire. It was a bustling city of 750,000 people and rising, and it was in this environment that John Lennon’s parents, Freddie and Julia, were born – a city culture that was in the north of England but in many ways not of it.
Freddie and Julia had a stormy relationship of 14 years, during which they expressed a love of life and a rejection of society’s norms, set against the fraught backdrop of the Great Depression and the Second World War. It was a marriage that took place despite opposition and interference from both families.
Meanwhile, the cultural influence of Ireland that infused the city was now joined by an American one, in which thousands of cargo ships and hundreds of liners annually crisscrossed the Atlantic to and from the United States. What entered the Port of Liverpool was a multitude of fresh ideas, innovative music and challenging attitudes, which then fanned out into the city.
But the new century heralded little change with regards to the poverty, squalor and adversity for many people in the city. As is often the case when groups of people are faced with injustice, there developed a strong sense of solidarity and in 1911 the city saw a series of strikes and industrial action, climaxing in a general strike by transport workers in and around the port. This involved carters,