Julia Lennon

Julia Lennon ( Stanley; 12 March 1914 – 15 July 1958) was the mother of English musician John Lennon, who was born during her marriage to Alfred Lennon. After complaints to Liverpool's Social Services by her eldest sister Mimi Smith (née Stanley), she surrendered the care of her son to Mimi. She later had one daughter after an affair with a Welsh soldier, but pressure from her family made her place the baby for adoption. Later she had two daughters, Julia and Jackie, with John "Bobby" Dykins. She never divorced her husband, preferring to live as Dykins' common-law wife for the rest of her life.

She was known as being high-spirited, impulsive, and musical, and for having a strong sense of humour. She taught her son John how to play the banjo and the ukulele. She kept in almost daily contact with him, and when he was in his teens he often stayed overnight at her and Dykins' house. On 15 July 1958, she was knocked down and killed by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, close to her sister's house at 251 Menlove Avenue. John was traumatised by her death and wrote several songs about her, including "Julia," "Mother," and "My Mummy's Dead." Biographer Ian MacDonald wrote that she was, "to a great extent ... her son's muse".

Background

Julia Stanley, later known by her family as Judy, was born at 8 Head Street, Toxteth, South Liverpool in 1914, and was the fourth of five sisters. Her mother, Annie Jane (née Millward), gave birth to a boy and then a girl, both of whom died shortly after birth. She then had Mary, known as "Mimi" (1906–1991), Elizabeth "Mater" (1908–1976), Anne "Nanny" (1911–1988), Julia "Judy" (1914–1958), and Harriet "Harrie" (1916–1972). John Lennon would later comment that the Stanley girls were "five, fantastic, strong, beautiful, and intelligent women". Their father, George Ernest Stanley, retired from the Merchant Navy and found a job with the Liverpool & Glasgow Salvage Association as an insurance investigator. He moved his family to the suburb of Wavertree, where they lived in a small terraced house at 9 Newcastle Road near to Penny Lane. Julia's mother died in 1945, and Julia and her oldest sister Mimi had to take care of their father.

Marriage to Alf Lennon

Alfred Lennon—always called "Alf" by his family—was always joking but never held a job for very long, preferring to visit Liverpool's many vaudeville theatres and cinemas, where he knew the usherettes by name. At the Trocadero club, a converted cinema on Camden Street, Liverpool, he first saw an "auburn-haired girl with a bright smile and high cheekbones": Julia Stanley. He saw her again in Sefton Park, where he had gone with a friend to meet girls. Lennon, who was dressed in a bowler hat and with a cigarette holder in hand, saw "this little waif" sitting on a wrought-iron bench. Julia, age 14, said that his hat looked "silly", to which 15-year-old Alf replied that she looked "lovely", and sat down next to her. She asked him to take off his hat, so he promptly threw it straight into the Sefton Park lake.

She stood at in heels and often caught the gaze of men in the street. She was always well-dressed and even went to bed with make-up on to "look beautiful when she woke up". A nephew later said that she could "make a joke out of nothing", and could have "walked out of a burning house with a smile and a joke". She frequented Liverpool's dance halls and clubs where she was often asked to dance in jitterbug competitions with dockers, soldiers, sailors, and waiters. It was remarked that she could be as humorous as any man and would sing the popular songs of the day at any time of day or night. Her voice sounded similar to Vera Lynn's, whilst Lennon specialised in impersonating Louis Armstrong and Al Jolson. She played the ukulele, the piano accordion, and the banjo (as did Lennon), although neither pursued music professionally. They spent their days together walking around Liverpool and talking of what they would do in the future: opening a shop, a pub, a café, or a club.

On 3 December 1938, 11 years after they first met, she married Alf Lennon after proposing to him. They were married in the Bolton Street registry office with none of her family present because she had not told them of the wedding. She wrote 'cinema usherette' as her occupation on the marriage certificate, although she had never been one. (John and Cynthia Lennon held their wedding breakfast at Reece's ballroom/cafe which was located at the corner of Parker St and Leigh St in Liverpool town centre.(Google)Cynthia Powell), then went to a cinema. She walked into 9 Newcastle Road waving the marriage licence and said to her family, "There!—I've married him." It was an act of defiance against her father, who had threatened to disown her if she ever cohabitated with a lover. On their wedding night, she stayed at her parents' house and Lennon went back to his boarding house. The next day, he went back to sea for three months, on a ship bound for the West Indies.

The Stanley family completely ignored her husband at first, believing him to be of "no use to anyone—certainly not our Julia". Her father demanded that he present something concrete to show that he could financially support his daughter, but Alf signed on as a Merchant Navy steward on a ship bound for the Mediterranean. He returned after a few months at sea and moved into the Stanley home. He auditioned for local theatre managers as an entertainer but had no success. Julia found out that she was pregnant (with John) in January 1940, but as the war had started her husband continued to serve as a merchant seaman during World War II, sending money home regularly. The payments stopped after Alf deserted in 1943.

John

Lennon gave birth to John Winston Lennon on 9 October 1940 in the second-floor ward of the Oxford Street Maternity Hospital in Liverpool, during the Second World War. Her eldest sister, Mimi Smith, phoned the hospital and was told that she had given birth to a boy. Smith would later claim that she went straight to the hospital during the middle of an air raid and was forced to hide in doorways to avoid the shrapnel from falling bombs, but in actuality, there was no attack on Liverpool that night. Alf was not present at their son's birth, as he was at sea.

John started at his first school in November 1945—Mosspits, on Mosspits Lane, Wavertree—so she found a part-time job at a café near the school. and later taught John how to play the piano accordion. Julia's banjo was the first instrument that John learned to play 'sitting there with endless patience until I managed to work out all the chords.' After Julia's untimely death, the instrument was never seen again and its whereabouts remains a mystery.

As Smith refused to have a record player in her house, John learned how to play his favourite songs by going to Julia's house. She played him Elvis Presley records and would dance around her kitchen with him. In 1957, when The Quarrymen played at St. Barnabas Hall, Penny Lane, Julia turned up to watch. After each song she would clap and whistle louder than everyone else and was seen "swaying and dancing" throughout the whole concert. John frequently visited her house during that period, detailing his anxieties and problems, where she gave him encouragement to continue with music over Smith's objections.

Victoria

During 1942–1943, Lennon lived with her son at The Dairy Cottage, 120a Allerton Road, Woolton. The cottage was owned by George Smith, and Mimi wanted Lennon to live there because they would be closer to her house and also out of the Stanley house.

As Alf was often away at sea, Julia started going out to dance halls. In 1942, she met a Welsh soldier named 'Taffy' Williams, who was stationed in the barracks at Mossley Hill. Alf later blamed himself for this, as he had written letters telling her that because there was a war on, she should go out and enjoy herself. After an evening out, she would often give her young son a piece of chocolate or shortcrust pastry the next morning for breakfast. She became pregnant by Williams in late 1944, though first claiming that she had been raped by an unknown soldier. Williams refused to live with Julia—who was still married to Alf—until she gave up John, which she refused to do. When Alf eventually came home in 1944, he offered to look after his wife, their son, and the expected baby, but she rejected the idea.

Alf took John to his brother Sydney's house in the Liverpool suburb of Maghull a few months before Julia gave birth. Julia's daughter, Victoria Elizabeth, born in the Elmswood Nursing Home on 19 June 1945, was subsequently given up for adoption to a Norwegian Salvation Army captain and his wife (Peder and Margaret Pedersen) after intense pressure from the Stanley family. John Lennon was informed by his aunt Harriet Birch of her existence in 1964. John was so overcome by emotion, wanting to find his sister, that he placed an ad in the paper, and hired detectives to look for her. They searched Norway for Victoria, and came up empty-handed, and in 1980, John died never having found or met her. Her adoptive name is Ingrid Pedersen.

John 'Bobby' Albert Dykins

Lennon started seeing Dykins a year after Victoria's birth (although they had known each other before) when she was working in the café near John's primary school, Mosspits. As Jackie was born prematurely, her mother visited the hospital every day to see her. After Julia's death, the two girls (aged eleven and eight) were sent to stay in Edinburgh at Aunt Mater's (Elizabeth) and were only told two months later, by their uncle Norman Birch, that their mother had died. The commercial success of the Beatles allowed John to buy a four-bedroom house in Gateacre Park Drive, Liverpool, for Julia and Jackie to live in with the Birches. They had previously been made legal guardians of the two girls; Dykins' parentage had been disregarded as he had never married Julia. Clague never extended condolences to Julia's family, believing that it would exacerbate the situation. He later left the police force and became a postman.

John, devastated by the loss of his mother, was unable to bear the sight of her body at the hospital and rested his head on Mimi's lap throughout the funeral service.

Effect on John Julia's death traumatised John and, for the next two years, he drank heavily and frequently got into fights, consumed by a "blind rage". It contributed to the emotional difficulties that haunted him for much of his life, but also served to draw him closer to McCartney, who had also lost his mother at an early age. Her memory inspired songs such as the 1968 Beatles song "Julia", with its dreamlike imagery of "hair of floating sky glimmering", recalling John's boyhood memories of his mother. He remarked that the song "was sort of a combination of Yoko [Ono] and my mother blended into one". "Mother" and "My Mummy's Dead" were both written under the influence of Arthur Janov's "Primal Scream" therapy, and released on his solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band in 1970. John's first son, Julian, was named after her.

When he inducted John Lennon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, Paul McCartney described Julia in his speech as a very beautiful woman with long red hair who played the ukulele. He commented that he had to teach John the guitar chords since John would just play the ukulele chords that his mother had taught him on guitar. and by Anne-Marie Duff in Nowhere Boy (2009).