Understanding John Lennon (eBook)

chapter 1

1800s
City of Outsiders

JOHN LENNON was born in 1940 in wartime Liverpool. His music, his persona and his beliefs were formed through the varying influences of his home city and its port, people and culture. The city represents the single most powerful influence on John’s life. Indeed, after the break-up of The Beatles, having moved to New York’s Dakota building, John still kept a sea trunk inscribed with ‘Liverpool’, which was full of mementos from his city of birth. His feelings for Liverpool were often ambiguous and, at certain periods of his career, the city’s deep-seated blue-collar ethos became an obstacle and a source of friction to his later musical success. Nevertheless, Liverpool was passionately championed by its favourite son.

It is only by coming to understand the impact of his home city on John, the place in which his (paternal) Lennon and (maternal) Stanley families were born and nurtured, that it becomes possible to gain a valuable appreciation of one of the 20th century’s greatest musical talents. The thread of passion for Liverpool’s culture, music and people would run throughout John’s life. He came to love the edginess of a seaport with a workforce more comfortable in Barranquilla, Boston and Buenos Aires than Bolton, Bury or Blackburn. In some ways, though, the influence of the city could be a double-edged sword. Much of his personality and strength came from his affinity with Liverpool’s Irish culture. The most obvious characteristics of this culture that John embodied were humour and accent, but also the seeming Irish tendency towards defiance and argumentativeness, together with a healthy irreverence for authority and cant. His own view of his hometown was candid and revealed the depth of feeling for what would be the prime mover in shaping his life and music:

It was going poor, a very poor city, and tough. But people have a sense of humour because they are in so much pain, so they are always cracking jokes. They are very witty, and it’s an Irish place. It is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it’s where black people were left or worked as slaves or whatever. It is cosmopolitan, and it’s where the sailors would come home with the blues records from America on the ships.1

John was fully aware of the unique nature of his hometown. Liverpool’s influence on John and the rest of The Beatles is self-evident, not just in their accent but in their outlook, spirit and stoic determination to survive. The sense of being an outsider, of mutual support and the ability to laugh at one another was drawn from the city; it was this that kept them together in the whirlwind of Beatlemania and beyond. Liverpool was ‘a transitional place looking out over the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean while turning its back on the rest of the country’.2

It was in 1699 that the Liverpool Merchant became the port’s first slave ship to sail for Africa, docking in Barbados with 220 Africans before making its return trip to Liverpool. In 1799, ships sailing out of Liverpool transported 45,000 Africans into bondage. The commercial success story of Liverpool and its relationship with the slave trade saw a rapid growth in port-related activities. This matched the growth of the British Industrial Revolution, in which the demand for imports and exports seemed insatiable on the back of that slave trade. At this time of mercantile expansion, Liverpool sailors were soon gaining a particular reputation and character. Indeed, novelist and sailor Joseph Conrad would comment: ‘That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It’s my experience they always have.’3

This growing development of trade routes to and from the port meant that large numbers of sailors were drawn to the city from all corners of the globe. This encouraged the opening of numerous pubs and gin houses, lodging houses and brothels. Seafarers began to be seen as an important mainstay of the port’s industry. Liverpool had become the first capitalist commercial boom town, as novelist Herman Melville observed in his novel Redburn:

Of all the sea-ports in the world, Liverpool, perhaps, most abounds in all the varieties of land-sharks, land-rats and other vermin, which make the hapless mariners their prey. In the shape of landlords, barkeepers, clothiers, crimps and boarding-house loungers, the land-sharks devour him, limb by limb; whilst the land-rats and mice constantly nibble at his purse.4

The importance of the port and port-based activities would constitute the main driving force behind Liverpool’s economic development for two and a half centuries. The city’s function as a port turned it into a commercial rather than an industrial centre. The capital invested in the city made it the major distribution centre and importer of raw material. Liverpool’s confidence in itself and sense for innovation was such that it pioneered the world’s first electrically powered overhead railway system, stretching seven miles along the dockland zones, which both New York and Chicago later emulated.

Trade with the Americas proved to be a huge attraction, not just for those in Britain, but all over Europe. The city and port were booming. But while Liverpool was generating itself into a boomtown, across the Irish Sea a disaster of biblical proportions was taking place:

As far as the Famine goes, we are dealing with the most important episode of Modern Irish history and the greatest social disaster of the nineteenth century in Europe …5

When the 1847–49 potato famine hit in Ireland, the exodus of Irish emigrants towards the city, in terms of its social fabric, was enormous. In 1847 alone, 300,000 people crossed the Irish Sea, fleeing the famine to live in England, with many starting a new life around the port. By 1851, 25 per cent of Liverpool’s population was Irish-born. An alternative set of values, beliefs and religion was developing, and the Catholic enclaves along the north end and south end dockland zones were becoming a city within a city.

The steady expansion of the city and its Irish contingent meant that by the 1890s, Liverpool had become the largest Roman Catholic diocese in England, with over 400,000 Catholic citizens, one-fifth of the total Catholic population of Britain. Between 1851 and 1911, the city also witnessed the arrival of 20,000 people in each decade from Wales. The ‘Celtic nations’ were never so well represented in one city. These Irish and mercantile influences on Liverpool have played a major role in defining its literature arts, music, culture and social fabric. Indeed, in the case of The Beatles, John, Paul and George shared Irish ancestry. The Beatles’ backgrounds were also inherently tied to the port, with John’s and George’s fathers being seafarers and Paul’s father working in the cotton industry, which relied on the port for shipping.

Liverpool had become a terminal for people, not just goods, and had established itself as the port par excellence for the mass movement for those seeking a better life – particularly for emigrants to northern and western Europe and the Americas. Between 1830 and 1930, some nine million emigrants sailed from the Mersey into the Atlantic. In 1886, London Illustrated News described Liverpool as ‘the New York of Europe; a world city rather than merely a British provincial’.

At beginning of the 20th century, Liverpool was at the peak of its commercial power and was considered the world’s first global city. In response to this, it celebrated and declared its position as second city of the world’s largest empire. The mercantile elite decided to create what would later be known as the ‘Three Graces’ – the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building – set on the Pier Head looking out to the Mersey Bar and Irish Sea. Tipping their hat towards the port in their film Yellow Submarine, we see The Beatles sailing off for their series of adventures in the Sea of Dreams, departing from their home city’s Pier Head.

The vibrancy and cut and thrust of a large seaport like Liverpool was to have a profound effect on John, as would his family life, which had its own Celtic roots to add to the influence of the city’s own home-grown Irish culture. This influence on his music, however, has to a large extent been overlooked. John’s rebellious nature has been attributed to the early absence of his parents and the death of his mother, Julia. But if one looks at the history of rebellion in the city, we find that this particular characteristic is rooted in the port and the mix of blue-collar workers, large numbers of Afro-Caribbean people (the largest community in the UK) and a Chinese community, the oldest in Europe. The influx of Irish immigrants, Welsh and Scots seeking work in the port, as well as African and Chinese seamen, led to an eclectic cultural community. The word Scouse, for example, comes from the word lobscouse, a Scandinavian stew. John’s Aunt Mimi was to take particular exception to John’s adoption of a Scouse accent upon forming The Beatles. To many, the garrulous, sharp-natured ‘Scouser’ can on the surface be seen as caustic or delivering a certain truculence, but this is not the full story. It is no coincidence that Liverpool, Naples, New York and Kingston have always had much more in common with each other than their own particular country. They are populated by outsiders fully aware of their...