Chris Salewicz - Redemption Song - The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

There, while lancing a boil for him, she met a lieutenant in an artillery regiment in the Indian army called Ronald Mellor who had been called up into the armed forces in 1942.

Ronald Mellor had been born in Lucknow on 8 December 1916. He was the youngest of four children; Phyllis, Fred and Ouina came before him. His father was Frederick Adolph Mellor, who had married Muriel St Editha Johannes; half-Armenian and half-English, she was a governess to a wealthy Indian family. There was a large population of Armenians in Lucknow. Frederick Adolph Mellor was one of five sons of Frederick William Mellor and Eugenie Daniels, a German Jewess, who had married during the Boer War when his father lived in East Budleigh in Devon. Shortly afterwards they moved to India. The family home in Lucknow was named Jahangirabad Mansion. Later Frederick William Mellor returned to East Budleigh, where he bought a row of cottages that he rented out. His son Bernhardt came to East Budleigh and married the local postmistress. Phyllis, his daughter still lives there.

Muriel Johannes was one of three daughters of Agnes Eleanor Greenway and a Mr Johannes: her two sisters were Dorothy and Marian. After the early death of her Armenian father, Muriel’s mother Agnes remarried, to a Mr Spiers, with whom she had two further daughters, Mary and Maggie.

Frederick Adolph Mellor, Joe’s grandfather, worked in a senior administrative position for the Indian railway, but died of pleurisy in 1919, when Ronald was still a toddler. Following his death his widow married George Chalk, who became Ronald Mellor’s stepfather, but Chalk disappeared to South Africa. Joe’s grandmother Muriel Mellor was not without her problems. A social whirl was part of the colonial norm in India; excessive drinking was an accepted part of that world, and she was an alcoholic, taking out her drunken rages on her children. Gerry King, a former teacher who lives in Brighton, is the daughter of Phyllis, the eldest of Ron’s siblings: ‘I was told that the mother was alcoholic, and used to beat them up. So my mother protected all four of them, and they used to hide from her.’ In 1927 Muriel Mellor died, largely because of her addiction to drink. (In 1999 Joe Strummer told me that both his grandparents on his father’s side had been killed in an Indian railway accident. When I learned what the truth was, I suspected him of some Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison-like obfuscation of his past. But no, said Gaby, the mother of his two children: ‘Joe really thought that was the truth. All the information that came down to him about his father’s life in India was so befuddled, and he was always trying to find out what the real history was.’) Joe’s father Ronald Mellor and his brother and two sisters were then brought up by Agnes Spiers, although Mary, her daughter, took a keen interest in helping to raise the children. ‘Ronald was the favourite with his half-Aunt Mary,’ said Jonathan Macfarland, another cousin on Joe’s father’s side. Ronald and Fred were educated at La Martinière College in Dilkusha Road in Lucknow, a revered Indian school. After La Martinière Ronald Mellor moved on to the University of Lucknow.

After Mrs Adam Girvan met Lieutenant Ronald Mellor, they fell in love. Ron, who by the end of the war had been promoted to Major, was great company, very funny, sensitive, intelligent and articulate; his Indian upbringing and racial mix made him seem unusual to the woman with a pure Highlands bloodline; and when she was with him her natural beauty was only emphasized by the glow of love that surrounded her like a halo. ‘Ron was very exotic, and I can see why Anna was captivated,’ thought Rona, Alasdair Gillies’s twin sister. Anna’s heart was touched by the subtly lingering sense of sadness that Ron had carried with him ever since the death of his difficult mother; some felt that the fact that he couldn’t even remember his father accounted for his faintly other-worldly air of permanent bewilderment.

They decided to make their lives together. But there was a problem: Anna was still married. Divorce in those days was very rare, and not in the vocabulary of the Bonar Bridge Mackenzies. All the same, Anna communicated her intentions to Adam Girvan. When she returned to the United Kingdom at the end of the war, they divorced: Anna discovered that as soon as Adam had learned of her relationship with Ron Mellor, he had cleaned out their joint bank account.

‘I remember my father wasn’t very chuffed about the divorce,’ said her sister Jessie. ‘But Mum didn’t say much.’ But would you have expected her to? As Jessie pointed out, ‘You didn’t even talk about pregnancy. Granny was very, very strict.’ Anna went up to Bonar Bridge and made peace with her parents. In that Highland way of keeping intimate matters close to your chest, the divorce was kept secret from everyone, including her children. ‘My mum told me Anna had been married before, but she never told my dad,’ Rona described a typical piece of Mackenzie behaviour. ‘I wasn’t surprised about it – things happen,’ said Uncle John, customarily phlegmatic. Joe didn’t learn about it until he was in the Clash. ‘I’ve just found out that my mum was married before,’ he said, tickled. ‘She seems to have been a bit of a goer.’

Ron Mellor made his way to London, and took a job in the Foreign Office as a Clerical Officer; considered highly prestigious, the FO only admitted candidates considered high fliers; they were subjected to a supposedly rigorous security check. Soon Ron and Anna were married: in a picture of Ron and Anna on their wedding day on 22 October 1949, her new husband’s caddish Clark Gablethin moustache and double-breasted suit give him the appearance of an archetypal Terry Thomas marriage-wrecker – which, in a way, he was. The newlyweds moved into a top-floor flat, up four flights of stairs, at 22 Sussex Gardens in the seedy area of Paddington. They lived there for two years. Meanwhile, Anna took a post as sister at one of the largest hospitals in London, St George’s by Hyde Park Corner.

Ron travelled to the Foreign Office in Whitehall every day, studying the intricacies of sending and decoding messages which would earn him the job of cypher-clerk, a role whose top-secret nature was only emphasized by the growing Cold War. In the manner of those employed in such positions, he laid down a smokescreen by describing himself to his relatives as ‘third secretary to the third under-secretary’. (Years later, at the beginning of the 1970s, after the Mellor family was once again settled in Britain, Alasdair Gillies remembered his uncle Ron telling him of a visit that Prime Minister Edward Heath made to meet Marshal Tito in the Iron Curtain state of Yugoslavia. ‘Ron was roused out of bed to go with him to send coded messages back to London from the embassy.’)

David Nicholas Mellor was born on 17 March 1951, in Nairobi in Kenya, where Ron Mellor had been posted after marrying Anna. Soon he was given a further overseas posting, to Ankara in Turkey. For unclear reasons, the Mellor family had been in Germany immediately prior to this move to Ankara. Booked on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, they travelled from Germany to the French capital by road. Running late, Ron telephoned ahead: employing diplomatic protocol, he managed to delay the departure of this prestigious train, and Anna told her younger son about running down the platform under the eyes of the waiting passengers.

In Ankara on 21 August 1952 Anna Mellor gave birth to her second son, John Graham Mellor. Brought up with Turkish help around the family home, he learnt a pidgin form of the language. His earliest memory, as he told me, was of the moment his brother leant into his pram, giving him a digestive biscuit.

Ron Mellor’s skills at coding and decoding messages did not go unappreciated by the powers that be. He was transferred to the British embassy in Cairo in Egypt, which was paying close attention to the zealous proclamations of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, soon to bring about the Suez Crisis with his nationalizing of the vital canal. In this John Le Carré world the Mellor family moved into a house vacated by a certain Donald Maclean and his wife Melinda – Anna complained about Melinda’s terrible taste in curtains and had them replaced. Ron Mellor would regularly have lunch, which invariably consisted of little more than a bottle of vodka, with a close friend of Maclean’s called Kim Philby. These two men, along with Guy Burgess, would defect to the Soviet Union; this trio of intellectuals had been working for Moscow. Interestingly, as the years progressed, Ron Mellor revealed himself more and more to be almost Marxist in political philosophy, an undisguised leaning that might seem surprising for someone working at such a level.