Philip Norman - John Lennon - The Life

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The final word on music’s greatest legend, in which Philip Norman reveals a John Lennon the world has never seen. With ground-breaking insight into the pain, beauty and frustration that shaped the genius of modern music, John Lennon: The Definitive Biography redefines a legend.John Lennon – the iconic songwriter, composer and one quarter of The Beatles – was a giant of the twentieth century. As the founding member of the world's most successful group ever, he changed lives. The popularity and significance of The Beatles is beyond comparison in our age – in the UK alone, they released more than 40 number one singles and albums.But their impact extended well beyond their music. Their clothes, hairstyles, statements, and even their choice of instruments made them trend-setters from the 1960s to this day, while their growing social awareness – reflected in the development of their music – saw their influence extend into the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s.Following the painful collapse of The Beatles, John came out a wiser but angrier person. Together with his wife Yoko Ono, he attempted to transform the world through non-musical means. Their bed-in in Amsterdam and Montreal, their black bag appearances on stage, their innocent flirting with political activists and radicals, all received massive media attention. These events were in search of world peace.John Lennon was shot dead by a mentally disturbed fan outside his New York apartment building on December 8, 1980.Featuring previously unseen photographs, this truly is the definitive John Lennon.

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On his release, he was ordered to accept a berth as assistant steward on a ship named the Sammex , bound for the Far East. When the Sammex docked in Bône, Algeria, Alf was arrested for the ‘theft by finding’ of a bottle of whisky and, by his own account, chose to take the rap rather than betray the friend who actually had committed the offence. He spent nine days in a horrific military prison, where he was forced to scrub latrines and was threatened with death should he ever speak about the conditions he had witnessed. Turned loose into the city’s dangerous casbah district, he met a mysterious Dutchman, known only as Hans, who not only saved him from being robbed and possibly murdered but also helped him rough up the British official he held partly responsible for his incarceration.

Finally, in October 1944, exhausted and half starved, with only a couple of dollars and his US Social Security card in his pocket, he managed to scrounge passage back to Britain as a DBS (Distressed British Seaman) on the troopship Monarch of Bermuda . In Liverpool, meanwhile, the shipping company had ceased paying his wages to Julia, who had no idea whether he was alive or dead. When he reached home, she informed him she was pregnant by another man. She had not been deliberately unfaithful, she said, but had been raped. She even gave Alf the name of the man she held responsible, a soldier stationed out on the Wirral Peninsula. Today the police would instantly be called in; back then, the proper course was for Alf to confront the alleged rapist and demand what he had to say for himself.

Fortunately, Alf’s brother Charlie, by now serving with the Royal Artillery, was on hand to lend moral support. Charlie would later recall the episode in terms rather like a deposition to a court-martial: ‘[Alf] told me he had come home and found [Julia] six weeks gone, but not showing. She claimed she’d been raped by a soldier. She gave a name. We went over to the Wirral where the soldier was stationed…Alfred wasn’t a violent man. Hasty-tempered but not violent. He said to him “I believe you’ve been having affairs with my wife and she accuses you of raping her.” No such thing, says the soldier. It wasn’t rape—it was consent.’

The upshot was that soft-hearted Alf took a shine to the soldier, a young Welshman named Taffy Williams, listening sympathetically to his protestation that he loved Julia and wanted to marry her and bring up the baby on his family’s farm (though John seemed to feature nowhere in this plan). Alf decided he had no option but to step aside—a decision that possibly did not come too hard after Julia’s recent behaviour. He persuaded Williams to accompany him back to 9 Newcastle Road, where, over a conciliatory pot of tea, he told Julia he was willing to let her go. No more inaccurate reading of the situation could have been possible. ‘I don’t want you, you fool,’ she told her erstwhile lover disdainfully, recommending him to finish his tea and then ‘get lost’.

To Alf’s credit, he expressed himself willing to take Julia back and bring up the baby as his own. But Pop Stanley, fearing the inevitable public disgrace, insisted it must be put up for adoption. On 19 June, 1945, five weeks after the war’s end, a girl was born to Julia at Elmswood, a Salvation Army maternity home in North Mossley Hill Road. Victoria Elizabeth, as Julia had named her, was adopted by a Norwegian couple named Pederson, who renamed her Ingrid Maria and took her off to Norway, out of her real mother’s life for ever.

This period of crisis and upheaval in the Stanley family saw four-year-old John, for the one and only time, handed over to the care of his Lennon relatives. During Julia’s pregnancy and confinement, he was sent to live with Alf’s brother Sydney, a man whose respectability and drive to better himself even Mimi had come to acknowledge. Sydney, his wife Madge and their eight-year-old daughter Joyce welcomed John to their home in Maghull, a village between Liverpool and Southport. He was left with Sydney and Madge for something like eight months. The life they provided for him was stable and loving and, as time passed, they assumed that they’d be allowed to adopt him officially. So confident were they of this outcome that they put his name down to start at the local primary school the following autumn. Then Alf turned up one night without warning and announced he was taking John away. Despite Sydney’s protests about the lateness of the hour, he insisted they had to leave immediately. All the family were distraught at losing John, Madge in particular. Soon afterward she adopted a six-week-old baby boy to fill the void he had left.

If Alf had hoped his display of magnanimity over Victoria Elizabeth would save his marriage, he was to be disappointed. In 1946, he returned from another cruise to find Julia openly involved with a sleek-haired hotel waiter named John—aka Bobby—Dykins. This time, however, the cuckolded husband wasn’t prepared to take it lying down. A furious night altercation took place at 9 Newcastle Road between Alf, Julia, her new man friend and Pop Stanley after Julia announced she was setting up home with Dykins and taking John with her. Awoken by the angry voices, John came to the stair head in time to see his mother screaming hysterically as Alf manhandled Dykins out the front door. When Alf himself awoke the next morning, John had been spirited away by Pop Stanley, and Julia was moving out her furniture, helped by a female neighbour. Alf pitched in to help them, telling Julia with the ostentatious self-pity of a country-and-western ballad to leave him only ‘a broken chair’ to sit on.

The sea, his old comforter, beckoned as alluringly as ever, and in April 1946 he found a berth as night steward aboard the Cunard company’s flagship, the Queen Mary , plying between Southampton and New York. The ship was within an hour of sailing when he received a telephone call from his sister-in-law, Mimi Smith, urging him to return to Liverpool immediately.

It was not an easy call for Mimi to make, and it doubtless caused even the unvengeful Alf a measure of quiet satisfaction. For the Stanley family’s hostility towards Julia’s new man friend Bobby Dykins was more virulent than anything he himself had ever suffered at their hands. According to Mimi, Julia and John had moved back into 9 Newcastle Road, and Dykins was also now in residence there, confronting John with the daily spectacle of his mother—in the accepted phrase—‘living in sin’. Of most immediate concern was that John seemed not to like his ‘new daddy’ and had turned up on Mimi’s doorstep in Woolton, having walked the 2 miles from Newcastle Road on his own. Despite all her hostility to Alf, she had been forced to concede that he missed and needed his real father. Alf then spoke to John, who asked him excitedly when he was coming home. He replied that he couldn’t ‘break Articles’ by deserting his ship, but promised to come as soon as the Queen Mary returned to Southampton, two weeks later.

He duly made his way back up north, arriving at Mimi’s late one night after John was in bed and asleep. The homecoming mariner was not offered a meal, only a cup of tea, which Mimi served to him accompanied by a further angry recital of Julia’s misconduct with Bobby Dykins. She also presented Alf with a bill for various necessities which she said she’d had to buy for John since his arrival. Fortunately, thanks to profitable black-market dealings in nylon stockings and other contraband, Alf had plenty of cash with him. He gave Mimi £20, and in that moment—so he would afterwards claim— decided he had no alternative but to abduct his son the following day. As he would later write, ‘I finally made up my mind that I would take [John] to Blackpool with me, making some excuse that I was taking him shopping or to see his granny.’

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