Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles

In quick succession — at least, in the timetable allowed by George’s stints at sea — Annie gave birth to five children, all girls: Mary Elizabeth, called Mimi; Elizabeth, known affectionately as Betty and, later, Mater; Anne; Harriet; and the youngest, Julia, nicknamed Judy, John Lennon’s mother, born in 1914.*

Conscientious husband that he was, George Stanley eventually surrendered to domestic reality, retiring grudgingly from sailing, and took a shoreside job with the Liverpool and Glasgow Tug Salvage Company, recovering the scattered wreckage of submarines from treacherous ocean beds. Rather than live in Liverpool center, which was still astonishingly dangerous, the Stanleys settled in Woolton, a grassy suburb outlined by dirt roads and farms.

All five sisters grew strong and inflexibly tight in a modest row house at 9 Newcastle Road, in the district known as Penny Lane. Years later, John would say: “Those women were fantastic ... five strong, intelligent, beautiful women, five sisters,” as if they were a stage act: the Stanley Girls. He relished their collective spirit, and from what history has shown, they were indeed a remarkable bunch. Mimi, the eldest, assumed a matriarchal role, taking charge of her siblings in a way that eluded their abstracted mother. Mimi was grounded: a practical nurse, a lover of culture, a sharp-tongued, high-principled, duty-bound young woman who wore the kind of sensible dresses that looked as if they had been picked out for the weekly garden club meeting. “She was born with a keen sense of propriety,” recalled one of her nephews. Her method was very simple: everything operated on the axis of decorum and honesty. It was all black-and-white: either you measured up or you didn’t. “She had a great sense of what was right and wrong,” recalls John Lennon’s boyhood friend Pete Shotton. There was nothing, no situation or dilemma, that Mimi was unequipped to handle. And where the younger girls dreamed of starting families, Mimi dreamed of challenges and adventure — the kind that demanded an unusually stubborn independence. “I had no intention of getting married,” she told a curious admirer, dreading the prospect of “being tied to a kitchen or a sink.”

As she approached her twentieth birthday, Mimi Stanley’s aspirations appeared to be right on track. Her pursuit of a respectable vocation met with early success, first as a resident nurse at a Woolton convalescent hospital and later as the private secretary to Ernest Vickers, an industrial magnate with posh residences in Manchester and Wales. Out of personal necessity, Mimi devoted herself entirely to her employer, certain that as soon as the opportunity availed itself, she would invest her savings “in a modest estate from which she could entertain scholars and dignitaries from a cross section of Liverpool society.”

A confluence of events, however, placed Mimi’s dream just out of reach. In the spring of 1932, when she was twenty-six years old, a short but powerfully built dairy farmer named George Smith, who lived just opposite the hospital and delivered raw milk there each morning, began courting Mimi with a vengeance. His efforts were made difficult by Mimi’s frustrating indifference and her eagle-eyed father, who treated all of his daughters’ suitors as adversaries. “Grandfather made it impossible for Mimi and George,” according to Stanley Parkes, Mimi’s nephew, who remembered watching his aunt with keen, admiring eyes. Night after night, he observed the young couple sitting in the back room at Newcastle Road, “under constant chaperone: my grandfather and grandmother always in the next room.” At a ridiculously early hour, old George Stanley would barge into the parlor, shouting, “That’s long enough! Away you go — home!” making it impossible for the relationship to develop. The courtship dragged on this way for almost seven years until, finally, George Smith delivered an ultimatum along with the milk. “Look here! I’ve had enough of you! Either marry me, or nothing at all!”

The marriage of such a headstrong young career woman to a relatively commonplace and unassuming man might have had more of a disruptive effect on the Stanley family were it not for another, more upheaving union among the close-knit sisters. Six months earlier, on December 3, 1938, Julia, George Stanley’s favorite and most high-spirited daughter, stunned her father when she arrived home after a date with a longtime boyfriend and announced, “There! I’ve married him,” waving a license as proof. It was only reluctantly, after her father threatened Julia with expulsion if she cohabited with a lover, that she proposed to — and married — the dapper young man with a “perfect profile” and nimble spirit named Freddie Lennon.

If John Lennon romanticized the memory of his mother, he took an altogether opposite view of his father. Freddie Lennon remained a vague shadow figure, an outcast, throughout John’s life and, except for two brief appearances, had no direct influence on his son’s upbringing. Aside from the resentment that lingered as a result of this circumstance, John’s knowledge of his father grew fainter with every year. “I soon forgot my father,” he told Hunter Davies in 1968. “It was like he was dead.”

The Stanleys did a good job helping to put Freddie Lennon to rest. “They wanted nothing to do with him from the start,” said his niece Leila Harvey. Julia’s father considered him below their station, “certainly not middle class,” and Mimi later said that “we knew he would be no use to anyone, certainly not our Julia.”

Though not genteel by any stretch of the imagination, Freddie was “very intelligent . . . a clever boy,” no doubt the consequence of long years spent surviving by his wits. The son of Jack Lennon, a refined British minstrel who died in 1919 when Freddie was seven, he and an elder brother, Charles, had landed in the Bluecoat Hospital, a prestigious Liverpool orphanage around the corner from Newcastle Road that prided itself on the impressive, independent-minded education provided to its young charges. There, amid a class that competed feverishly for top academic honors, Freddie earned a reputation for being happy-go-lucky. “Anywhere Freddie turned up always meant fun was about to start,” said a relative. “He couldn’t resist having a good time.” There wasn’t a room he couldn’t light up with a witty remark or well-timed rejoinder. Repartee came naturally to him, carried off with such endearing joie de vivre that friends assumed he would ultimately capitalize on his personality. But he was never able to put it all together. Too frivolous to master a vocation, he bounced from office job to odd job, cadging money off friends or his eldest brother, Sydney, who worked long hours hemming pants in a tailor shop on Ranelagh Place. He spent endless nights attending any one of the city’s two dozen vaudeville houses, where he was on a first-name basis with the pretty, long-legged usherettes who paraded along the aisles. At the Trocadero, a converted cinema on Camden Road, he’d often caught sight of its most beautiful attendant, a head-turner with high cheekbones and an engaging smile framed by cascading auburn hair, but he’d never actually spoken to Julia Stanley.

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