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 theLiverpool 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 M