John Lennon

(1940 -1980)

At 7:00 a.m. on October 9, 1940, John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool England. It was a time when England was involved in the Second World War, a time of blackouts and air raids, a time of great darkness for all the world. On that dreary fall morning, however, there was a lull in the bombing after a night of fearful air raids. It was as if the madness had paused for a moment of peace.

The peace of the moment was short lived. At the time of John's birth, his father, Fred Lennon, was at sea. Julia, John's mother, felt unable to care for a newborn, and so she asked John's Aunt Mimi and Uncle George to care for the child. In essence, John was orphaned by his own parents, and was displaced from the moment of his birth to the care of surrogate parents.

John would later write:

Mother, you had me,

But I didn't have you,

I wanted you,

You didn't want me. . .

("Mother" John Lennon)

Fred Lennon returned to Liverpool five years after John's birth. In 1946, he took the young John to Blackpool, and he made plans to emigrate with John to New Zealand. John's mother, however, intervened, and John was returned to live with his Aunt Mimi.

John's childhood was troubled by his own sense of displacement from his parents and a streak of rebelliousness that he had developed under the strict rules of his Aunt Mimi. He became an unwilling student at Dovedale Primary School, preferring drawing cartoons and sketches over his studies. This pattern continued until Mimi was able to persuade the principal at Quarry Bank Grammar School to writer a letter of recommendation for John to attend the Liverpool Art College.

By 1955, a new musical interest was sweeping across Britain. "Skiffle groups" would play on the street with only few instruments, often simply a guitar or two, a washboard, and a simple snare drum. In the U.K., these groups were the forerunners of the rock 'n' roll band. For John, skiffle music became an obsession. He asked his Aunt Mimi for a guitar, but she refused to waste her money on what she saw was just a "craze." Undaunted, John remembered that his mother played the banjo, and so went to Julia for a guitar. She bought him one, and she even taught him banjo chords. The first song John learned was "That'll Be The Day."

Aunt Mimi was not pleased with John's new passion. She wouldn't allow him to play or practice the guitar in her house. He had to stand in the glass porch at the front, playing and singing to himself. She would tell him:

It wasn't long before John started his own skiffle band with his best friend, Pete Shotton and some other friends from the Liverpool Institute. They called themselves "The Quarrymen," and they played for free or "a few bob" at local parties. The band was going nowhere, often because John would be the cause of arguments among the members.

"It was all just a joke, setting up a group. Skiffle was in, so everybody was trying to do something. I was on washboard because I had no idea about music. I was John's friend, so I had to be in." (Pete Shotton)

The Quarrymen's first major "gig" was on July 6, 1957 at an outdoor party at the Woolton Parish Church. Ivan Vaughan, one of John's friends, introduced John to another young musician after the band had finished for the day. That was the day that John Lennon met Paul McCartney.