How John Lennon’s Parents Met and Fell in Love
The Beatles guitarist John Lennon is a widely respected music icon with decades of contributions to music. But before he was a world-famous musician, he was a little boy in Liverpool with complicated parents.
How John Lennon’s parents met
Bob Spitz’s 2005 book The Beatles: The Biography delves into the personal lives of each of the Fab Four and their road to worldwide stardom as The Beatles. In one part, he goes into how John Lennon‘s parents, Freddie Lennon and Julia Stanley, met and began dating.
“[Freddie Lennon] 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,” Spitz wrote. “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.”
Spitz explained just how Lennon and Stanley became romantically involved. “It wasn’t until a chance meeting in Seton Park, where he and a friend had gone one midsummer afternoon to pick up girls, that Freddie and Julia struck up a fast acquaintance,” Spitz wrote. “Their encounter, as Freddie related it, read like a romantic-comedy script. He was strolling jauntily along a cobblestone path, dressed in a black bowler and fingering a cigarette holder, when he came upon ‘this little waif’ perched on a wrought-iron bench.”
“‘As I walked past her, she said, “You look silly,”‘” Lennon recalled. “‘I said, “You look lovely!” and I sat down beside her.’ Casting him a playful sidelong glance, Julia insisted he remove his ‘silly hat,’ so, with impeccable timing, Freddie promptly flung it into the lake. It was the perfect gesture to win an invitation to go dancing and, ultimately, her heart.”
John Lennon’s parents had similar senses of humor
Spitz went on to detail how Freddie Lennon and Julia Stanley were a match made for each other, thanks in part to their similar senses of humor.
“Julia had long been attracted to the kind of slapstick sensibility that Freddie Lennon personified,” Spitz wrote. One nephew said that “If the house was burning down around Judy, she’d come out laughing and smiling — she’d make a joke of it.”
While Stanley maintained a seemingly-perfect outward image, it didn’t bring well-intentioned men into her life — only men who wanted to have their way with her. “All the makeup in the world couldn’t attract the right kind of man,” Spitz said. “From the time she stepped out from her family’s grasp, Julia Stanley kept company with a succession of good-looking rascals with fast come-on lines and even faster escapes. Night after night, humming with energy, she made the rounds of local dance halls and breezy clubs, where the rootless crowd of dockers, soldiers, waiters, laborers, and after-hours sharks congregated.”
“A spry dancer with a carefree sensuality, Julia found herself in great demand as a partner in the stylish jitterbug competitions that lasted into the early hours of morning,” he continued. “She could tell a joke as hard and bawdy as any man, which won her no shortage of admirers.”
John Lennon’s father worked on a ship
Although they seemed like an unlikely match, Freddie and Julia ended up being perfect for each other.
“At first glance, Freddie and Julia seemed like an improbable pair, but from the moment they met they were inseparable,” Spitz said. “Both tireless dreamers, they spent long days walking around Liverpool, hatching improbable schemes. They would open a shop, a pub, a café, a club where they’d take turns performing, Julia cracking one-liners, Freddie singing and playing the banjo. He had a pretty good voice, a husky tenor, and no shortage of charisma.” They were eventually married, much to the chagrin of Stanley’s father.
Freddie finally helped the family make money by setting sail around the world to work on a ship, as many Liverpool men did. He eventually returned to Liverpool, and in January 1940, Stanley discovered that she was pregnant. Their son, John Winston Lennon, was born in October of that year.
