David Bedford who has recently completed his masterpiece on Liverpool around the time of the Beatles "LIDDYPOOL the birthplace of the Beatles" has joined Liverpool Beat as a special correspondent and he will be writing some amazing features revealing the truth behind the legends of the Liverpool Beat. David has exploded into action with an exclusive interview with John Lennon's sister Julia Baird, who tells the real story of Nowhere Boy...

Before you read David's interview you might like to listen to an interview with John's Aunt Mimi completed just after John's death in 1980 (Thanks to Craig for sending me the link)

David Interviews Julia Baird - John Lennon's Sister

The Real Nowhere Boy

I spoke to Julia Baird, John Lennon’s half-sister, to ask about her childhood, her mother, Aunt Mimi and being part of John Lennon’s family.

What was her mother like?

“Wonderful—what would you expect me to say? I remember my mother going everyday to the hospital to see Jackie, who had been born prematurely. Looking back, I wonder how much the stress of not seeing John affected her. I’ve not put it in the book because it’s a psychological or emotional question. She’d had John, she’d had a baby taken away, and then I arrived. She had all the problems arguing with Mimi and Pop and then moving house. Pop died and my father had to find a house, and then physically coping with the move. I remember my father and I carrying things out of the house. We moved all the furniture out and the baby was due at Christmas and maybe it was not a surprise that she was born two months early.

“My mother was a wordsmith extraordinaire. She would have you laughing and rolling in the aisles about anything: she was clever. She has been dismissed by so many writers as just a woman who gave her children away. She was a highly intelligent, articulate woman who was witty, dry, funny, everything”.

The affection that the other lads in The Quarrymen had for her, and have been happy to retell isn’t consistent with Aunt Mimi’s stories. Why is that?

“Mimi lived eleven years after John had died. And in that time, Mimi reinvented herself. With John gone, she could say anything she liked, without anyone to contradict her. Thus, she was able to dismiss Jackie and me for years”.

How did you first hear about Victoria, (later named Ingrid)?

“That was Bill Smithies from the Liverpool Echo, the features editor then. He was trying to set the story straight, and within a short time he mentioned about the four children, and I just looked at him, and straight away he said, “You don’t know, do you?” I said “No, what are you talking about, are you saying there are four of us?” He said, “Julia, your mother had four children, and I can see you don’t know. I’m going”.

He was a lovely man, and gave me his number to ring him when I was ready to talk. I went straight out of the house and drove to Nanny’s house in Rock Ferry (Nanny was Mimi’s sister, Anne).
I said, ‘Nanny, I’m going to come again and again until you tell me the truth. I’ve been told by a complete stranger’. It took three visits”.

You met Ingrid, didn’t you?

“It was so strange when she turned up. My cousin, Stan and I were at Mendips putting up the Blue Heritage plaque. It was a sunny day and he turned round and quietly spoke—we were concerned he was going to fall off the ladder—“I think I can see Ingrid”. “What?” I said. “Ingrid, she’s over there”. Stan had seen her before, but I didn’t know what my half-sister looked like. He went down the ladder and there she was walking up the road with a friend. The first thing I did was look at her. John and I look alike, my sister and I look alike—some people even think we’re twins—so the genes are strong. My mother had brown eyes—I don’t know about Alf—and we’re a red-headed family, and we also look like John. I thoroughly and absolutely expected Ingrid to look like me, John and Jackie, but that wasn’t the case. She had pale blue eyes and fair hair, and I found this quite a shock. I had built up a mental image, because, despite the fact that John is our half-brother, Jackie, John and I all look alike. There is a common, strong gene. Obviously, Ingrid must favour her father more. Our father was dark, so different. We went for a short walk and talked for a few minutes. I invited her to a reception being given in John’s honour, but she declined. Despite several invitations, I haven’t seen her from that day”.

Julia, tell me about John’s childhood.

“One of my older cousins says, ‘John was as happy as the day is long’. According to his own testimony, that was not true. John once called himself a ‘social and psychological cripple’ because he was torn away from his mother to live with Mimi. When I heard that I was in tears. “The family is in denial about how all that to-ing and fro-ing can affect a child’s life. It is unimaginable to the adults because it didn’t happen to them. You can’t go through all that and not be affected. All those things that he wasn’t supposed to know or notice, or remember. Children do not talk to the oppressor. I know that from my own history and children I have worked with. If you tell the oppressor how unhappy you are, then they oppress you even more. You tell anybody that’s not close”.

The steps Mimi took to get John are almost beyond belief.

“She saw a window of opportunity, and if she’d have let that go, there wouldn’t be another chance. She was like a bulldog, wasn’t she? Like a mastiff or a rottweiler? The first time she came round, to collect John, my father put her out. The second time she came with a social worker who said or rather, told Mimi that she could find nothing wrong with John’s staying with his mother. Mimi then probably appealed to the Director of Public Services. She was determined. He asked where John slept. There was only one bedroom and my parents weren’t married. He agreed with Pop and Mimi that John should go and live with George and Mimi at Mendips. “My ‘family’ say that Mimi loved Julia. I call it jealousy, spite, and opportunism. I don’t call that love, when you take them at their weakest point. Talk about kicking a dog when it’s down.

Mimi changed John’s school to Dovedale from Mosspits, and took over running his life, or should that be ruining his life? It was obvious that Julia and Bobby needed a bigger place, where John would have his own bedroom. Julia and Bobby moved back with Pop at Newcastle Road, where John could have his own room. That would solve the problem, so Julia went to Mimi to get John back. Mimi turned her away at the door”.

How would you describe Mimi?

“Hypocrite. To the core, flawed. Unbelievable what she put my mother through. I mention in the book that she had set her heart on having John, no matter what the price to pay, no matter what my mother thought, Mimi just battled away. This was her opportunity to have a child”.

Mimi’s story was about to take an unusual turn. She and her husband George had started to take in lodgers at Mendips. After George died in 1955, the student’s rent became invaluable, with Mimi even giving up her bedroom to sleep downstairs in the dining room to accommodate as many students as possible. One of those students, Michael Fishwick, was about to become a more significant player than anyone realised.

Tell me about Michael Fishwick and his story.

“The hypocrisy is too big to take on board, and I’ve known now since 2005 and am still shocked by it. I had it in my head that Mimi had had an affair after what Nanny had suggested. She thought it was ‘George’ and ‘New Zealand’, but that’s all I had to go on. She’d picked up that something was going on and only started to tell me about it in her last 18 months up to 1997. She knew that Mimi had talked about going to New Zealand and she thought it was with George. This was only partly correct.

“When I was getting in touch with Michael Fishwick, it was to find out what he knew and saw? On the other side of Mendips, where there had been waste ground, a bungalow had been built. It was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Caplan. Mimi didn’t like Mrs. Caplan, but Mimi was not a woman’s woman, she was a man’s woman. She didn’t like the female race. You see, Mimi didn’t go out; she never went anywhere, so it had to be close to home because you could go round, any day or evening and she was there. The only place she went to regularly was Woolton Village to shop. So if Mimi was having a relationship, it had to be withinwalking distance.

“Michael Fishwick didn’t have to tell me anything; it was his decision. I tracked him down, hoping that he could unlock the secrets of life inside Mendips. Mimi’s boyfriend would have had to have been one of the students who were there through thick and thin. That’s why I set out to contact him, never imagining for a split second, about his involvement with my aunt.

“When I spoke to Michael Fishwick, I just said, ‘Who was Mimi’s boyfriend?’ I didn’t ask did she have one. If he’d have said to me, ‘Good grief, Mimi didn’t have a boyfriend, what are you talking about?’ I would have thought, ‘Nanny was wrong on that one’. She wasn’t wrong on much: she’d picked up some feelings but that was all. I would have left it.

“He said, ‘What made you think Mimi had a boyfriend?’ Perhaps Nanny was right, as it wasn’t a denial. We met again the next week and he told me about his improbable relationship with Mimi, given his much younger age.

“The relationship started in 1956. Michael had lived at Mendips as a student since September 1951 and finally left in 1960. George had died in 1955. Mimi at this point was over fifty years of age, although she told Michael that she was forty-six—Michael was twenty-seven. During Christmas of 1956, Mimi had taken John with her to Scotland to see her sister’s family and to keep him away from his mother. Michael telephoned to say that he was ill, and was confined to his bed at Mendips. Mimi left Scotland the next day, without John and went straight back to Mendips to be with Michael.

“Michael was offered the chance to go to New Zealand on a project to complete his Ph.D. and he and Mimi considered leaving Liverpool and moving to New Zealand, with marriage a possibility. However, the funding for the doctorate fell through, and Michael had to stay in Liverpool. He was soon called up for national service and in 1960 the relationship was at an end. Michael later married someone else”.

This helps to understand Mimi more. Tell me about ‘The House of Correction’.

“Mimi called Mendips, ‘The House of Correction’ and when John was going back there he said, ‘I have to go back to the House of Correction’ and we were the ‘House of Sin’. Society has changed a lot since then, but the hypocrisy hasn’t. Mimi destroyed my mother’s life, and the rest of our family, just to get the child that she never had. Here was a ready-made child. I can only think that she was an opportunist. I don’t think that she had planned it, but as it became more obvious, it was an opportunity not to be missed. As I have already mentioned, Leila Harvey, my cousin, told me that when they (John’s mother Julia and ‘Bobby’ Dykins) had moved back to the Penny Lane area—9, Newcastle Road—Julia went to Mimi to ask to take John home. Mimi flung John behind her and said to my mother, ‘Get out’. It’s a lot stronger than I put in the book—‘Get out of here, you’re not having him, you’re not fit to have him, get out of my house’. Leila was at the back of the room and witnessed it all.

“When I think of Mendips, I always think of it as an unhappy house, and people go round there on the tour and say, ‘Isn’t this wonderful, isn’t this lovely,’ but it was not a happy house. After Ernest died—the owner of Mendips who was a lovely man—Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife said, ‘Do you want to buy it?’ I said, ‘No Cynthia, what are you suggesting?’ Cynthia said she would speak to Julian—John and Cynthia’s son—and did Jackie and I want the house?’ I said, ‘Cyn, thank you, but no thank you’.

“Cynthia knew what type of house it was, and I understood, even before I knew the whole story, that John was living in that house as a child because he had to live there, not by choice or that my mother had given him away. It was the house where my mother was turned away”.

Your mother must have been distraught?

“We now know she had post-natal depression. Mimi couldn’t have children for whatever reason, but I’ve tried not to surmise anything in the book. We always knew that there was something wrong about Mimi; I’ve never tried to write about it before because I couldn’t prove it. Once I knew about the student, everything fell into place. That was the final piece of the jigsaw. When I looked at everything Mimi had done, I realised that she had ruined my mother’s life”.

May Pang, John Lennon’s former personal assistant-turned-lover in the 1970s said recently that she had a sense that John had been told that Julia was dead, when clearly she was living close by. Do you know anything about that?

“I don’t know that, but it’s entirely possible. I know that Mimi said to John that she didn’t know where his mother was, because Nanny told me this and John told me in his conversations. He said, ‘I didn’t know where you were, I was told that mummy had gone away with Bobby, and Mimi didn’t know where’. At the same time, Mimi told my mother, ‘You keep away, he is unhappy and unsettled after he sees you, and he has to settle into his new life’.

“Mimi lived for eleven years after John and she continued to rewrite her story. She said, ‘I knew I wanted John from the moment I first saw him’. We all like our sister’s children, but she made all that up. Give her another fifty years and she’d have claimed she had John herself. There had always been an atmosphere between us that never ever went away. Bizarrely though, it was me that she sent for at the end of her life”.

Why did she ask for you?

“I don’t know, but I always went. When she came out of hospital, she was told that someone from the family had to be there, in her house, before they would let her go home, so she phoned me. Why me? I wonder did Mimi want to talk to me? I am surmising here because she never said anything”.

Mimi died in December 1992. Her last words were, “I’m terrified of dying, I’ve been so wicked”. Did she want to apologise and heal the wounds?

“I wish she would have done it years ago because I would have said to her, ‘It’s all right Mimi, I don’t think you’re going to be judged anywhere and I’m not going to judge you. Be happy. It’s totally forgiven’. Do I have the right to forgive on behalf of my mother? Maybe I do. I would have told her, ‘It’s fine; no one is going to judge you, be happy, and be peaceful now’. I would have said it to her without a shadow of a doubt, but she didn’t give me the opportunity to, and we were too frightened of her, even at this stage, to say anything. She was an absolute figure of fear to me”.

What happened after your mother was killed?

“Jackie and I were nuisances, to be coped with as a matter of family duty. We were packed off to Scotland the next day and were told that mummy was unwell in hospital”

How long were they planning to keep your mother’s death a secret?

“I imagine that if they could, it would have been forever. We came back to Liverpool, the first week in September. My mother died on 15 July, and we were sent away on the 16 July, so we were away for about eight weeks. Even when we came back they still didn’t tell us. Were we not to ever mention our mother again? They were mad if they thought that we were never going to talk about her. They were mad, empty-headed, self-obsessed adults”.

Mimi’s sister Harriet, and her husband Norman, assumed responsibility for the girls and took them to live in the dairy cottage, not far from Mendips.

It’s like there is a conspiracy between Mimi’s whole family because your mum and dad weren’t married, you and Jackie were not considered to be part of Mimi’s family.

“We heard that forever. If they were alive we’d still be hearing it now”.

It must have deeply affected you and Jackie?

“It still affects us. They didn’t care, that is the truth. It was a duty to look after us. There was talk of an orphanage but my father went crazy. My father maintained us the whole time. I don’t know what the agreement was, but he kept the family, as he should have done. It wasn’t a duty; he paid for everything and more for us and in fact, for the household. He bought the beds, the washing machine, and the school shoes: he bought everything. He was never a father who decided not to pay. There was money going into the house all the time for us, but we never knew it then”.

You were made wards of court, weren’t you?

“We knew nothing about this until later. When I was 21, I just received a letter, which had been opened already, and I said, ‘What’s this?’ I was told to go down to this place in Water Street (Liverpool City Centre) and they’ll explain it to you. So I went down and I said, ‘What’s this?’ My mother apparently had an insurance policy that was bought from the man at the door, and it was worth £300 when she died, to be paid out when we were twenty-one, split between her three children. John received £100 when he was twenty-one, though he was never told that it was from his mother. John always believed it was a gift from his auntie. He and Paul went to Paris with the money. “When I was twenty-one, I went and I received £200, and when Jackie went it was about £320, because of the interest that had built up. I just said, ‘What is this about the ward of court, I don’t know anything about this’. I was told, ‘Sign this, and you’re not a ward of court any more’. But I said, ‘What does it mean?’ ‘It means that your uncle and aunt became your guardians’. But my father was keeping us. We knew nothing about it”.

It was something else from your childhood that’s been taken away from you.

“Exactly. When we had our school reports, my uncle always signed them as guardian. My father could have done that. Why did they do that? We were raging inside but we never dared ask any questions”.

Norman and Harriet Birch became their guardians. Since the girl’s father, ‘Bobby’ Dykins, had not been married to Julia, he had little or no rights. Some books have portrayed Dykins as a drunk, an incompetent father incapable of looking after his daughters. This was not true. He was not allowed to look after his daughters, and legally could do nothing about it. He was allowed to visit them once or twice a week.
Bobby couldn’t cope with living in Springwood, and so he found a new house near Woolton Woods, close to the cottage. Unbeknown to Harrie and Mimi, Julia and Jackie found the house and would go to see their father for quick visits in secret.

How did your father cope?

“He was weak in the opposition of the family, caught in the teeth of the tiger. There was no respect for his feelings. Because they couldn’t marry—Alf wouldn’t give Julia a divorce—Bobby had no rights. They didn’t have the right to do what they did, but they did it. They were like bulldozers. We lost our mother, and they took us away from our father and our grandmother because she was too ‘common’ to be allowed to visit”.

In the summer of 1959, Julia and Jackie were told they could go and spend a week with their father, whose mother had come to live with him too. ‘Nana’ was able to take care of them when their father had to go to work. The week became two weeks and then the whole of the summer holiday. Bobby had a new job in the
New Bears Paw pub in town, and arranged a part-time job for John there with him. It was all going well, when, in the summer of 1960, Nana became ill. It became clear that she couldn’t continue to look after the girls, and they moved back in with their Aunt Harrie. In December 1965, further tragedy struck when their father, Bobby, was killed in a car crash at the bottom of Penny Lane. John didn’t know for months: he didn’t need to be told, as it was nothing to do with ‘the family’. John Lennon by now was a Beatle and the contact between him and his two half-sisters became less frequent, and they rarely heard from him. They made contact again in the 1970s, and had many conversations. Julia talked to John about their mum
and their emotions ran the gamut. John remarked to Julia, ‘You had her, I didn’t,’ a lyric reflected in his song “Mother”.

He became nostalgic, and asked Julia to send over lots of his old things to America. Julia sent photos, and at the same time, Mimi mailed his Quarry Bank school tie and sent his Uncle George’s hallway clock at Mendips. Lennon spoke of visiting Liverpool to see everyone. He surprised Nanny by ringing her up on her birthday and told her of his impending visit in the New Year. Unfortunately, a crazed assassin stopped his
long-overdue homecoming from happening in December 1980. Before then, John had purchased a three-bedroom house in Gateacre Park Drive, which was intended for his two half-sisters, Julia and Jackie. John’s Aunt Harriet and Uncle Norman had moved there from the dairy cottage where they had looked after Julia and Jackie. Harriet died in 1972 and after John died in 1980, Norman was still living there. Yoko wrote to offer Norman first refusal on the sale of the house, ‘at a mutually agreeable price’. Norman lived on a
fixed income from a pension and was unable to afford it. However, following a protest, Yoko allowed Norman to stay. After a flurry of letters and phone calls between Julia Baird and Yoko, it became clear that Yoko was not giving the house to Julia and Jackie. Yoko, however, did offer the two money if they were
in need. The house was handed over to the Salvation Army on 2 November 1993 as a gift from Yoko. After sitting empty for several years, the Salvation Army has put it to use as a retirement home for their officers.

This house in Gateacre Park Drive became important to you, didn’t it?

“That house is a symbol of John’s love and care for Jackie and me, and it was taken away from us. It is just more of the same treatment that has been meted out to us since our mother’s death. When Norman died after being knocked down by a car in October 1991—a horrible reoccurring theme with car accidents—his son David was asked by Yoko’s lawyers, to clear the house within weeks. He emptied it in a weekend. It was special to us. Yoko then donated it to the Salvation Army, so it was never ours. “Mimi also subsequently found that the house John had bought for her in Poole, Dorset, was not hers, but owned by Apple. “But Yoko helped her by paying for private nursing care. When she died, Cynthia came with me to the funeral. Yoko and Sean (John and Yoko’s son) came too, but not Julian who was John and Cynthia’s son. Cynthia spoke to Yoko about Mimi’s house, as apparently John had intended for it to be used as a family retreat too, as well as being Mimi’s home. However, the house had already been sold”.

People keep repeating untruths, don’t they?

“Why didn’t Hunter Davies (The Beatles official biographer) come and see me? I was an adult and I could have told him that Springwood (where Julia and her family lived) was where it all happened. Why wasn’t that in?”

All these books with myths and stories must hurt you?

“I’ve been quoted as contributing to books, such as Albert Goldman’s, when I never gave interviews. I could have sued, but I don’t let it bother me because I know it’s rubbish. That’s why I say at the beginning of my book that these so-called ‘experts’ are someone who knew someone who knew someone else or maybe they didn’t, so here’s the truth. A newspaper article was one of the reasons I started my book. I challenged Philip Norman over what he had written in an article. He contacted me and, after initially denying it, he rang back and to his credit apologised. That particular article had hurt me, but I knew that because it was written by the well-respected author, people would accept it. When he admitted that the article was wrong, he invited me to correct the story of John’s childhood in his forthcoming biography. My reply was that I would write it myself”.

It must be so strange, directly or indirectly, to have people writing about you and your family constantly?

“All the time. When the ‘family’ don’t gainsay it, that’s almost a taciturn acknowledgment that it is true. When I speak to my cousin Leila she says, ‘You know it’s not true’. That is not good enough. When we go, it will become the truth.

Your mother has been described as this happy-go-lucky girl who gave John away and it didn’t matter to her.

“That’s why I’ve written this book, to put my mother back where she belongs. One of my cousins said that it’s an assassination of Mimi, but believe me it could have been a lot worse. I’ve done the bare minimum because there is enough in there”.

It could have been a tabloid-style sensationalist book, couldn’t it?

“It was never my intention to do that, even though there was enough scandal to do that. It’s a serious book about serious matters. People have written these accounts without speaking to me or to Jackie and then new researchers just look at the research done before and refer to that without doing their own investigation. As an academic I know that won’t do. Go back to the source. You wouldn’t get away with it in school. I’ve been to see the house where my mother was born, the plot at 8, Head Street, the houses have been demolished. I’ve seen them all with Stan, and I’ve been to see the farm in North Wales.

“My mother’s house has been demolished to make way for new developments. I don’t know if I’m pleased about that because I’d have to buy it and live in it as a tangible association with her”.

You mention your mother’s grave.

“I’ve been looking to do something about my mum’s grave for some time, and it turned out that my Uncle Norman had paid about thirteen shillings (65 pence) for the plot. I don’t know where the money came from or whether they clubbed together or how it happened, but he paid for it. Therefore, my mother’s plot belonged to him. It’s just that they didn’t care, and what did it matter to us? After all, she wasn’t alive and we weren’t at the funeral and were never told where she was buried. So that passed, when Norman died, to my cousin David. He has been great in going through the paperwork and probate, so soon we can look at a proper headstone. It will be for us, and not the public and I hope it never will be”.

How do you deal with it?

“Since 2004, I have been consumed with the book, and it has been a cathartic exercise for me. I will be promoting the book in the near future to get the truth out there. After that, I don’t know. I’m thinking of putting my book into poems. The book is about in the tenth draft (the book is since published in 2007, Imagine This – Growing up with my brother John Lennon). When I started writing it, I thought that Hodder, the publisher, might not be interested. It was an affair of the heart, I was researching and making notes and it came out more like modern poetry than prose. One example is called ‘John’. My mother wanted John to know that he was the only John, and why she called my father ‘Bobby’”.

For a short time, A very short time,
My parents lived together with John.
My mother called John Albert by ‘Bobby’, as did John.
My mother wanted John to know that he was John.
The one John. The number one John. Her John.

Julia Baird is an extraordinary woman who has faced unbelievable treatment from her own family. On account of Mimi’s scheming, Julia and Jackie were virtually disowned and ignored. They were not considered part of the family. More recently, Julia has found out that Mimi, the ‘moral’ voice of the Stanley family who destroyed her sister, Julia’s life, who forcibly took John away from his mother out of some misplaced moral crusade, was herself later having a relationship with a student half her age in her
‘House of Correction’. You can understand why Julia feels that Mimi was a hypocrite. What makes it worse still is that her life has been constantly paraded in the public eye for the last four decades, and misrepresented. Her mother, who was not alive to defend herself, has been reviled and ridiculed for too long.

It is no wonder John had so many demons, and it is easier to understand the man more than ever before. Julia Lennon was an inspiration to her son and daughters, and should now be given the credit for what she was able to achieve, in spite of Mimi’s actions which tore the family apart.

David Bedford  Liverpool January 2010

David's new book LIDDYPOOL the birthplace of the Beatles is now published and can be purchased from the Hard Days Night Shop online.