Lennon

Lennon

Liverpool was a desperate place on October 9, 1940, when Julia Stanley Lennon gave birth to her first and only son, at the Oxford Maternity Home. For the third month in a row, the Nazis were raining bombs on the city, trying to disrupt supply lines through Liverpool’s sprawling port system, with its direct access to the Irish Sea. Built up around the River Mersey’s deep estuary, thirty miles across at its widest point and navigable by oceangoing vessels, the Port of Liverpool was a critical point of entry for the beleaguered nation’s food and fuel; the Allies called it their “Atlantic approach.” In targeting Liverpool, Hitler hoped to starve Britain into submission and yoke the island into his European conquests.

The first bombs fell on Liverpool in August, a mere two months before Julia gave birth. Hitler dropped 454 tons of high explosives and 1,029 tons of incendiaries on the town, more than the Luftwaffe dropped on any other British city that month, including London. Throughout the following weeks, in a relentless barrage, the German bombs savaged Dockyards, factories, and airfields, destroyed both a children’s convalescent home and a jail. The wreckage left thousands of Julia Stanley Lennon’s neighbors homeless, more than half of them from “the Bootle,” the hardest-hit neighborhood and home of most of the docks’ workforce. Many of these workers relocated to outlying towns, and ten thousand commuted back to the wharves daily to keep the docks running for the rest of the war.

The terrified population buckled down to maintain some semblance of normal life, tending their shops and gardens, unsure how long the bombing would last. Remarkably, most historians report high morale throughout that fall.3 But underneath, Liverpool, not to mention the rest of England, was panicked by what the war might bring: whether Britain would still be Britain or, like most of Europe and much of North Africa, a Vichy-like satellite or appendage to the Third Reich.

On October 8, 1940, the day before John Lennon was born, the BBC radio broadcast Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s address to the House of Commons. Churchill promised that the cities devastated by German bombs would “rise from their ruins, more healthy, and, I hope, more beautiful.” In Liverpool and cities like it, where the bombing seemed endless, Churchill’s words injected the careworn citizenry with a newly found courage. “So hypnotic was the force of his words,” Isaiah Berlin later wrote, “so strong his faith, that by the sheer intensity of his eloquence he bound his spell upon them until it seemed to them he was indeed speaking what was in their hearts and minds. If it was there, it was largely dormant until he had awoken it within them.”

LENNON: The Man, the Myth, the Music – The Definitive Life by Tim Riley. Copyright © 2011 Tim Riley. Published by Hyperion, New York.