Family reflections on the Liverpool Lennons

An Interview With Julia Baird

listen

(page 1 of 6)

Julia Baird is John Lennon’s half sister. A teacher, Julia lives and works in Cheshire. She is the author of ‘John Lennon, My Brother’, a memoir she wrote in the 80s which she plans to update soon. Lennon.net talked to her about her memories of John, their mother Julia and the family.

I can't remember dates and things but it must have been prior to 1956, yeah 1956ish is when Paul came on the scene. For two years prior to my mother's death Paul was in and out of the house playing. John was always messing around with some instrument or other as was everybody in Liverpool at the time. Any young man was probably in a group, not a band. A band at that time was definitely orchestral with violins and timpanists and stuff like that and a group was popular music, so for everyone who had a brother the question would always be: what does he play? John almost certainly wasn't the only one playing. There were lots of these little sessions going on in people's houses, bathrooms, porches, kitchens but in our house it was John.

Yes, my mother played the piano. She also played the piano accordion which was I suppose quite unusual but we didn't think anything of it. So when we got the fairy story say about the teddy bears' picnic we would get the piano accompaniments and a bit of piano accordion with it and a bit of twanging on the banjo. We'd get the full hit story with background and foreground music.

So John's learning to play the banjo, which my mother was teaching him, was just an extension and I've no doubt that we'd have been the next to learn it. We all used to play with it. We used to play with the piano accordion. We've always bashed about on the piano although none of us can play it like she did, and we all bashed about on the banjo as well.

I don't know. If you speak to my cousin Liela, she will tell you that my mother was the one with all the talent and that John was just a mere imitation. She was very artistic in every way; she painted, she drew; she had the most beautiful handwriting. I remember that - beautiful, beautiful handwriting; sang, wrote us stories.

I think in a different age she might have gone on the stage or something. I don't know, but she was of the age when, in the family that she came from women didn't work; they got married; they had children; they didn't actually go out and do anything after that. She was in that genre of person, but she was a very, very talented and wonderful person.

The first time, as far as I remember, that we saw John playing publicly, outside, was on the back of a coal lorry and it was in a street called Rosebury Street in town. Jackie and I had been on the Sunday school picnic and we'd been up a local hill. It's a well-known haunt called Helsby Hill and you do all sorts of climbing and there's a beautiful view at the top. There was a maypole and we had a picnic lunch and things.

It was a Sunday school outing and we came back and my mother met us at the church hall as we expected her to do. Instead of going across the road and going back and getting in the bath and going to bed which is what would normally have happened because it was getting late, we went over to the bus stop and got the bus into town.

It was all really, really exciting, I remember Jackie and I being upstairs on the bus, holding on going 'It's getting dark and we're going into town and it's night time' and we were actually going to see John play, but we didn't know until we were on the bus because she said: "It's a secret."

We got off the bus at the beginning of Princes Avenue and we were walking up the road looking for Rosebury Street. I ran on ahead and I found it and I said: "It's here it's here!". Of course Jackie is nearly three years younger than me and she's holding my mother's hand and I was shouting to her: "Its up here, it's up here."

So I found it first and it was just like a big old coal lorry cleared off at the back. And I couldn't tell you who was on it apart from John. I do remember being allowed to sit on it with them and it was much too loud so we got off again. I remember my mother having a cup of tea with one of the women standing in a doorway.

It was just like big loud music, but I do remember that it was the sort of music that we'd heard in the house, only a lot louder. It was more exciting for us because we were out late at night.

Right, well the first time that I saw Paul, that any of our family saw Paul, was in 1956 in about June. It was at St Peter's Rose Queen Day, the annual day of the church festival. We were all very local people - it was all village stuff. We had a local police school near us and they trained dogs and at any occasion they were out with the dogs.

So we all went along because you saw beautiful Alsatians jumping through hoops and catching robbers who had big leather patches on their hands so that they wouldn't get bitten and stuff like that, and we all loved that. The coconut shy and the Salvation Army and everything else; the Rose Queen and her retinue all in pretty pretty like 'bridesmaid type' dresses. It was quite revolutionary really that they had a group playing and this was the Quarry Men.

So we saw Paul then for the first time. So that was my mother, my mother's sister Nanny - Anne, we called her Nanny, my mother's sister Harriet - we called her Harrie, Mimi - that's Mary. Everyone except for Mater, that's Stan's mother Elizabeth who lived in Scotland; she lived in Edinburgh.

So the four sisters were there, and all the cousins, even Stan came down from Scotland, to see John playing, but we would have been there anyway because it was the local church fete. So Paul was invited along.