John Lennon

1940 - 1980

The Vanished World of a Woolton Childhood with John Lennon

by DAVID ASHTON

Page 9

Then Buddy Holly appeared and that was really crazy stuff shortly followed by Rock and Roll. On the Mill Style footpath I found a record hidden in the grass. It was called 'Blue Suede Shoes' by a performer called Elvis Presley.

I took it home and played it on our wind-up gramophone in the back room of the house. My mother heard it and went wild. She called it 'The Devil's Music' and wanted to get the record off me to smash it to pieces.

I fled upstairs, out through my bedroom window, down the drainpipe and ran off to Newsteads Farm on Quarry Street where I had a part-time, after school job. I hid the record behind some bales of hay that were used to feed Julie the house cow.

Gilbert Scott, the farm manager who also ran a youth club at Allerton - I think it was at All Hallows Church - found it. He took it to his youth club and the kids had gone wild so he asked me if it was my record and I told him the story.

He suggested that I should sneak it into the pile of records Jack Gibbons used to put on the front of the stage at St Peters Youth Club. This is did with my conspirator-in-crime, Rod Davis.

As I remember my sister and her mate,Hillary Balmer, had seen us do it and when the record got put on the auto-change and was played Jack went into a blue rage and threw us out of the club and threatened to tell our fathers.

He never did! He was a decent sort was Jack and it wasn't all that long before Elvis was being played in the club. By the way, my big sister, Pauline and her mates who were about 3 years older than me always said that they did not like John and couldn't understand why I did.

They said "If you knew what we know you would not" but she never, ever told me what it was. I guess it must have been some girlish thing between them and John.

It was said in the Woolton and Liverpool of my childhood that when we looked from the top of Woolton Hill we could look over to the Welsh mountain, Moel Famau (Mother of Mountains) which we called the Jampot Mountain and could sometimes glimpse Snowdon beyond and that the Welsh people did the same and looking towards us thought they could see Paradise away from the drudgery peasant farming, slate quarrying, mineral mining and poverty.

The Liverpool of our childhood had wealth, jobs and employment or the promise to be able to sail off on a boat to anywhere in the world for new opportunity. Liverpool had grown from a little fishing port in the diocese of the big city of Chester to a city with one Church of England cathedral built from the red Woolton sandstone, and talk of another to be built for the Catholic Church.

Its wealth had come from trade which included , sadly, slave trading but it was a city where the Welsh, Scots, Irish and indeed people of all nations, creeds and beliefs found a home, work and - though it did not always happen - peace.

Not only did the great passenger liners going to North America come into Liverpool but liners from all over the world arrived bringing immigrants and migrants seeking their fortunes or, perhaps, just a better way of life. Often they did not get any further than Liverpool - having arrived they stayed.

I went to school with many Jewish children whose parents had escaped the gas ovens of Nazi-occupied Europe. Liverpool welcomed them and made them feel at home in time. I am not sure that we lads knew about it or understood it as we mixed freely and happily with boys and girls of all races, religions and creeds.

I think it was true that most of us boys had some Welsh in our language - usually some very bad 'non-chapel' words but Welsh words of greeting which were in common use or we could at least say Llanfairpwllgwyngllgogerychwyrndrobwllantisyliogoggogoch, the longest word in the Welsh language which means 'the church of St Mary by the Hollow of white aspen, over the whirlpool, and St Tysilio's church close to the red cave'.

So it was with our accepting attitude towards race that we absorbed the cultures of the world without anyone using, or trying to use, culture to frighten us or use it as a social control mechanism.

I think it is true to say that Liverpool and Woolton (the much older civic centre) was, is and hopefully always will be a multi-faith, multi- cultural city which stands as a beacon of optimism and hope in a pessimistic world. It was such a place that inspired John Lennon and why the world finds and will hopefully always find hope, love, joy and optimism in all the Beatles' songs.

It would be untrue to say that there was never any racial tension in Liverpool but it was often very confused and was perhaps fermented by others. I remember on one occasion coming out of our very Protestant Bluecoat School and standing and laughing at the antics of the extreme Protestant organisation on a march.

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