I ran all the way back to Newcastle Road to tell Father the news. They wanted me to go into the basement, but I wouldn't. When a parachute-borne landmine fell outside the hospital, Mimi later said, 'My sister stayed in bed, and they put the baby under the bed. Mimi took Lennon in her arms 20 minutes after he was born. She ran, as she later recalled, 'as fast as my legs could carry me'. Mimi immediately went to the hospital, despite there being an air raid, and was forced to hide in doorways to avoid the shrapnel. Mimi phoned the Oxford Street Maternity Hospital that evening and was told that Julia had given birth to a boy. Julia Stanley married Alfred Lennon on 3 December 1938, and on 9 October 1940, the couple's first and only child was born. George later left the milk trade and started a small bookmaker's business, which led Mimi to complain later that George was a compulsive gambler and had lost most of their money. During the war the government took over the Smiths' farmland for war work, and George was called up for service, but was discharged three years later, and subsequently worked in an aircraft factory in Speke until the end of the war. Menlove Avenue suffered extensive damage during World War II, and Mimi often had to throw a wet blanket on incendiary bombs that fell in their garden. They bought a semi-detached house called Mendips - named after the Mendip range of hills - at 251 Menlove Avenue (across the road from the Allerton Park golf course) in a middle-class area of Liverpool. On 15 September 1939 she finally married George. The courtship lasted almost seven years, but George grew tired of waiting, so after delivering milk to the hospital one morning he gave Mimi an ultimatum that she must marry him, 'or nothing at all!'

George Stanley would only allow the couple to sit in the back room at Newcastle Road when he or his wife were in the front room, and before it grew too late he would burst into the back room and loudly order George home. George started seriously courting Mimi, but was constantly thwarted by Mimi's indifference and her father's interference. George and his brother, Frank Smith, operated a dairy farm and a shop in Woolton that had been in the Smith family for four generations. In early 1932 Mimi met George Smith, a tall and stocky milkman, who lived across from the hospital where Mimi worked and to which he delivered milk every morning. Marriage and Mendips ġ0-year-old Lennon (right) and his cousin Stanley Parkes by the front door at Mendips. She had long-term plans to buy a modest house in a respected suburb of Liverpool one day so that she could entertain the 'scholars and dignitaries of Liverpool society'. She became a resident trainee nurse at the Woolton Convalescent Hospital and later worked as a private secretary for Ernest Vickers, who was an industrial magnate with businesses in Manchester and Liverpool. She once confided that she never wanted to get married, as she hated the idea of being 'tied to the kitchen sink'. When other girls were thinking of marriage, Mimi talked of challenges and adventures that arose from her attitude of stubborn independence. Annie Stanley died in 1945, so Julia Lennon had to take care of her father with help from Mimi. Lennon's school friend Pete Shotton later commented that 'Mimi had a very strong sense of what was right or wrong'. Mimi based everything on decorum, honesty, and a black-and-white attitude: either you were good enough or you were not. Despite this, Mimi wore sensible dresses, and always looked as if she was on her way to a weekly garden club meeting. To help her mother, Mimi had to take a matriarchal role in the Stanley house, looking after the whole family. He moved his family to the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where they lived in a small terraced house at 9 Newcastle Road, which is close to Penny Lane. Īfter the birth of all of his daughters, Mimi's father retired from sailing and found a job with the Liverpool and Glasgow Tug Salvage Company as an insurance investigator. Mimi's mother, Annie Jane Millward, was born in Chester around 1875, to Welsh parents. Mimi's father, George Stanley, was born in the Everton district of Liverpool in 1874, and became a sailor. According to Lennon, the Stanley family once owned the whole of Woolton village.

Julia lennon children