Julia Lennon - Marriage To Alf Lennon

Marriage To Alf Lennon

Alfred 'Freddie' Lennon—always called 'Alf' by his family—was always joking but never held a job for very long, preferring to visit Liverpool's many vaudeville theatres and cinemas, where he knew the usherettes by name. At the Trocadero club, a converted cinema on Camden Road, Liverpool, he first saw an "auburn-haired girl with a bright smile and high cheekbones"; Julia Stanley. He saw her again in Sefton Park, where he had gone with a friend to meet girls. Lennon, who was dressed in a bowler hat and with a cigarette holder in hand, saw "this little waif" sitting on a wrought-iron bench. Julia (14 years old) said that his hat looked "silly", to which the 15-year-old Alf replied that she looked "lovely", and sat down next to her. She asked him to take off his hat, so he promptly threw it straight into the Sefton Park lake.

Despite standing only five feet two inches tall in heels, she often caught the gaze of men in the street, being attractive and full-figured. She was always well-dressed and even went to bed with make-up on so as to "look beautiful when she woke up". A nephew later said that she could "make a joke out of nothing", and could have "walked out of a burning house with a smile and a joke". She frequented Liverpool's dance halls and clubs where she was often asked to dance in jitterbug competitions with dockers, soldiers, sailors, and waiters. It was remarked that she could be as humorous as any man and would sing the popular songs of the day at any time of day or night. Her voice sounded similar to Vera Lynn's, whilst Lennon specialised in impersonating Louis Armstrong and Al Jolson. She played the ukelele, the piano accordion, and the banjo (as did Lennon), although neither pursued music professionally. They spent their days together walking around Liverpool and talking of what they would do in the future: opening a shop, a pub, a cafe, or a club.

On 3 December 1938, 11 years after they had first met, she married Alf Lennon after she had proposed to him. They were married in the Bolton Street Registry office, although none of her family were present as she had not informed them about the wedding. She wrote 'cinema usherette' as her occupation on the marriage certificate, even though she had never been one. They spent their honeymoon eating at Reece's restaurant in Clayton Square (which is where their son would later celebrate after his marriage to Cynthia Powell), and then went to a cinema. She walked into 9 Newcastle Road waving the marriage licence and said to her family, "There!—I've married him." It was an act of defiance against her father, who had threatened to disown her if she ever cohabitated with a lover. On their wedding night, she stayed at her parents' house, and Lennon went back to his boarding house. The next day, he went back to sea for three months, on a ship bound for the West Indies.

The Stanley family completely ignored her husband at first, believing him to be of "no use to anyone—certainly not our Julia". Her father demanded that Lennon present something concrete to show that he could financially support his daughter, but Lennon signed on as a Merchant Navy steward on a ship bound for the Mediterranean. He returned after a few months at sea and moved into the Stanley home. He auditioned for local theatre managers as an entertainer but had no success. Julia found out that she was pregnant (with John) in January 1940, but as the war had started her husband continued to serve as a merchant seaman during World War II, sending money home regularly. The payments stopped after Alf deserted in 1943.