From: dmaclaug@agsm.ucla.edu (saki)
Newsgroups: rec.music.beatles
Subject: Re: John Lennon's Birth Revisited
Organization: UCLA, Anderson Graduate School Of Management
Date: 7 Apr 92 18:58:55 PDT

In article <1992Apr5.164102.26290@nsisrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> alex@drax (Alex Measday) writes:
>[for Don Sauter]
>...Beatles Unlimited 84
>researched this question.  They found that the Liverpool Echo reported
>air raids on the nights of 7Oct and 10Oct40 in the following days'
>papers.  There was no report of an air raid during the night of 9Oct.
>(Interestingly, the fanzine reproduces part of an article from the 7Oct
>Echo which says "For nearly 2 months... *almost nightly attempts* have 
>been made by the Luftwaffe to damage the port...")  The BU article notes
>that it is 7 miles from Mimi's home to Oxford Maternity.  Surely Mimi
>couldn't have covered that in 20 minutes, but maybe her 20-minute run 
>was from the Penny Lane roundabout to the hospital, which is 
>borderline conceivable.  Julia Baird has not presented proof of her 
>claim that John was born at Sefton General, which is half as far from 
>the roundabout - about a 25-minute walk.

Let's not be too harsh with the memories of dear departed Mimi; she
was an enthusiastic fan of Lennon from day one---I mean that literally---
but may have mixed up a fact or two. Lennon's birth certificate says
"Liverpool Maternity Hospital"---that's the same thing as Oxford Maternity
Hospital, familiarly called because it's on Oxford Street. Mimi undoubtedly
used the verb "ran" to refer to her speed that night as she was racing to
visit her sister Julia in hospital; I'm not sure it's meant to be literal.
Looking at a map of Liverpool, it's fairly direct from Mimi's ancestral
home at 9 Newcastle Road to the hospital: just take Smithdown Road to
Oxford Street, and there you are. It doesn't look like seven miles to
me, just eyeballing it, but it does appear to be a fair gallop across
town. Perhaps she ran on foot; more likely she took a bus and ran to and
from the stops: "The air raids used to start at that time, dusk [Lennon
was born just before 6.30p on 9 October 1940], so I ran to the maternity
hospital to see her" remembers Mimi, and later, after visiting Julia and
the infant John (the baby, she remembers, was put underneath the bed when
the air raid sirens started). Mimi relates "...we couldn't stay....I ran
every step of the way home" (Ray Coleman, "John Winston Lennon" [Vol. I],
p. 25). One can interpret that also as Mimi running, rather than walking,
during whatever point of the journey she was on foot, after alighting from
a bus. Next time I visit Liverpool I'll trek that route myself---maybe
I'll run it, if I'm feeling chipper---and see whether it's possible to
do it. Or maybe some other traveler going to Liddypool this year would
like to volunteer? :-)

Re: the air raid: Mimi says clearly that the city expected bombings
from Germany every evening at dusk (and this was autumn, so dusk came
rather earlier than Lennon's birth-hour of 6.30p); she does not say,
in her interview here with Coleman, that there was any bombing that
night. She says the air raid sirens went off and visitors were given
the opportunity of going down to the cellar for protection (pity the
poor mums who had just given birth, being shuttled around like this!)
or the visitors could leave. It's Coleman who says "That night, Hitler's
Luftwaffe pounded Liverpool in one of its fiercest raids on a major city
and port" (p. 25). Puzzling! If the local newspapers reported no such
raid for the evening of 9 October, was Mimi mistaken and her visit
actually took place the night afterwards on 10 October (when the Liverpool
papers corroborate the bombing raid)? Was she correct and did the papers, due
to "fierce" bombing, fail to note the story in their next edition? Did
they miss deadline and fail to report raids on the night of 9 October at
all? If Coleman is basing his account of the "fiercest raid" on Mimi's
words alone, that's rather slipshod. If he has a source for military
records other than the Liverpool Echo (which may be inaccurate), it
would be nice to know what they are---we might be able to settle this.

--
"I get something in me head, you know, and all the
walls of Rome couldn't stop me."
----------------------------------------------------
saki (dmaclaug@agsm.ucla.edu)