Were The Beatles ‘all Irish’?
“I’m a quarter Irish or half Irish or something,” John Lennon
On arrival at Dublin Airport in 1963 John Lennon declared to reporters. “We’re all Irish!”.
Lennon was half-joking, and referring primarily to the reputation Liverpool as an historic centre of Irish immigration. No Beatle was eligible for an Irish passport or even selection for Jack Charlton’s famously flexible Republic of Ireland soccer team.
That said, President Biden regularly describes himself as ‘Irish’, sometimes even omitting to add ‘American’. If we apply what might be termed Biden Rules (ancestors going back a generation or five) at least three of the Fab Four can climb aboard.
John Lennon became more interested in his ancestry after he moved to New York. “I’m a quarter Irish or half Irish or something,” he declared in an interview. A more plausible claim would delete the ‘or half’’ bit. There has been some squabbling over the details but the consensus is that he had Irish great grandparents:
James Lennon, (b: 1829, County Down, Ireland.) His father was Patrick Lennon, a farmer. James Lennon moved to Liverpool as a young man, and married an Irish girl, Jane McConville (b.1831 Ireland) in St. Anthony’s Chapel, Scotland Road, Liverpool on the 29th April, 1849. (cited source: GRO/NA = General Records Office/National Archives.) Source
One theory was that his surname was an anglicization of Ó Leannáin septs. Further research dug up a supposed connection to some tomfoolery involving a stag. The resulting ‘family crest’ is a little underwhelming:
In the booklet accompanying his Walls and Bridges album Lennon gleefully quotes from Irish Families, Their Names, Arms and Origins by E. MacLysaght
“No person of the name Lennon has distinguished himself in the political, military or cultural life of Ireland (or England for that matter).”
Paul McCartney could trump his beloved bandmate/bitter rival in Irish relative trumps. His maternal grandfather, Owen Mahin, was from Tullynamallow in County Monaghan. Mr Mahin emigrated to Liverpool in the 1890s, mysteriously changing his name to Mahon before embarking on a career in coal delivery.
The McCartney name would also suggest Irish lineage on the paternal side, too, but this remains unconfirmed.
George Harrison had the strongest Irish familial link, though Mark Lewisohn notes: “Down the male line at least, the Harrisons were English through and through.”
Historical records indicate that George’s (maternal) ancestors settled after the Norman invasion (with the handily descriptive surname Ffrench/French). After 250 years they lost ownership of the land they farmed during Cromwell’s land seizures .
That earns brownie points from a nationalist perspective — but the Ffrench family appears to have remained relatively prosperous. Like Owen Mahin/Mahon George’s maternal grandfather also emigrated to Liverpool in the late 1890s.
More recent Harrison family history is difficult to untangle, perhaps because there appears to have been the skeleton in the cupboard. His maternal grandparents met in England and never married — perhaps because it was a mixed Catholic/Protestant relationship. George always knew his grandmother as Louise French, her ‘married’ name.
Some accounts suggest that George was in regular contact with his ‘Irish {second} cousins’. Drumcondra library, for example, claims:
Liverpool Harrison family frequently took the ferry to visit his cousins the Ffrench family in Drumcondra on summer holidays.
For those of us raising sceptical eyebrows, there is an impressive piece of evidence.
‘The Man On The Bridge’ photographer Arthur Fields even snapped George as a lad, with his brother Pete, and mother Louise walking along O’Connell Street Dublin in the 1950s.
The camera may fib but that is George, in his outsized jacket. This makes him the only Beatle to step onto Irish soil before they became famous. In fact, he was only the one who had any sort of Irish cultural background in childhood. He was the only one to visit the US, too.
The man to miss out when they handed out the shamrocks would later adopt an Irish showband name. Frankly, neither Starkey nor Starr are surnames that appear frequently in Irish family trees. As Mark Lewisohn puts it “Richy Starkey’s family were Dingle through”. The Dingle in Liverpool, that is
Lewisohn does throw a bone to those desperate for a full set of Hibernian Beatles. Ringo’s maternal great grandmother ‘was the daughter of gardener from Mayo — the only trace of Irish in this genealogy’.
A thin claim, perhaps, and not enough to earn a souvenir plastic family crest to mount in the hall. But if the criteria were broadened to include temperament — and the Irish Tourism Board certainly wouldn’t complain — then a case could be made for honorary citizenship.
A famously gregarious salt-of-the-earth country music-and-craic lover? With a sad back story?
Fáilte go hÉirinn Mr Starr (Welcome to Ireland, Mr O’Starr.)
More fascinating details of the Beatles Irish connections are explored in the BBC radio series Give The Beatles Back to Irish. And my piece on The Beatles ‘riot’ in Dublin in 1963
