Which Beatle had the most difficult childhood?
Not the ‘working class hero’ or the council house boys.
All four Beatles had what Mark Lewisohn calls ‘unvarnished working class roots’ in an industrial city that had seen better days. Liverpool was heavily bombed during the war and its docks long in decline. The rationing of food and clothing (until 1954) added to a general austerity. There was plenty of manual work around but it was not well paid. Housing was similarly limited — the national shortage was particularly acute in in the city.
When they first met John Lennon, John and Paul both lived in council houses (social housing). Neither considered themselves to be poor, but they conscious of a social divide between their households and that of their new friend and band leader.
John lived in a large semi-detached house in a prosperous suburb. His house even had a name Mendips and had been built (in the 1930s) with room for servants. This had never been a plausible prospect and (Aunt) Mimi Smith and her husband George never had such grand aspirations. They wanted millions across the post war western world aspired to: a nice house in a nice neighbourhood with a bathroom, garden and front drive.
Of course, the relative affluence of John Lennon’s suburban upbringing the came at the cost of emotional disturbance in early childhood. The unseemly battle for his custody between his biological mother Julia and his much maligned biological father, Freddie, left deep scars.
Paul often points out that this contrasted with his own experience: ‘the kind of happy home I thought everyone had’. Here he is partly alluding to Aunt Mimi’s (overdone) Cruela da Ville reputation but more specifically to the death of Julia Lennon in hit-and-run accident in 1958.
The trauma inflicted by that drunk driver cannot be overstated. Nonetheless Paul’s late teen ‘happy home’. was also marked by a destabilizing personal tragedy: the loss of ‘Mother Mary’ to a previously unmentioned cancer.
John and Paul shared the heartache of early bereavement but also the security of relative material comfort and good health. Their childhoods were austere by contemporary western standards but not by the expectations of the era. George came from a bigger family which was slightly more economically pressed — but he did not experience hunger extreme material deprivation
Only one future member of The Beatles emerged from absolute poverty. While the other three went to good schools and lived in good areas over in the notorious Dingle their future bandmate was experiencing what biographer Bob Spitz terms “a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune.”
