was judged too young to face otherwise automatic capital punishment) to the rise of so-called ‘cosh-boys’ as a threat to formerly safe urban streets.
But the first generalised outbreak of deviancy among the younger generation occurred in no place more sinister than tailors’ fitting rooms. During 1955, a proportion of British youths rejected the tweed jackets and baggy grey flannels prescribed for them almost by statute, and took to going about in knee-length coats with black velvet collars, frilled shirts, leopardskin waistcoats, bootlace ties, ankle-hugging ‘drainpipe’ trousers, fluorescent orange or lime green socks and chukka boots raised on two inches of spongy rubber. The style being reminiscent of Edwardian dress, its adherents were dubbed Teddy Boys, though dandified Wild West heroes like Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok also represented a strong influence. Their most radical departure from convention was their hair—no longer planed into an army-style short back and sides and flattened with Brylcreem, but blow-dried into a flossy forelock, backswept over long sideburns, and interleaved at the rear into a DA, or duck’s arse.
Teddy Boys were exclusively working-class young men who by rights should have been welcomed as symbols of growing national affluence. Since no men’s outfitters stocked such outlandish garments, they had to be expensively tailor-made, often to the client’s own design. Unfortunately, some (though by no means all) of these style pioneers were also apt to get into street brawls, using weapons like coshes, brass knuckles and bicycle chains. As a result, for a decade to come, unusual suits and long hair would be synonymous in the British mind with proletarian criminality and riot.
In Woolton, John and his circle were too young—albeit by just a whisker—to be swept up in James Dean mania or join the first wave of Teddy Boys. For John, the latter were no more than comic curiosities to be recorded in his sketchbook (like a Scotsman with a ‘drainpipe kilt’). Liverpool ‘Teds’ took their reputation as hard men with special seriousness, none more so than John’s old Dovedale Primary schoolfellow Jimmy Tarbuck, now very big and tough and disinclined to any humour where his wardrobe was concerned. ‘We were all dead scared of Tarbuck,’ Len Garry remembers. ‘He’d only got to say “Are you looking at me?” and we’d run…John the fastest of all.’
Woolton did not offer much encouragement to would-be Teddy Boys. The village’s two barber’s shops, Ashcroft’s and Dicky Jones’, both treated their teenage clientele merely as so many sheep to be sheared. John and his friends preferred to have their hair cut at Bioletti, in the little parade of shops off the Penny Lane roundabout. The proprietor and sole operator was an elderly Italian who had also cut John’s father’s hair—though John had no idea of this—when Alf Lennon was at the Bluecoat Hospital in the 1920s. Signor Bioletti’s hands were famously shaky, but his trembling scissors would make at least a stab at more modish styles. And in his shop window—as a song would one day commemorate—were head shots of satisfied customers triumphantly coiffured like James Dean, Tony Curtis or Jeff Chandler.
One sunny evening during that June of 1955, Mendips’ most regular boarder, Michael Fishwick, was finishing supper in the morning room, and Uncle George was due to take his place at the table before starting night-watchman duty at the Bear Brand factory. Suddenly, as Fishwick recalls, there was ‘a terrible bang on the stairs’. On his way down, George had collapsed from what the biochemistry student recognized as massive internal bleeding. He was rushed to Smithdown Road Hospital but died soon after admission; the cause was given as a haemorrhage of the liver.
John was away in Scotland with Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert, and knew nothing of what had happened until his return home a couple of days later. As Mimi would remember, ‘He came bouncing in, his usual excitable self, and asked where George was. When I told him he was dead [ John] just went very quiet. He didn’t cry or anything like that. He just went up to his room. If there was any crying to do, he would do it on his own. He wouldn’t want anyone else to see him like that.’
The family member thought best suited to keep John company at such a devastating moment was his Aunt Harrie’s daughter, Liela. She remembers arriving at Mendips to find Mimi ‘sitting outside on the coal-bunker, looking lost.’ Alone in his bedroom with this trusted childhood ally, John could at last give vent to his emotions, which he did not do by crying but by cackling with uncontrollable laughter. ‘We both had hysterics,’ he later remembered (though Liela has no recollection of joining in). ‘We laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards.’
George’s death had a devastating effect on Mimi, made worse, perhaps, by recollecting how little overt affection she had shown him in return for his generosity, good nature and ever-dependable kindness. ‘Our world was never the same,’ she would remember. ‘John took it on the chin…but never the same. The place seemed empty, but we muddled on. I mean, you don’t give up, do you?’
George had never been much of a businessman and—so the family always maintained—had been denied his fair share of the Smith dairy farm when his brother Frank sold it for development in the latter war years. Mimi thus found herself left with little in the way of capital to continue educating and providing for John and maintaining the comfortable home to which he was accustomed. She did not discuss these financial anxieties with him, and he never dreamed that at least once a year she discreetly visited a pawnbrokers in Smithdown Road and pawned her diamond engagement ring.
In that era, a woman widowed in her early fifties was expected to regard her life as over. Although Mimi was only just over forty, the thought of remarriage—or any other relationship with a man—never crossed her mind. From here on, so she thought, her only raison d’être would be the care and protection of John.
Her main support were the four sisters whose lives and families remained as closely meshed as ever. And ironically, the one she turned to most frequently for consolation was Julia, the ‘baby sister’ whose unreliability she had so often deplored. Though Mimi still could not bring herself to accept Bobby Dykins, she formed a closer bond with Julia than had existed since their childhood; henceforth a day seldom passed when Julia did not drop in at Mendips for a cup of tea and a chat.
Coping singlehandedly with 14-year-old John was a task that required all Mimi’s old hospital-bred toughness as well as her bottomless reserves of diligence and self-sacrifice. He was always to remain in awe of her flights of temper, when she would pick up anything at hand and fling it at him, regardless of consequences. Rather than provoke her ire over neglected homework or unsuitable friends, he often preferred to tiptoe noiselessly out of the house on stockinged feet; for the rest of his life, he would retain this habit of padding around as noiselessly as a cat. But more often than not, just as he reached the back door and liberty, a stern voice from above would call, ‘Is that you, John?’
The lack of a man about the house was accentuated by John’s inability to perform even the simplest domestic tasks. When his two small cousins, Michael and David, arrived for a visit, Mimi would give them the many overdue little jobs that were beyond him. ‘I remember often changing the light-bulb in John’s bedroom,’ Michael Cadwallader says. ‘He’d never even learned to do that.’
Mimi’s straitened finances increased her reliance on her student boarders. Fortunately, Michael Fishwick was now preparing for a biochemistry PhD and so needed accommodation for most of the year rather than just a regular student’s three terms. He was allotted the back bedroom Mimi had formerly shared with George, while she moved into the larger bay-windowed one adjoining John’s. Considering Fishwick an old friend, as well as a link with George, she took to confiding in him as she seldom had in anyone outside the immediate family. When she visited a solicitor to probate George’s will, she asked Fishwick to accompany her, and also recounted the circumstances that had brought John into her care. Once she even showed him a letter from John’s father, Alf, sent from prison, which all these years later still ‘made steam come out of her ears’.
The loss of George’s kindly, understanding masculine influence could not have come at an unluckier time, with John
