travel, when Liverpool vied with Southampton as Britain’s busiest passenger port. Huge, multi-funnelled ships daily nosed up the River Mersey to be met by emblazoned boat-trains from London, packed with rich people, their furs and cabin trunks. In Ranelagh Place, the splendiferous Adelphi Hotel had just been built to provide a painless transition from shore to ship, with its Titanic-size palm court, bedrooms like staterooms, below-waterline swimming pools, hairdressers and masseurs.
So Alf went off to sea as a bellboy on the SS Montrose. It was, as he soon discovered, a life he seemed born to lead. His friendly, cheery nature made him popular with passengers and his superior officers and kept him on the right side of the gay mafia who ran the ships’ catering departments. ‘Lennie’—his onboard nickname—rapidly won promotion to restaurant waiter on the cruise vessels plying between Liverpool and the Mediterranean. In off-duty hours, he would entertain his fellow workers with songs and impressions in their cramped, foetid communal cabins or in the crew bar, known on every ship as the Pig and Whistle. His speciality (one his father Jack would have especially appreciated) was blackening his face with shoe polish and ‘doing’ Al Jolson, the minstrel offcut whose schmaltzy anthems to ‘Mammy’ and ‘Dixie’ sold records by the million in the 1920s and early 30s.
He could think himself always in a kind of spotlight, whether serving rich food to ‘nobs’ in his gleaming white mess jacket and gloves, or crooning Jolson’s ‘Sonny Boy’, down on one knee, with clasped hands, to the beery delight of his shipmates, or returning home to Copperfield Street laden with the contraband ship’s delicacies that are every steward’s God-given perk. Between voyages, too, in some dockside saloon-bar or other, he could always find an audience eager to be regaled with stories about the exotic places and peoples he had seen and the racy shipboard life of a single young waiter.
Despite all his lurid sailor’s yarns, there had only ever seemed to be one woman for Alf Lennon. Sometime in 1928, not long after leaving the Bluecoat Hospital, he was strolling through Sefton Park resplendent in one of his two new suits, topped off by an outsized bowler hat and smoking a cheap Wild Woodbine cigarette fixed dandyishly into a holder. Seated alone on a bench beside the ornamental lake was a girl with fluffy auburn hair and the facial bone structure of a young Marlene Dietrich. When Alf moved in to chat her up, he was met with gales of derisive laughter. Realising that his top-heavy bowler was the cause, he whipped it off his head and sent it skimming into the lake. So began his long, troubled relationship with Julia Stanley.
In Julia—variously known as Juliet, Judy, or Ju—destiny had paired Alf with a character whose craving for glamour and urge to entertain were almost the equal of his. Julia, too, had a better than average singing voice and, unlike Alf, was a practised instrumentalist. Her grandfather, yet another stagestruck Liverpool clerk, had taught her to play the banjo; she also could give a passable account of herself on the piano accordion and the ukulele.
Julia’s musical talent, personality and enchanting prettiness made her an obvious candidate for the professional stage. But the hard slog entailed by a career on the boards was not for her. When she left school, aged 15, it was merely for an dull office job in a printing firm. She quickly gave this up to become an usherette at Liverpool’s plushest cinema, the Trocadero in Camden Street. Like Alf’s role at sea, it was a life of glamour by proxy, working amid deep pile carpets and soft lights, clad in a trim Ruritanian uniform with cross-buttoning tunic and pillbox hat.
Her looks won her many admirers, and even the manager of the Trocadero, a magnificent personage who wore evening dress all day, made periodic attempts to woo his prettiest usherette by leaving gifts of stockings or chocolates in her locker. For such a siren, Alf Lennon with his Chico Marx hat and little legs seemed not much of a catch. But their happy-go-lucky natures and zany sense of humour were exactly in tune. They also shared a passion for dancing—which in those days meant the ‘strict tempo’ ballroom variety. Waltzing or quickstepping in each other’s arms, they would imagine themselves the most famous dancing couple of the cinema screen, with redheaded Julia becoming Ginger Rogers while Alf metamorphosed into Fred, as in Astaire.
To outward appearances, Alf and Julia might seem to have been from roughly similar backgrounds. Both belonged to large families—she having as many sisters as he had brothers—and both were offspring of men in shipping. Like every other stratum of British life, however, the seafaring world in those days was governed by rigid class distinction. And it happened that Julia’s father, George Stanley, known to his family as Pop, stood several notches above Alf in the rigidly defined mercantile hierarchy. He had trained as a sailmaker in the not-so-distant days when many ships putting into Liverpool still relied on canvas as a supplement to steam. After many years at sea with the White Star Line, he had joined the London, Liverpool and Glasgow Tug Salvage Company, helping to retrieve the wrecks that storms or human error frequently caused in the treacherous deeps between the Mersey estuary and the North Wales shore.
Pop Stanley therefore mingled on equal terms with ships’ captains and pilots, the bluebloods of the sea. His other four daughters, though lively and strong-willed, all comported themselves in a manner befitting this social eminence, keeping company with young men destined to be navigators or marine engineers. Only Julia had ever dragged down the family by going out with ‘a mere steward’ like Alf Lennon. In his displeasure, Pop found strongest support in his oldest daughter, Mary, known as Mimi. ‘Why she picked [Alf] I’ll never know,’ Mimi would still lament at the very end of her life. ‘I couldn’t believe she ended up with a seaman. He was a good-for-nothing…the type to have one in every port. Fly-by-night is what I called him.’
Alf himself, unfortunately, possessed the same sharp wit and withering bluntness that would be among his future son’s strongest characteristics. Mingling as he did with actual bluebloods every day of his nautical life, he found the Stanleys’ attitude ludicrous, and made no bones about saying so. Whenever Julia tried to introduce him into her tight-knit family circle, there would invariably be some upset—if not with Pop then with Mimi—that ended with his leaving the house or being ordered out of it. Had the pair been left alone, Julia probably would have tired of Alf and found someone her family considered worthier of her. But, true to her nature, the more he was snubbed and criticised, the greater became her determination to hang on to him.
So their courtship meandered on through the 1930s, kept fresh when it might otherwise have staled by Alf’s periodic long absences at sea. He grew reasonably friendly with Julia’s sisters Elizabeth, Anne and Harriet, and liked her mother Annie (née Millward), a woman so sweet-natured and kind that she would sometimes buy shoes for children she saw running barefoot in the street. But Pop (whom even Mimi described as ‘a bully’) always remained bristlingly hostile. Like most young courting couples of that time, with nowhere to meet but pubs, family front parlors and park benches, Alf and Julia reached their early twenties without having experienced any physical intimacy beyond kissing and petting. In spite of Mimi’s dark suspicions about ‘one in every port’, Alf always swore he remained faithful to Julia on his travels, and wrote to her at every opportunity. The Stanleys accused Alf of being work shy—‘swallowing the anchor’ in nautical slang. However, he seems to have remained employed more successfully than a great many others in Liverpool during that era of grinding economic depression. His official Board of Trade seaman’s employment record gives the standard of his work and personal conduct for voyage after voyage as a consistent VG. At one point, Julia’s family made a highly disingenuous move to ‘help’ him by finding him a place aboard a whaling ship, which would have had the blessed result of taking him away for about two years. When Alf refused to consider the idea, Pop Stanley ordered him out of the house once again.
Alf and Julia finally married in December 1938, when he was 26 and she 24. A few weeks earlier, then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich waving the piece of paper that ‘guaranteed’ peace with Hitler’s Germany in return for abandoning Czechoslovakia to invasion and genocide. The mood of national euphoria, while it lasted, produced a sharp surge in the marriage rate as many young people felt their future to be more secure. But Alf and Julia took their belated plunge
