Julia Baird
Julia Baird is the honorary president of the Steps At Strawberry Field Project, which aims to give young people with minor learning disabilities and other barriers into employment a chance to achieve their dreams.
She is also the sister of John Lennon.
The two shared a mother, along with two other siblings; Jackie - and Victoria, who was adopted by a Scandinavian couple and renamed Ingrid Pedersen. Julia was born in Liverpool, and has since lived in France and Ireland before moving back close to the city. Julia worked as a teacher for many years, her relationship to the famous musician a secret until she had her own children and her brother had died.
In 2007, Julia's book, Imagine This - Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon was published, at which point she began to speak more about her childhood with John. Sharing the same mother, the four siblings never lived altogether, with John having a different father (Alfred Lennon) to Victoria, Julia and Jackie. Victoria's father was a Welsh soldier, and was the result of an affair between the elder Julia and the soldier whilst her husband was away at sea. After meeting both Julia and Jackie's father - John 'Bobby' Dykins - in 1946, John's mother became his common-law wife, despite never divorcing Alf Lennon. She died in 1958 after being hit by a car on Menlove Avenue, where John lived with his aunt Mimi.
Following the death of her brother John in 1980, Panorama, a BBC show, aired a documentary about him, in which they didn't mention John's first son Julian, or the part of the family in Liverpool. The programme was endorsed by Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono.
Julia shared that whilst she originally had not had any intention of watching the programme because her brother's death was "sudden and devastating," and "a huge blow to the family," she knew that her children wanted to watch it, and this was because it was likely that the next day at their school it would be talked about by the other students. Upon watching the programme, Julia found that it missed out some of the most important aspects of her brother's life, and so she rang the BBC the next day to talk to the producer of the show.
When she asked about Julian, she was met with rudeness, and when she asked why herself and her sister, Jackie, had not been mentioned, she was told that John didn't have any sisters. Amongst other inaccuracies, John's first wife, Cynthia, mother of Julian and to whom Julia was close to, was portrayed as a villain, and with completely different physical features to that which she had.
It was at this point, 1985, that Julia decided to write her memoirs down, which eventually became her book, though this would not be published for about twenty more years. She says that she wrote this book, "not to probe into [Aunt] Mimi's life, or my mother's life - even John's life - but to stop the stupid stories dead."
Aunt Mimi, who had raised John, died in 1991, and it was only then that one of Julia's other maternal aunts, of which there had been four, began to talk and tell what can only be the closest to the truth of why John lived with Mimi and was never 'given back' to his mother. Unfortunately, John died over a decade before his sister had the truth, with Julia admitting that she was "still digging [for the answers as to why those things happened to John] in 1996-97."
Julia found that there was an audience for her book, because she had known John as a child, which not many people could say they did - barring, of course: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and some other friends from school such as Pete Shotton. Upon publication, biographer Philip Norman, who had initially been keen to co-write the book with her, stated, "we can all stop now [trying to tell the whole story of John Lennon]. Julia's done it."
Although Julia had written her memories of her brother down at this point, it was at 7am in the morning whilst she was in the shower that Cynthia [Lennon] rang her. At first alarmed, it turned out that Cynthia was calling with the news that her publisher would be contacting Julia with regards to publishing her book, which at that point was a collection of handwritten notes and personal family photographs of her brother.
Within a week, she had met the publishers at Hodder & Stoughton, and the idea was put forward for the book to be written by a 'ghost writer'. Julia would not accept this, despite the fact that a ghost writer had written Cynthia's 'John'.
Julia's book is what loosely inspired the 2009 biopic film Nowhere Boy, starring Aaron Johnson as a teenaged John Lennon and directed by Sam Taylor-Wood. The tagline of the film is 'as a boy all John Lennon needed was love'. Whilst this was originally a film which Julia was on board with, upon seeing a cut of it she was dismayed and pulled out. She does not support nor entertain the film despite the fact that in the credits, it states that the film is based upon her book. This was how I first came to hear of her and her book, as Nowhere Boy is a comfort film of mine.
When visiting John Lennon's childhood home, Mendips, on Menlove Avenue, I was informed by the tour guide and custodian of the house that the cast and crew of the film came to see the house before filming and set design took place. This was in order to understand what kind of home and environment John would have grown up in. Julia, too, was key to not only getting sets accurate, but in how the National Trust converted the house after it was given to them by Yoko Ono in March 2002.
