More Rosebud - Julia Baird

Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth

Gyles Brandreth / Plain Jaine Media

Society & Culture, Unknown

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's More Rosebud, and time for another guest with an unusual tale to tell. Julia Baird is the half-sister of John Lennon, and here she tells Gyles about her childhood, their mother (Julia Lennon, née Stanley) and what it was like to grow up alongside a future pop icon. John Lennon and Julia Baird's family was big, and complicated - their mother, Julia, was one of five girls. She met John Lennon's father, Alf Lennon, in the park when she was just 14, and the pair courted, and later married. John was born in 1940, but Alf got a job in the merchant navy and from then on was seldom home. After that, Julia had three more daughters with two different partners, but her family did not approve and John was taken to live with his aunt, Mimi. However, John and his mother never stopped seeing each other, and never stopped loving each other - and this is the story Julia Baird tells to Gyles in this episode. She also tells Gyles about John's success, about the band's rehearsals in her mum's kitchen, about John and Cynthia, and about going to see the Beatles play in Liverpool and the early days of Beatlemania.

This really is a must for any John Lennon fans who want to know more about his childhood.

Julia Baird's book Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon is available here. Tickets to Live Odyssey, an immersive exhibition about British music and featuring a new John Lennon exhibition, are available here.

This episode was recorded at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London. Thank you very much to everyone there!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	On more, Rosebud, we tend to have people as guests who may not be people who are hugely
0:26.2	famous, but they're definitely people who have an extraordinary and interesting story to tell.
0:31.0	And I'm really intrigued about today's guest because I've been, obviously, as we all have,
0:39.8	aware of the Beatles since the early 1960s. I felt a particular link to the Beatles when I was younger for two reasons. One, when I was
0:47.4	at university, I happened to meet the actress then very young, Jane Asher, who was the girlfriend of Paul McCartney.
0:56.0	And Jane and I became friends and were still friends, and through her I met Paul McCartney.
1:01.0	But I met the other Beatles because I lived in London with my parents in a block of flats called Portman Mansions in Chiltern Street.
1:10.0	At the end of it was on the corner a shop,
1:13.9	the corner of Baker Street and Chiltern Street, a shop. It was the Apple shop. It didn't sell
1:19.0	computers. It sold material connected with the Beatles. It was their store. And when it opened,
1:25.1	they turned up. And they were there quite a lot in the early days.
1:28.1	So that's how I came to meet all four of the Beatles. Anybody can meet them. You just went in
1:32.7	to buy something, and there they were. And to me, John Lennon was always the most fascinating.
1:40.7	I'm not quite sure why. I think because I knew he was interested in words and language,
1:46.5	and he liked nonsense verse.
1:48.8	I thought he was intriguing.
1:51.0	In fact, the first Beatles thing that I bought wasn't one of their albums.
1:55.4	It was John Lennon, in his own right, spelled W-R-I-T-E.
2:00.8	And I found him fascinating.
2:02.4	So I'm very excited by our guest today, who is Julia Baird.
2:07.8	Now Harriet is here.
2:10.5	Welcome, Harriet.
	...

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