Merseybeat founder Bill Harry launches new blog

Bill Harry, founder of Liverpool's Mersey Beat newspaper and a former classmate to John Lennon, is now blogging regularly here.

One of his early posts concerns the recent death of Cynthia Lennon and his memories of her at art school and early Beatles gigs:

Initially, it seemed as if John was genuinely in love with her and they began going everywhere together. I remember them sagging off school to go to the Palais De Luxe in Lime Street. Yet despite his seeming attraction, there was an element of cruelty in his treatment of her, perhaps because she wasn’t a strong woman like the Stanley sisters, the dominant women of the maternal side of his family. I think his formative years with the influence of his aunts made him psychologically desirous of a woman who was strong, who wouldn’t take any of his Macho nonsense.

John used to bring Cynthia round to the Mersey Beat office and the four of us would go down the road for a breakfast of bacon and eggs. We’d see Cynthia hiding away at some of the gigs, frightened that female Beatle fans would attack her.