John Lennon’s Dad Worried Lennon Would Kill Him After Their Final Meeting
John Lennon and his dad, Alfred Lennon, had a rocky relationship. They reconnected after years without seeing or speaking to each other, but their relationship never quite recovered from Alfred’s time away from his son. During their last-ever meeting, Lennon flew into a rage and directed it at his father. When Alfred left, he wrote a letter to his lawyer, genuinely worried that Lennon would do something to harm him.
John Lennon and his dad got into an argument the last time they saw each other
Alfred Lennon remarried and had another child. The young family visited Lennon on his 30th birthday, but they didn’t find him in good spirits. He ranted about the people who negatively affected his life, Alfred included. Alfred said his wife, Pauline, tried defending him, but he stopped her. He worried Lennon would fly out of control and hurt them.
“[I] was by now, convinced he would do us an injury if we tried to thwart in any way, his evil intentions,” he wrote, per John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman. “It was when I once more alluded to the fact, that I had never asked him for financial help, and was quite prepared to manage without it, that he flew into another abominable outburst, and accused me of using the “Press” to force him to help me, and that, if I were to do so again, particularly about our present discussion, he would have me ‘done In.'”
It seemed to Alfred that Lennon was threatening to send him to a watery grave.
“There was no doubt whatsoever in my mind, that he meant every word he spoke, his countenance was frightful to behold, as he explained in detail, how I would be carried out to sea and dumped, ‘twenty — Fifty — or perhaps you would prefer a hundred fathoms deep,'” Alfred wrote. “The whole loathesome tirade was uttered with malignant glee, as though he were actually participating in the terrible deed.”
He wrote the letter to his lawyer for proof in case anything happened to him.
“The week following this nightmarish interview with my son, furnished proof beyond doubt, that, not content with terminating the weekly allowance, he had already begun proceedings, to force me from the house we were living in, which I had presumed was already in my name, and was even prepared to pay for,” he wrote. “This sort of action, I could fight, but the threat, left me with no other alternative than to leave this full account with my Solicitor to be opened only if I should disappear or die an unnatural death.”
John Lennon was right to be angry with his dad
Lennon likely would never have done anything to hurt his father, but Alfred seemed genuinely shaken by the exchange. They did not see each other after the contentious exchange on Lennon’s birthday. This was for the best.
Lennon went roughly twenty years without seeing or hearing from Alfred. According to Paul McCartney, this had a profound effect on the Beatle. Alfred only came back into his son’s life after hearing of his success in The Beatles. He reached out, but he also used their relationship for his personal gain. He gave interviews, sold his life story, and tried to start a music career for himself.
Lennon was right to feel frustrated with his father. The long period of abandonment was a cloud over his childhood and Alfred appeared only to reestablish the relationship to help himself.
John Lennon still helped his father a bit
While their final meeting was explosive, Lennon and Alfred maintained some form of contentious contact afterward. Alfred and Pauline were living in a house owned by Lennon. He demanded that they transfer the home back to him.
They moved into a new home, and Lennon offered to give them £500 to pay for new furniture and fixtures. Still, his aid was conditional. He told Alfred he could have the money if he stopped giving interviews and destroyed the statement he wrote about their argument. Alfred complied, but not before he made a copy of the letter.
