05/06/2026
Today is the anniversary of the passing of John Lennon's Uncle George.
George Toogood Smith died 13 March 1903 – 5 June 1955.
The Dairy Cottage, 120a Allerton Road in Woolton, Liverpool, was owned by George ‘TooGood’ Smith, the husband of Julia’s sister Mimi.
Julia Lennon, nee Stanley, was born on 12th March 1914. She lived at The Cottage with son John in 1942 - 1943, and then again with younger sister Harriet in 1945 whilst pregnant with her second child.
TooGood was the maiden name of Georges paternal Grandmother and George lived up to the name by being a kind hearted and generous man.
In 1918, his brother, Robert Smith, was killed in action in world war 1.
On 4th April 1932, Georges father was reported missing from his home on Allerton Road. 2 months later, a police constable found his decomposing body in a pit in Dodds Lane, Speke.
At an inquest, the city coroner ruled that Francis Smith took his own life by drowning whilst of unsound mind. George used the inheritance money as a deposit for Menlove.
George was called up for military service at the late age of 38 and became a member of the British Expeditionary Force. He took part in the Battle of France, which resulted in defeat. After he was discharged from the army, George left the milk trade. He worked an aircraft factory in Speke, as a tram and bus cleaner at the Woolton depot and started a small bookmakers business.
John Lennon lived with his Uncle George and Aunt Mimi throughout most of his childhood. They were his legal guardians, and George was a surrogate father to John.
When the dairy farm was still active in the early years of World War Two, George took his nephew around Woolton on the milk cart, proudly showing him off to customers as if he was one of his own.
As a boy, John loved to go with George to the milking parlour or to visit Daisy the cart horse in the field.
In the autumn of 1947, the Smiths began accepting student lodgers from Liverpool University. The longest serving lodger was a man called Michael Fishwick, who took up residence at Mendips in October 1951 and stayed until December 1958.
He said: “George Smith was very fond of John and John was very fond of him. It was a good relationship. He treated John like a son.”
Uncle George helped to develop Lennon's literacy by balancing the boy on his knee and reading aloud the Liverpool Echo newspaper. He also took him to the local picturedrome and bought him comic books like The Beano and The Dandy and read nursery rhymes to the child at night.
The house had no television but a wireless radio stood on the sideboard in the morning room. George wired it to an extension speaker in John's bedroom so that he could listen in bed. George also taught the young Lennon how to ride a bicycle and bought him an emerald green Raleigh Lenton bike in 1952 as a reward for passing his Eleven Plus exams.
Mimi remembered that when George came home at night, he would open up his arms and John would fly into them. She said they were like “two trains colliding in the doorway”. Their relationship was an affectionate one.
On 4 June 1955, Mimi and lodger Michael Fishwick were finishing a meal in the morning room at Mendips when they heard George collapse on the staircase. The biochemistry student rushed from his seat at the dinner table to find George bleeding internally.
“He was bleeding from the mouth. It was pretty obvious it came from the stomach, a haemorrhage.”
He was rushed to Sefton General Hospital, but never recovered.
George Toogood Smith died aged 52 on 5 June 1955. He was survived by his wife Mimi and fathered no children.
A postmortem established the cause of death as cirrhosis of the liver (non-alcoholic) and burst abdomen. He was buried in the graveyard of St Peter's Church in Woolton, close to the grave of one Eleanor Rigby, who died on 10 October 1939.
Two years later, on 6 July, 1957, John Lennon would meet Paul McCartney for the first time at St Peter's Church Hall fête, a short distance from Uncle George's resting place.
John was 14 that summer and away in Scotland when George collapsed. He found out only when he returned to Mendips. Mimi said: “He came bouncing in, his usual excitable self, and asked where George was. When I told him he was dead, John just went very quiet. He didn't cry or anything like that. He just went up to his room. If there was any crying to do, he would do it on his own. He wouldn't want anyone else to see him like that.”
John’s cousin Leila, the daughter of his Aunt Harrie, kept him company that evening. Leila remembers arriving at Mendips to find Mimi “sitting outside on the coal bunker looking lost”. Leila said: “It was a terrible shock to us all, but especially to John, who looked on him as a father.” Their bond was deep and paternal, and with George's death John was robbed of a positive masculine influence at a critical time in his adolescence.
The manifestation of Lennon's shock and grief was not the typical response we would expect from an adolescent boy, erupting into tears, but instead to grin like the Cheshire Cat and burst into fits of laughter. “We both had hysterics.” Lennon later remembered. Although Leila doesn't remember joining in. “We laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards,” he said.
John's crazed laughter was something that happened on more than one occasion when he encountered loss, including the death of his best friend and The Beatles’ original bassist Stuart Sutcliffe.
It even appears in what is often considered the Beatles most monumental song: A Day in the Life. After reading the newspaper and discovering that his and Paul McCartney’s friend Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness fortune, had died in a traffic collision at the age of 21, Lennon sings: “I just had to laugh.”
John's reaction is often cited as an example of him being callous, cold and cruel. But I would suggest that it's much more complicated than that. I see it as a reminder that there's no right or wrong way to grieve. Death can be an incredibly uncomfortable subject for many people.
As a child of 14, John had never been in this situation before. And so how can we expect him to react appropriately? And why do we feel like we can define the appropriate response to something as incomprehensible as death, especially a sudden death?
Laughing, giggling and smiling are perfectly normal nervous reactions to any uncomfortable situation, including a death related one. It can be an unconscious way of protecting oneself from a more raw, emotional experience.
Aunt Mimi said: “Our world was never the same. John took it on the chin, but never the same. The place seemed empty, but we muddled on. I mean, you don't give up, do you?”
It is not known whether John attended his uncle's funeral and burial at St Peter's Church, but we do know that the 14 year old John wrote a poem for Mimi on the day.
The third line is adapted from Young at Heart, a 1954 song by Frank Sinatra.
John wore his uncle's shirt, suit and tie to his Liverpool College of Art interview in 1957, and Cynthia Lennon remembers John wearing his uncle's threadbare coat for years afterwards.
It was not John's first loss in the sense that he'd already been effectively orphaned by his parents. But it was the first death of a loved one that he'd ever experienced.
One of many losses that would recur throughout his life until his own nightmarish assassination in 1980.
Paul McCartney, who was taught handwriting and English by George's brother Cissy Smith at school, remembered Lennon later saying that, with his father leaving and his uncle dying, John began to feel like he was a jinx on the male side of the family.
From 1903 the Smith Family ran their dairy farm. George Toogood Smith was uncle to John Lennon, who lived here with his mother at the age of two.
George ‘Toogood’ Smith was also landlord of The Woolton Tavern, this is now called The Grapes Pub, Quarry Street, Liverpool.
John: We [Uncle George and I] got on fine. He was nice and kind. [When] he died, I didn't know how to be sad publicly - what you did or said - so I went upstairs. Then my cousin [Liela] arrived and she came upstairs as well. We both had hysterics. We just laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards.
