Epstein insisted that the fans should never know that John was married, to preserve his aura of laddish availability, so Cynthia was often left behind with Julian while John was away touring or recording. Cynthia had been intending to become an art teacher, but now found herself in a kind of limbo as a wife and, after Julian’s birth in 1963, mother. This they did, in Liverpool on 23 August 1962, with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, as best man. The following year, aged 22, she found herself pregnant, to which Lennon retorted: “We’ll have to get married then, Cyn.” Nonetheless she stuck by him, and visited Hamburg in 1961 when the Beatles played a residency there, apparently remaining oblivious to the band’s frantic promiscuity. Their relationship was volatile, with Lennon prone to jealousy and violence (“I was in sort of a blind rage for two years, I was either drunk or fighting,” he said). She met John Lennon in lettering classes (he mocked her middle-class manners by addressing her as “Miss Hoylake”), and despite her protests that she was already engaged to a boy in Hoylake, she rapidly succumbed to Lennon’s caustic charms. As the war got into full swing and the Luftwaffe began to target Liverpool, “my Liverpudlian parents moved across the Mersey to the relative safety of Hoylake, a sweet little seaside village,” she recalled.Ĭynthia showed artistic flair, and after attending the city’s Junior Art School, began studying at the Liverpool College of Art in 1957.

She was born in the opening days of the second world war, in Blackpool, to where her mother had been evacuated from the family home in Liverpool. She married three more times and was a devoted mother to her son, the musician Julian Lennon.Ĭynthia was the third child of Charles Powell, who worked for the electrical and engineering company GEC, and his wife, Lillian. She opened restaurants, wrote books and even made a stab at becoming a recording artist. The couple divorced that November, but Cynthia never managed to escape completely from Lennon’s giant shadow – “having tried to live an ordinary life for so many years since John and I parted, I have come to realise that I will always be known as John’s first wife,” she wrote in her 2005 memoir John – but for the rest of her life she kept trying her hand at a variety of roles.

Cindy lennon