Penny Lane: The Beatles’ Connection to Florence Chandler Maybrick
Toward the end of the witness testimonies in the 1889 trial of Florence Chandler Maybrick, a defense witness, James Bioletti, a beautician and owner of a “Gentleman’s American Hair-Cutting Saloon, the largest and best-appointed in the City,” testified at Florence’s trial. He stated that he was a hairdresser and perfumer conducting business in Dale Street, Liverpool, where he had been operating for about thirty years.
Bioletti testified about his clients’ use of arsenic as a cosmetic. Although it was not a common request, men used an arsenical solution as a hair wash, believing it would promote growth. Slightly different solutions were applied for women to smooth and brighten the skin and to serve as an underarm depilatory. Bioletti said, “Arsenic is used a good deal in the hair for some purposes, and I have used it as a wash for the face on being asked for it by ladies. There is an impression among ladies that it is good for the complexion.”
In this otherwise grave situation, an amusing element of 20th-century pop culture trivia deserves mention. It highlights some local history: the intriguing intersection of Florence Chandler Maybrick and the British rock band, the Beatles.
This convergence is the streetcar and bus stop on a famous roundabout (traffic circle) in southern Liverpool, where Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr of the Beatles received their haircuts: Penny Lane. The 1967 hit song opens with the lyrics, “In Penny Lane, there is a barber showing photographs / Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know.” McCartney once remarked about the song, “There was a barber shop called Bioletti, and he did have — like all barber shops — pictures of the hairstyles, so I likened that to a photo gallery, like it was an art show.”
One of Lennon’s school chums, David Ashton, shared an anecdote from a day when they were in Bioletti’s barber shop waiting for haircuts. There were two younger boys ahead of them, but John didn’t want to wait, so he told them,
Do you know, last week old man Bioletti cut off somebody’s scalp completely, with his shaky hands. You could actually see the brains wobbling around like a dark grey blancmange inside the head. But he was alright cos’ he stuck the scalp back on with sticking plaster.
John’s ruse worked, scaring the boys out of the queue and the shop. However, it couldn’t have been the same Bioletti who testified in Florence’s defense.
Assuming he started at age fifteen, if Mr. Bioletti had been in business “for some three decades” in 1889, he would have been about forty-five years old. Six decades later, by 1949, when the Liverpudlian lads were in grade school and getting their moptops chopped, the hairdresser who testified in Florence’s defense was long since dead. More likely, the barber “with shakey hands” was James Bioletti’s second son, Leslie. It is unclear which of the Biolettis and at what point they moved the barber shop from Dale Street to Penny Lane.
In any case, although far less known, we can credit the Fab Four with a story from “beneath the blue suburban skies” of south Liverpool that is far more gruesome than that of the Maybrick family.
All four boys lived within a couple of miles of Penny Lane. In fact, one can drive from the Maybrick home, Battlecrease House in Aigburth, to McCartney’s childhood home, then to Lennon’s childhood home, followed by Harrison’s birthplace, and finally to Starr’s childhood home, in just over half an hour. Ringo and John were born the year before Florence died, which brought her name back into the headlines. Paul and George were born within two years after that.
The band never had a song lyric that mentions arsenic or poison, and none of them have ever discussed the Maybrick scandal publicly. However, given their proximity in location and time, it is inconceivable that the Beatles were unaware of Florence Maybrick.
