By Brad Dison
Mary Patricia Mohin was born on September 29, 1909. Her father, Owen, was a coal merchant. Her mother was Mary Teresa Danher. In January 1919, Mary’s mother died during the birth of her fourth child, along with the baby. At the young age of 14, Mary became a nurse at Alder Hey Hospital. Four years later, she moved out of her family home because she was unable to get along with her stepmother. When she was 24, Mary became a nursing sister while working at Walton Hospital. In the United Kingdom, a nursing sister refers to a nurse of high rank. Nursing sisters are responsible for the overall running of each hospital ward or unit. Hospital staff may have called her a nursing sister, but her patients called her “the Angel.”
While working at Walton Hospital, Mary befriended another nurse name Jin. One night in 1940, Mary stopped by to visit Jin at her family’s home. There, Mary met Jim, Jin’s brother, for the first time. As they were visiting, the air raid sirens sounded. The German Luftwaffe were attacking. Mary was unable to leave and spent the evening huddled in the basement with Jim and other members of their family. Jim and Mary began dating.
On April 15, 1941, 38-year-old Jim and 31-year-old Mary married. They rented a small home in a poor section of town. On June 18, 1942, Jim and Mary had their first child at Walton Hospital. Mary was given special treatment while at the hospital because she had previously been in charge of the maternity section at that hospital. They named young Jimmy after his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather.
On January 7, 1944, Jim and Mary welcomed their second child, Michael. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to bungalow in a slightly better part of town. Mary stopped working for a while to raise Jimmy and Michael, but money was tight. Mary returned to nursing and became a part-time health visitor and a midwife. Mary was on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When Mary received a call, she would don her navy-blue uniform and hat and pedal away on the family’s bicycle. They couldn’t afford a car.
Jim made little money, but Mary did well. Jimmy remembered, “My mum was the upwardly mobile force. She was always moving us to a better address. Originally, we had to go out to the sticks of Liverpool because of her work as a midwife. Roads were unmade but the midwife’s house came free. So economically it was a good idea. She always wanted to move out of rough areas.” Jimmy remembered that his mom loved to whistle. “That’s one of my fond memories of my mum.,” he said. You don’t hear many women whistling. She was quite musical.”
Like most parents, Mary wanted the best for her sons. She wanted them to succeed in life. Early on, Jimmy spoke with a strong accent and used a lot of slang. Jimmy remembered that his mother, “told me off about it.” Mary encouraged Jimmy to speak proper Queen’s English. Mary envisioned Jimmy becoming a doctor.
In the summer of 1955, Mary began to experience pains in her chest. She took large doses of BiSodol, which was used to treat indigestion and heartburn. In the following year, Michael went into Mary’s bedroom and saw her crying. Michael asked his mother why she was crying. She pulled herself together, forced a smile, and said, “nothing, love.” Soon thereafter, Mary was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went into the hospital for a mastectomy, but they were unable to stop the cancer. After surgery, Jim, Jimmy, and Michael went into the room to be with their mother. Jimmy remembered that it was “a huge shock to us. Suddenly she was ill. We were very young.” Jim sent Jimmy and Michael to stay with their aunt and uncle. While in the hospital, Mary told her sister-in-law, “I would have liked to have seen the boys grow up.”
On Halloween morning, October 31, 1956, Jimmy and Michael had barely woken up when Aunt Joan told them, “Love, your mum’s dead.” Mary had died from an embolism, a blood clot, while recovering from surgery. 14-year-old Jimmy cried and prayed. He described them as “Daft prayers, you know. If you bring her back, I’ll be very, very good for always. I thought, it just shows how stupid religion is. See, the prayers didn’t work when I really needed them.” Shortly after Mary’s death, Jim bought his sons a guitar. He thought it could help them escape from the pain. Michael remembered that “It was just after mother’s death that it started. It became an obsession. It took over [Jimmy’s] whole life. You lose a mother – and you find a guitar.”
30 years after her death, Jimmy said, “I was fourteen. It’s a very difficult age, fourteen, because you are growing up and you’re getting your act together. So, it was a tough time to have something as devastating as that happen. I think I probably covered a lot of it up at the time, as you would, a fourteen-year-old boy.”
Jimmy learned to play the guitar pretty well. A decade and a half after his mother’s death, he wrote a little song about his mother. “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.” The world knows Jimmy… James Paul McCartney.
Sources:
1. “Paul McCartney’s Mother Mary Dies,” The Beatles Bible, https://www.beatlesbible.com/
2. Jordan Runtagh, “Paul McCartney Reflects on How His Late Mother Became His Greatest Muse,” People.com, November 2, 2021, https://people.com/music/paul-
