By Catherine Pepinster
John Lennon, who once claimed the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, has become the key to a highly innovative project by the Salvation Army — to use tourism to fund its social action work and the Beatles to encourage people who would never consider stepping inside a church to find out about Christianity.
At the centre of this unusual project in Liverpool is a place made famous around the world by John Lennon’s song, Strawberry Fields Forever. Written in 1966 when the Beatles were transforming themselves from lovable moptops to a band that broke musical boundaries, it celebrated a place that Lennon knew well from childhood: Strawberry Field, a children’s home run by the Salvation Army.
The home and its grounds were just around the corner from Mendips, the house in Woolton where Lennon lived for most of his childhood with his Aunt Mimi, and he would climb its wall to explore the grounds.
Now, within those grounds is a new building — the children’s home long demolished — that provides prayer space, a café, an exhibition about Lennon and the Beatles, together with his piano, and a training project to help young people with special needs get into work.
The Strawberry Field project opened in September 2019, but was initially stymied by the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. It is now coming into its own, with visitors from the UK and around the world. Last year it welcomed 120,000 paying visitors through its famous red gates, with their strawberry motifs, and this year the Sally Army expects even more. The gates are often thronged with tourists, taking selfies, and some no doubt adding to the graffiti on its stone pillars.
The project is the result of years of discussion by the Salvation Army after it closed its children’s home — and the gates — in 2005. The worldwide movement, founded in Victorian London by William and Catherine Booth to work in urban slums, became known as the Salvation Army in 1878. It adopted a quasi-military structure with officers rather than clergy leading it, and members wearing uniform. Its membership across the world of 1.5 million still focuses on social action and its officers, like Strawberry Field’s mission director, Major Kathy Versfeld, still wear uniform.
She said: “The Salvation Army through its research discovered that every year 60,000 John Lennon fans and Beatles fans were bringing themselves uninvited to the red gates and many came not knowing not knowing what Strawberry Field was.
“They knew that there was a connection because of the song Strawberry Fields Forever and so they came for an experience of John and they would stand at those gates and look in. The Salvation Army realised there was the potential not just for a commercial operation here but an opportunity for engagement with those individuals who would not quickly come through the doors of a Salvation Army church or centre.
“The Salvation Army has owned Strawberry Field since the 1930s. The most recent chapter has been since 2019 when we opened as a visitor attraction but also as a training hub for young adults with disabilities and other barriers to employment and then the third component has been a place where everybody coming through these gates can explore the bigger questions of life and spirituality.”
Major Versfeld and her team want to challenge people who visit the centre: “Strawberry Fields Forever — but what does last for ever?,” she said. “What does abundance look like and what does it mean for us to open the gates for good and to do good?”
Today (22 August), the annual International Beatles Week begins in Liverpool, drawing in thousands of Beatles fans who takes tours of the city, from the site of the Cavern Club where Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr first played, to Beatles museums, coach trips, and the childhood homes of McCartney and Lennon — just around the corner from Strawberry Field.
Also on their must-see list is Penny Lane in Mossley Hill, which inspired McCartney’s song about his younger days, in response to Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever. Together, the songs formed a double A-side single, released in February 1967. It took the group 45 hours to record Strawberry Fields, with producer George Martin, eventually stitching together two versions.
As the Strawberry Field interactive exhibition explains to visitors, the instruments used on the track included a mellotron keyboard, a swarmandal, reflecting the Beatles’ interest in Indian culture and religion, and several brass instruments — perhaps hinting at the Salvation Army bands that Lennon recalled from his youth.
The song’s refrain — “Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields” — is reflected in the Salvation Army’s invitation to people to explore its site, including the gardens where Lennon used to play, and would visit the home’s summer fete with Aunt Mimi.
There is also an invitation to support the Sally Army’s work financially, through the £11.20 admission fee for the Beatles interactive display, using the café and the gift shop. Local people can also volunteer at the centre. Among those who regularly attend are members of a ukulele band: on the day I visited, the sound of them playing the Beatles track Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da filled the café. In the garden is space for people to spend their time in contemplation while a giant bandstand shaped like a Salvation Army band’s drum, dominates one end.
“This drum is on its side because in our early days people would see the band marching down the high street and the drum would be used as a place of prayer,” Major Versfeld explained.
Lennon was no advocate of organised religion and in 1966 caused uproar in the United States when an interview, previously published without controversy in the UK, quoted him as saying that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first — rock’n’roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.”
As word spread about the interview more than 30 US radio stations banned Beatles tracks and young people were urged to burn their Beatles records and memorabilia. Lennon eventually apologised.
Now, at Strawberry Field, the Salvation Army says that it wants visitors to be able to “find out more about what it means to explore spirituality and faith” and that the Army strives to be “an inclusive community with God at the centre … but you do not have to belong to a Christian church — or any religious tradition at all to take part in what’s on offer here”.
Lennon’s song, Imagine, is highlighted at Strawberry Field as an anthem for peace and its words are carved in stone in the garden. In its interactive Beatles display, Lennon’s upright Steinway piano, on which he composed Imagine, takes centre stage. It was bought at auction in 2000 by the singer-songwriter George Michael and his estate lent it to Strawberry Field in 2020.
Allister Versfeld, who works on mission development there, said it was the social action work that convinced the estate’s representatives to lend the project the piano; George Michael was revealed after his death in 2016 as a significant philanthropist, donating millions to charity. “They spent the day here; it was the work done here that convinced them it should come here,” he said.
Strawberry Field’s training and employment project, Steps to Work, is for anyone who may have learning difficulties or other barriers to employment. Each trainee is given an individual programme and their own work coach, as well as an eight-week work readiness course, teaching independence and employment skills, before they undergo three placements, each of three months. A shorter course is run too, as well as a volunteering training project, and Recycles, a recycling scheme that trains young people with special needs in repairing and maintaining bikes.
In the café, screens along the wall show films of trainees who have graduated from Steps to Work, as well as other Salvation Army projects. Aside from the tourists, there are groups for people with dementia, prayer meetings, and ecumenical clergy gatherings. “A lot of what we do,” Allister Versfeld says, “are touchpoints for people wanting to explore spirituality.”
The doors are open seven days a week for tourists and locals alike. When the Versfelds arrived, the famous strawberry gates had been shut for years, but now, says Kathy Versfeld, “the gates are open for good”.
Images: ©RMC
