Lady Diana Frances Spencer (1961-1997) married Prince Charles in 1981 and became Princess of Wales. Retaining her title after the royal couple divorced in 1996, Diana continued her humanitarian work. She died in a tragic car accident in 1997.
Diana Frances Spencer was born on July 1, 1961, in Norfolk, England, the third of the Lord and Lady Althorp's four children. She grew up at Park House, a mansion in Norfolk located next door to the royal family's Sandringham estate. One of Diana's playmates was Prince Andrew, Charles's brother. The Spencers have served the Crown as courtiers for generations and are related to the Sir Winston Churchills and at least eight U.S. presidents, including George Washington, John Adams, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Diana's younger brother Charles is Queen Elizabeth's godson, and her father was the late Queen Mary's godson and former personal aide to both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Diana, a quiet and reserved child, had a relatively happy home life until she was eight years old, when her parents went through a bitter divorce, and her mother ran off with the heir to a wallpaper fortune. Her father eventually won the custody battle over their son and three daughters. Diana, who remained close to her mother, subsequently became depressed.
Diana's academic career was unremarkable. She was tutored at home until the age of nine, when she was sent to Riddlesworth Hall in Norfolk.
At the age of 12, Diana began attending the exclusive West Heath School in Sevenoaks, Kent, where she developed a passion for ballet and later Prince Charles. She hung his picture above her cot at the boarding school and told a classmate, as reported by People, " I would love to be a dancer—or Princess of Wales."
Diana became bored with academics and dropped out of West Heath at the age of 16. Her father sent her to a Swiss finishing school, Chateau d'Oex. She became homesick within a few months and returned to Norfolk. For a while she hired herself out as a cleaning woman, eventually finding work as a kindergarten teacher's aide. Her father bought her a three-bedroom flat not far from fashionable Sloane Street and Knightsbridge, where Diana helped her three roommates with housekeeping and cooking duties.
Although Prince Charles had known Diana, literally the girl next door, for virtually all of her life, he regarded her as a playmate for his younger brothers. He later dated Diana's older sister, Lady Sarah, who eventually became Mrs. Neil McCorquodale. Lady Sarah reintroduced Charles and Diana at a 1977 pheasant hunt at Althorp. "[Diana] taught him how to tap-dance on the terrace," a family friend once told McCall's. "He thought she was adorable … full of vitality and terribly sweet." Charles was struck by "what a very amusing and jolly and attractive 16-year-old she was," Time reported. Diana concluded that the prince was "pretty amazing."
Charles thought Diana was too young to consider as a marriage prospect, however, and the romance didn't bloom for another three years. In July of 1980 Diana visited the royal family's Balmoral Castle in Scotland to see her sister, Lady Jane, who was married to Robert Fellowes, the queen's assistant secretary. Soon afterward, reporters began to suspect the nature of her relationship with Charles and began to hound Diana mercilessly, photographing her with the prince at her London flat and once while holding one of the children at the nursery school where she taught.
Charles proposed to Diana at dinner in his Buckingham Palace apartment on February 3, 1981. Diana was the first British citizen to marry the heir to the throne since 1659, when Prince James—later James II—married Lady Anne Hyde. In addition, Diana was an Anglican, presenting no legal obstacles to marriage with the man who, as king, would head the Church of England. Her past was pristine, a matter of great importance to the royal family. A well-known saying soon made the rounds in the press: Diana had a history, but no past.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and 25 other clerics officiated at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana on July 29, 1981. A congregation of 2,500 and a worldwide TV audience of about 750 million watched the ceremony under the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. Five mounted military police officers led Diana in her glass coach from Clarence House to St. Paul's. Two million spectators—whose behavior was kept in check by 4,000 policemen and 2,228 soldiers—jammed the processional route.
Soon afterward, Diana's professional life became an endless round of ceremonial tree plantings, introductions, and public appearances.
There seemed to be no doubts about Charles and Diana's love for each other in those early days.
On November 5, 1981, the palace announced that the Princess of Wales was expecting a child. Charles was present when his wife gave birth at London's St. Mary's Hospital 11 months after the royal wedding. Prince William, nicknamed Wills, was born in June of 1982. A second son, Harry, was born two years later in September of 1984. Diana was said to be a doting mother, trying to raise the children as normally as possible, away from the glare of publicity.
Over the years, Diana immersed herself in numerous charitable causes. She became involved in such social issues such as homelessness and drug abuse, visited leprosariums in Nigeria and Indonesia, shook hands with patients at an AIDS ward in a Middlesex Hospital, and once visited victims of an IRA (Irish Republican Army) bombing in Northern Ireland.
Over the next few years Charles and Diana's widely varying intellectual and social interests became apparent: He was an intellectual who preferred to read philosophical and thought-provoking literature, while Diana was partial to romance novels. Charles enjoyed polo and horseback riding; Diana once fell off a horse and had lost any passion she had for riding. He enjoyed opera; she preferred ballet and rock music. The media began tracking the number of days the two spent apart, noting Charles's lengthy stays away from home. Diana once said in public, People reported, that being a princess "isn't all it's cracked up to be." Buckingham Palace maintained a stony silence.
In June of 1991, young Prince William sustained a skull fracture after being hit in the head with a golf club. Diana spent two nights with her son in the hospital, while Charles reportedly dropped in once, on his way to an opera. A month later, Charles and Diana spent her 30th birthday apart.
On December 9, 1992, it was formally announced that the royal couple was separating.
In 1993 Diana announced that due to exhaustion from the intense media scrutiny, she would be withdrawing from public life, though she would continue her charity work. For the next two years, with a few exceptions, she kept a fairly low media profile. During this time she sought government advice about how she might have some role as an ambassador for Britain, but no firm arrangements were made.
In 1994, Prince Charles granted a wide-ranging television interview to Jonathan Dimbleby, which was broadcast at the same time that Dimbleby's biography of Charles appeared in bookstores. In an uncharacteristically frank interview, Charles admitted his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, though he claimed this relationship began only in 1986, after his marriage with Diana had completely broken down. However, after the couple's divorce was announced in 1996, it seemed apparent that Charles had carried a torch for Camilla Parker Bowles since before his marriage to Diana, and it was speculated that he would marry her.
On February 29, 1996, Diana gave her consent to a divorce—though again she violated protocol by not informing the Queen first. It was announced in July of 1996 that the royals had worked out the divorce terms. Diana would continue to be involved in all decisions about the children and the couple would share access to them, she would remain at Kensington Palace, and would be known as Diana, Princess of Wales—losing the prefix H.R.H. (Her Royal Highness) and any right to ascend to the British throne. However, she kept all of her jewelry and received a lump-sum alimony settlement of almost $23 million, and Charles agreed to pay for the annual maintenance of her private office.
Diana continued her diplomatic role as Princess of Wales after the divorce. She visited terminally ill people in hospitals, traveled to Bosnia to meet the victims of land mines, and met Mother Teresa in New York City's South Bronx in June 1997. Romantically, the press linked her with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani-born heart surgeon and Dodi al Fayed, whose father owned Harrods Department Store in London. However, her number one priority remained her two sons.
As Diana spent more time with Fayed, the paparazzi hounded the couple, who could not go anywhere without cameras following close behind. On August 31, 1997, the paparazzi followed the couple after they dined at the Ritz Hotel in Paris (owned by Fayed's father). The combination of the pursuing paparazzi, driving at a high rate of speed, and having a drunk driver behind the wheel, all played into the automobile accident which claimed Princess Diana's life. Some witnesses stated that photographers frantically snapped pictures and obstructed police officers and rescue workers from aiding the victims. The driver and Fayed died at the scene; Princess Diana died from her injuries a few hours later.
The world mourned for "the people's princess" with an outpouring of emotion and flowers. People waited up to eight hours to sign condolence books at St. James Palace, and 100,000 people per day passed through Kensington Palace, where Diana lived.
However, Britons and the British press soon lashed out at the royal family, who did not share in the public grieving. Headlines begged the family to "show us you care." Truly surprised by the backlash, Queen Elizabeth II went on live television the day before the funeral. It was only the second time in the queen's 45-year reign that she had appeared on live TV, not counting her annual Christmas greeting. She spoke as "your queen and as a grandmother," and stated "I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being."
Diana's funeral was held in Westminster Abbey on September 6th. Her sons, Princes Willam and Harry, her brother, Earl Spencer, her ex-husband, Prince Charles, and her ex-father-in-law, Prince Philip, as well as five representatives from each of the 110 charities she represented, followed the coffin during part of the funeral procession. Elton John re-wrote the song "Candle in the Wind" and sang "Goodbye England's Rose" for his close friend. It was estimated that 2.5 billion people watched Princess Diana's funeral on television, nearly half the population of the world. One royal watcher stated, "Diana made the monarchy more in touch with people."
Unit 14
Florence Nightingale
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Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. She came to prominence while serving as a manager of nurses trained by her during the Crimean War, where she organised the tending to wounded soldiers. She gave nursing a highly favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.
In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday. Her social reforms include improving healthcare for all sections of British society, advocating better hunger relief in India, helping to abolish prostitution laws that were over-harsh to women, and expanding the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce.
Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer. In her lifetime, much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge. Some of her tracts were written in simple English so that they could easily be understood by those with poor literary skills. She also helped popularise the graphical presentation of statistical data. Much of her writing, including her extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published posthumously.
Early life
Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, in Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth. When Florence was 1, the family moved back to England in 1821, with Nightingale being brought up in the family's homes at Embley and Lea Hurst.
As a young woman, Nightingale was attractive, slender and graceful. While her demeanor was often severe, she could be very charming and her smile was radiant. Her most persistent suitor was the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but after a nine-year courtship she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing.
In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, a politician who had been Secretary at War (1845–1846). Herbert was on his honeymoon. He and Nightingale became lifelong close friends. Herbert would be Secretary of War again during the Crimean War, when he and his wife would be instrumental in facilitating Nightingale's nursing work in the Crimea. She became Herbert's key adviser throughout his political career, though she was accused by some of having hastened Herbert's death from Bright's Disease in 1861 because of the pressure her programme of reform placed on him.
Nightingale also much later had strong relations with Benjamin Jowett, who may have wanted to marry her.
In 1850, she visited the Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein in Germany, where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the sick and the deprived. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life, and issued her findings anonymously in 1851; The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc. was her first published work. She also received four months of medical training at the institute, which formed the basis for her later care.
On 22 August 1853, Nightingale took the post of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly £40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career.
Crimean War
Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith, and fifteen Catholic nuns (mobilised by Henry Edward Manning) were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire. Nightingale was assisted in Paris by her friend Mary Mohl. They were deployed about 295 nautical miles(546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.
Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). Her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.
After Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility that, under the management of Dr. Edmund Alexander Parkes, had a death rate less than 1/10th that of Scutari.
During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. With overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of ventilation, the Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived. The commission flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. Death rates were sharply reduced, but she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate. In 2001 and 2008 the BBC released documentaries that were critical of Nightingale's performance in the Crimean War, as were some follow-up articles published in The Guardian and the Sunday Times. Nightingale scholar Lynn McDonald has dismissed these criticisms as "often preposterous", arguing they are not supported by the primary sources.
Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies, stale air and overworking of the soldiers. After she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced peacetime deaths in the army and turned her attention to the sanitary design of hospitals and the introduction of sanitation in working-class homes.
The Lady with the Lamp
During the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" from a phrase in a report in The Times:
She is a "ministering angel" without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.
Later career
In the Crimea on 29 November 1855, the Nightingale Fund was established for the training of nurses. Nightingale was considered a pioneer in the concept of medical tourism as well, based on her 1856 letters describing spas in the Ottoman Empire. She detailed the health conditions, physical descriptions, dietary information, and other vital details of patients whom she directed there. The treatment there was significantly less expensive than in Switzerland.
Nightingale had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16 May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. Now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery, the school is part of King's College London. She also campaigned and raised funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesburynear her sister's home, Claydon House.
Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing (1859). The book served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing schools, though it was written specifically for the education of those nursing at home.
Nightingale spent the rest of her life promoting and organising the nursing profession.
By 1882, several Nightingale nurses had become matrons at several leading hospitals, including, in London (St Mary's Hospital, Westminster Hospital, St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary and the Hospital for Incurables at Putney) and throughout Britain (Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley; Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; Cumberland Infirmary and Liverpool Royal Infirmary), as well as at Sydney Hospital in New South Wales, Australia.
In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria. In 1904, she was appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In the following year she was given the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. Her birthday is now celebrated as International CFS Awareness Day.
From 1857 onwards, Nightingale was intermittently bedridden and suffered from depression. During her bedridden years, she also did pioneering work in the field of hospital planning, and her work propagated quickly across Britain and the world. Nightingale's output slowed down considerably in her last decade. She wrote very little during that period due to blindness and declining mental abilities, though she still retained an interest in current affairs.
The grave of Florence Nightingale in the churchyard of St Margaret's Church, East Wellow.
On 13 August 1910, at the age of 90, she died peacefully in her sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Mayfair, London. The offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her relatives and she is buried in the graveyard at St Margaret Church in East Wellow, Hampshire. She left a large body of work, including several hundred notes that were previously unpublished. A memorial monument to Nightingale was created in Carrara marble by Francis William Sargant in 1913 and placed in the cloister of the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence.
Unit 15
John Lennon
John Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, in Liverpool, England. He met Paul McCartney in 1957 and invited McCartney to join his music group. They eventually formed the most successful songwriting partnership in musical history. Lennon left the Beatles in 1969 and later released albums with his wife, Yoko Ono, among others. On December 8, 1980, he was killed by a crazed fan named Mark David Chapman.
Early Life
Famed singer-songwriter John Winston Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, in Liverpool, Merseyside, England, during a German air raid in World War II.
When he was 4 years old, Lennon's parents separated and he ended up living with his Aunt Mimi. Lennon's father was a merchant seaman. He was not present at his son's birth and did not see a lot of his son when he was small.
Lennon's mother, Julia, remarried, but visited him and Mimi regularly. She taught Lennon how to play the banjo and the piano and purchased his first guitar. Lennon was devastated when Julia was fatally struck by a car driven by an off-duty police officer in July 1958. Her death was one of the most traumatic events in his life.
As a child, Lennon was a prankster and he enjoyed getting in trouble. As a boy and young adult, he enjoyed drawing grotesque figures and cripples. Lennon's school master thought that he could go to an art school for college, since he did not get good grades in school, but had artistic talent.
Forming the Beatles
Elvis Presley's explosion onto the rock music scene inspired a 16-year-old Lennon to create the skiffle band called the Quarry Men, named after his school. Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church fete on July 6, 1957. He soon invited McCartney to join the group, and the two eventually formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in musical history.
McCartney introduced George Harrison to Lennon the following year, and Harrison and art college buddy Stuart Sutcliffe also joined Lennon's band. Always in need of a drummer, the group finally settled on Pete Best in 1960.
The first recording they made was Buddy Holly's "That'll be the Day" in 1958. In fact, it was Holly's group, the Crickets, that inspired the band to change its name. Lennon would later joke that he had a vision when he was 12 years old—a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, "From this day on, you are Beatles with an 'A.'"
The Beatles were discovered by Brian Epstein in 1961 at Liverpool's Cavern Club, where they were performing on a regular basis. As their new manager, Epstein secured a record contract with EMI. With a new drummer, Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey), and George Martin as producer, the group released their first single, "Love Me Do," in October 1962. It peaked on the British charts at No. 17.
Lennon wrote the group's follow-up single, "Please Please Me," inspired primarily by Roy Orbison, but also fed by Lennon's infatuation with the pun in Bing Crosby's famous lyrics, "Oh, please, lend your little ears to my pleas," from the song "Please." The Beatles' "Please Please Me" topped the charts in Britain. The Beatles went on to become the most popular band in Britain with the release of such mega-hits as "She Loves You" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand."
Lennon married Cynthia Powell in August 1962. The couple had one son together, Julian, who was named after Lennon's mother. Cynthia was forced to keep a very low profile during Beatlemania. She and Lennon divorced in 1968. He remarried the following year, on March 20, 1969, to Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, whom he had met at the Indica Gallery in November 1966.
Beatlemania
In 1964, the Beatles became the first British band to break out big in the United States, beginning with their appearance on television's The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. Beatlemania launched a "British Invasion" of rock bands in the United States that also included the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. Following their appearance on Sullivan, the Beatles returned to Britain to film their first film, A Hard Day's Night (1964), and prepare for their first world tour.
The Beatles' second film, Help!, was released in 1965. That June, Queen Elizabeth II of England announced that the Beatles would be named a Member of the Order of the British Empire. In August 1965, the foursome performed to 55,600 fans at New York's Shea Stadium, setting a new record for largest concert audience in musical history. When the Beatles returned to England, they recorded the breakthrough album Rubber Soul (1965), noted for extending beyond the love songs and pop formulas for which the band was previously well-known.
The magic of Beatlemania had begun to lose its appeal by 1966. The band members' lives were put in danger when they were accused of snubbing the presidential family in the Philippines. Then, Lennon's remark that the band was "more popular than Jesus now" incited denunciations and Beatles record bonfires in the U.S. Bible belt. The Beatles gave up touring after an August 29, 1966, concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park.
After an extended break, the band returned to the studio to expand their experimental sound with drug-influenced exotic instrumentation/lyrics and tape abstractions. The first sample was the single "Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever," followed by the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), considered by many to be the greatest rock project in musical history.
The Beatles Break Up
The Beatles then suffered a huge blow when Epstein died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills on August 27, 1967. Shaken by Epstein's death, the Beatles retrenched under McCartney's leadership in the fall and filmed Magical Mystery Tour. While the film was panned by critics, the soundtrack album contained Lennon's "I Am The Walrus," the group's most cryptic work yet.
Magical Mystery Tour failed to achieve much commercial success, and the Beatles retreated into Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which took them to India for two months in early 1968. Their next effort, Apple Corps Ltd., was plagued by mismanagement. That July, the group faced its last notably hysterical crowd at the premiere of their film Yellow Submarine. In November 1968, the Beatles' double-album The Beatles (also known as The White Album) displayed their divergent directions.
By this time, Lennon's artist partnership with second wife Yoko Ono had begun to cause serious tensions within the group. Lennon and Ono invented a form of peace protest by staying in bed while being filmed and interviewed, and their single "Give Peace a Chance" (1969), recorded under the name "the Plastic Ono Band," became a national anthem of sorts for pacifists.
Lennon left the Beatles in September 1969, just after the group completed recording Abbey Road. The news of the break-up was kept secret until McCartney announced his departure in April 1970, a month before the band released Let It Be, recorded just before Abbey Road.
Solo Career
Not long after the Beatles broke up, in 1970, Lennon released his debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, featuring a raw, minimalist sound that followed "primal-scream" therapy. He followed that project with 1971's Imagine, the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed of all Lennon's post-Beatles efforts. The title track was later named No. 3 on Rolling Stone magazine's "All-Time Best Songs" list.
Peace and love, however, was not always on Lennon's agenda. Imagine also included the track "How Do You Sleep?," a vehement response to veiled messages at Lennon in some of McCartney's solo recordings. The friends and former songwriting duo later buried the hatchet, but never formally worked together again.
Lennon and Ono moved to the United States in September 1971, but were constantly threatened with deportation by the Nixon Administration. Lennon was told that he was being kicked out of the country due to his 1968 marijuana conviction in Britain, but the singer believed that he was being removed because of his activism against the unpopular Vietnam War. Documents later proved him correct. (Two years after Nixon resigned, in 1976, Lennon was granted permanent U.S. residency.)
In 1972, while battling to stay in America, Lennon performed at Madison Square Garden in New York City to benefit mentally handicapped children and continued to promote peace. His immigration battle took a toll on Lennon's marriage, and in the fall of 1973, he and Ono separated. Lennon went to Los Angeles, California, where he partied and took a mistress, May Pang. He still managed to release hit albums, including Mind Games (1973), Walls and Bridges (1974) and Rock 'n' Roll (1975). During this time, Lennon famously collaborated with David Bowie and Elton John.
Lennon and Ono reconciled in 1974, and she gave birth to their only child, a son named Sean, on Lennon's 35th birthday (October 9, 1975). Shortly thereafter, Lennon decided to leave the music business to focus on being a father and husband.
Tragic Death
In 1980, John Lennon returned to the music world with the album Double Fantasy, featuring the hit single "(Just Like) Starting Over." Tragically, just a few weeks after the album's release, Lennon was shot several times by a deranged fan Mark David Chapman in front of his apartment complex in New York City. Lennon died at New York City's Roosevelt Hospital on December 8, 1980, at the age of 40.
John Lennon's assassination had, and continues to have, a profound impact on pop culture. Following the tragic event, millions of fans worldwide mourned as record sales soared. And Lennon's untimely death still evokes deep sadness around the globe today, as he continues to be admired by new generations of fans. Lennon was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Notes
skiffle –скиффл (народная музыка, исполняемая небольшим ансамблем и певцом-гитаристом)
Хрестоматия