John Lennon never seemed over-impressed by powerful people, a trait he’d had since childhood. Lennon didn’t take school seriously and tried his best to distract his friends and classmates. Even when he was in trouble, he reacted with limited concern. Once, the future Beatle pulled a prank on his headmaster that made laugh so hard he peed.
John Lennon found a prank so funny that he began to pee
Lennon spent a great deal of his time at school at odds with his teachers. He got in trouble often, and his friend, Pete Shotton, recalled the first time they got in trouble.
“We must have been very young this first time when we had to go to a senior master for having done something bad,” Shotton said in the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “He was sitting at his desk writing when we came in and made me and John stand either side of him. As he was sitting down there, telling us off, John started tickling the hairs on his head. He was almost bald, but with a few wisps across the top.”
The two of them broke into hysterics even as they were being scolded.
“He couldn’t understand what was tickling him and kept on putting his hand up to rub his bald head as he was telling us off. It was terrible,” Shotton said. “I was doubled up. John was literally pissing himself. Really. It started to run down his trousers. He had short trousers on, that’s why I know we must have been pretty young at the time. The piss was dripping onto the floor and the master was looking round and saying ‘What’s that? What’s that?’”
John Lennon’s friend said he didn’t take authority very seriously
Shotton said Lennon maintained this attitude when he got in trouble, even when the punishments were more severe. He recalled the first time they were caned in school.
“John had to go in first while I waited outside the head’s door. I was in agony, all uptight, worrying what was going to happen to me. I seemed to wait hours, but it was probably only a few minutes. Then the door opened and John came out — crawling on the floor on his hands and knees, giving great exaggerated groans. I burst out at once.”
Unfortunately, this might have led to more trouble for Shotton.
“I hadn’t realized at first that the head had two sets of doors,” Shotton said. “John was crawling out of the lobby place where no one could see him from inside. I had to go into the head next, still with a smile on my face, which of course they never like.”
He did his best to disrupt his classmates
Lennon cared little about his studies, and he made it his mission to distract his fellow students. This did not make him well-liked with the faculty.
“It turned out that John hadn’t chosen to do lettering,” his first wife Cynthia wrote in the book John. “He’d been ordered into the class when most of the other teachers had refused to have him. He made it clear he didn’t want to be there and did his best to disrupt the class.”
She recalled him doing whatever it took to get a laugh.
“When he wasn’t teasing someone he’d give us a wicked commentary on the teacher,” she wrote, “or provoke hoots of laughter with his cruelly funny and uncannily accurate cartoons of teachers, fellow students, or of twisted, grimacing, malformed figures.”
