This first image was scanned from a 2011 George tribute magazine published by the British Beatles Fan Club, and shows George’s maternal grandfather, John French, circa 1919. Photo 2 shows George in 1967, photographed by Richard Avedon.
“Of all the Beatles, George Harrison can truly claim to have the strongest Irish roots. His family tree can be traced back to the thirteenth century when his ancestors, who were Norman knights from France, settled in southern Ireland at the time of William the Conqueror. Given the name ‘Ffrench’ by their peasant subjects, these knights owned all the land that could be seen from the tower of their Norman castle in Co Wexford, 60 miles south of Dublin.
During the time of Oliver Cromwell the family refused to renounce their Catholic beliefs and, as a result, were stripped of their property and thrown into a life of poverty, toiling on the land and continuing to do so for the next 300 years. Records show that as recently as 50 years before George Harrison began his musical career, his Irish forebears still lived a humble peasant life on a tiny farm at Corah, Co Wexford.
George’s great-grandfather, James Darby Ffrench, was born in 1825 and he married Ellen (née Whelan), born in 1831. The two struggled all their lives to produce enough to feed and clothe their five children and meet a monthly rent of 14s 6d for their two-acre farm. When they died within two months of each other in 1906, James was 81 and his wife was 75.
Their children, who by now had dropped the extra ‘f’ from their name, struggled on with the farm for four more years. When Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, died in 1911, the surviving siblings sold the smallholding and divided the proceeds. One of the remaining children, John, born in 1870, emigrated to Liverpool where he signed up with the city’s police force. He was sacked, along with the rest of his colleagues, during a bitter union dispute that became known as The Liverpool Lock-out, in which policemen were banned from entering their own stations.
Following a brief spell as a carriage driver, he found employment as a streetlamp lighter and moved to a small terraced house, 9 Albert Grove, Wavertree, where his wife [Liverpool-born Louise Woollam] bore seven children. One of their children, Louise, met her husband-to-be, Harold Hargreaves Harrison, when she was a teenager working as a grocer’s assistant and he was a steward in the Merchant Navy. [...]
Harold Harrison married Louise in 1930 and they moved into a tiny two-up, two-down, in 12 Arnold Grove. They had four children, Louise (born 1931), Harold (1934), Peter (1940) and George (1943).” - The Beatles and Ireland by Michael Lynch and Damian Smith
