[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: A very English extremist Born Joan Pollock Graham in Winnipeg, Canada, on 18 May 1913, the Dowager Lady Jane Birdwood was the second of three daughters of a Scottish aristocrat, Christopher Norman Graham, and his wife, Ada Ruth Pollock. At 19 she went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where she trained as an actress. But at 5ft 11 inches she was considered too tall and left to take up a post with the Central Record Information Bureau at HMV in London, where she worked for eight years. It was a few years later, while working at the BBC Gramophone Library, that she changed her name to Jane to avoid being confused with the actress Joan Graham. During the Second World War Birdwood worked for the Entertainment National Service Association (ENSA), first in Brussels and later, after the war, in Hamburg, where she was responsible for organising the travel and accommodation of performers. In 1947 she joined the Red Cross in Germany and became secretary to Lieutenant Colonel the Hon Christopher Birdwood, the only son of Field Marshall the first Baron Birdwood, who had recently returned from duty in India. Within months of meeting they were having an affair. In 1953, two years after Lord Birdwood had succeeded to the barony, his wife divorced her husband, citing his affair with Jane Graham. The following year Lord Birdwood and Jane Graham married at a quiet ceremony in Kensington. The new Lady Birdwood was a socialite, quickly earning a reputation as a carefree woman quite prepared to break with custom. She was, according to one newspaper report, the first woman in London society to wear coloured stockings. But it was her exotic array of glasses that gave her notoriety, earning her the Spectacle Wearer of the Year award. Birdwood’s first foray into politics came when she accompanied her husband in his crusade against communism, making visits to Czechoslovakia and South Africa. On her tour to South Africa in 1961, she described racial segregation as “inevitable and a social necessity”. Her anti-communism brought her into contact with Eastern European émigrés in Britain, many of whom had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Her strongest links were with the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, a group dominated by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). This deeply antisemitic group had, in 1941, declared an independent Ukrainian state after the Germans had conquered the country. The declaration was made by Yaroslav Stetsko, with whom Birdwood became closely linked in a number of right-wing anti-communist organisations. It was only after the death of Lord Birdwood, in January 1962, that she began to earn a reputation for her own political extremism. Initially this was a result of her work with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), an alliance of far-right émigré groups led by the OUN, but her reputation grew with the formation of the European Freedom Council (EFC) in 1967. This anti-communist body brought together the émigré organisations and political figures in Britain, France and Germany. But it was her involvement in the moral crusading of her close friend Mary Whitehouse that capitulated Birdwood into the national headlines. As chairman of the London branch of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, she campaigned against pornography and obscenity on television and the stage. In July 1970, after watching a performance of Oh Calcutta!, she walked into Kentish Town police station and complained to the duty solicitor about what she had seen. Her moral antics and political swing to the right brought her into conflict with her husband’s family, which privately had never forgiven her for the breakup of Lord and Lady Birdwood’s marriage. In 1971 they took out an advertisement in a national newspaper dissociating themselves from her views. Many years later Lady Jane Birdwood’s own family was alienated, when British National Party supporters heckled and abused her sister for marrying a Jewish man, while she was attending one of Birdwood’s numerous court appearances for producing and distributing antisemitic literature. She later wrote to Jane describing her hurt and requesting no further contact. Though unsuccessful in her bid to close down the plays, Birdwood remained undeterred. The following year she invoked an ancient statute against blasphemy in order to prosecute the producers of the anti-religious comedy, Council of Love. Despite winning the support of Norris and Ross McWhirter, the right-wing founders of The Guinness Book of Records, she again failed. The McWhirters were close personal and political friends. In the mid-1970s she joined forces with Ross McWhirter to produce the far-right magazine Majority. But it was to be a short-lived venture as the project was terminated after Ross McWhirter was killed by the IRA in 1975. Although she fought bitterly to keep the publication going, the trustees opposed such a move. Like many of her generation and class background, Birdwood took the retreat from Empire, crystallised by the Rhodesian crisis, membership of the EEC and immigration into Britain, as a bitter pill. Seeing Prime Minister Edward Heath seemingly impotent against the changing political and economic circumstances, she joined those who feared encroaching communism. The American defeat in Vietnam and student and worker protests in Western Europe left many of her peers fearing the worst. With the trade unions were successfully challenging Heath’s authority, she began to look beyond the Conservative Party for salvation. Determined to play her part in holding back the red tide, she embarked on a number of right-wing crusades in Britain and abroad. She helped form the Citizens’ Mutual Protection Union (CMPU) in a bid to undermine union strikes and became joint editor of its newspaper, The British Gazette. In this and a later project, Self Help, she was backed by Edward Martell, a leading union basher and editor of the short-lived The Daily News in the 1960s. Under the guise of the CMPU she and Martell attempted to break a postal workers’ strike. In 1977, using her newly formed group, Self Help, she tried unsuccessfully,to recruit strike breakers to defeat workers at the bitter Grunwick dispute. Her anti-communism was bringing her into contact with people of even more extreme views. In Britain she became an officer of the League of Rights, run by the long-time antisemite, Don Martin. Together, they were also involved in the British League for European Freedom (BLEF), where they were joined by a leading member of the OUN. Through her work for the ABN and EFC, Birdwood travelled extensively around the world, attending anti-communist conferences and rallies in South and North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Many of these events were hosted by the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a coalition of nazi collaborators, South American death squad leaders and right-wing senators and politicians from Europe and the United States. Birdwood became the British representative at WACL events in Brazil and the USA, through her involvement in the BLEF. There she found herself in good company. Joining WACL as a US delegate was the British-born Roger Pearce, founder of Mankind Quarterly and formerly of the Northern League. She was also involved in the Foreign Affairs Circle (FAC), another anti-communist group, run by the Conservative Party activist Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. Considerably more moderate than the BLEF, the FAC soon lost the services of Birdwood after she became disillusioned with the Conservative Party, while Stewart-Smith became critical of the more extreme and openly antisemitic elements within the WACL. The split occurred in 1974, when Stewart-Smith was sidelined from the organisation of a planned WACL conference in Britain, in favour of the East European émigrés. Birdwood’s decision to leave the Conservative Party came after a group of far-right activists formed around the leadership of her close friend George Kennedy Young, the former deputy leader of MI6, failed in their bid to clinch the leadership of the Monday Club. While some went on to join the rapidly growing National Front, others preferred single issue campaigns. By the early 1970s race and immigration were the dominating issues for the right in Britain. Birdwood was no exception and became involved in a number of anti-immigrant organisations, including the Halt Immigration Now Campaign, led by Tory MP Ronald Bell, and the Immigration Control Association, led by Joy Page. Birdwood herself ran the Co-ordination Committee Against Immigration. Leaving the Conservative Party in the mid-1970s, Birdwood briefly joined the National Front, which at that time was witnessing a massive growth. During the short period she was connected with the NF, she attended rallies and meetings across the capital. Her involvement was not to last and before long she drifted away. Not that she objected to the NF’s politics, quite the contrary, but for a societal women, the NF was too crass and rough for her liking and she soon went her own way. She went on to launch her own political projects, as well as supporting every racist and antisemitic cause around, including events organised by openly nazi groups. In 1978 she was the guest speaker at a British Movement-organised rally in Birmingham. In 1986 she was again guest speaker at a St George’s Day rally organised by Stuart Millson, then a right-wing Tory, shortly before he switched allegiance to the BNP. Throughout this period, she also maintained links with Conservative Party activists, especially in Essex, where she continued to speak at their functions well into the 1990s. Her most longstanding friend came out of her political activism in the 1970s. Peter Marriner was a leading figure in both the British Movement (BM) and the National Front. The pair were photographed together by Searchlight at a racist rally in Trafalgar Square in 1976 and at a BM meeting in Birmingham two years later. Twenty years later Marriner was still at her side when she, accompanied by Joy Page, attended a Right Now! meeting in the House of Commons. The first editor of Right Now! was Ralph Harrison, with whom she had launched Fair Play and several white-only tenants’ associations in south London. Alongside Marriner her other close friend throughout this period was Martin Webster, the National Activities Organiser of the NF in the 1970s. In 1977 she launched Choice, a right-wing newspaper that called for the repatriation of non-white people from Britain. A reflection of her influence during this period was that its inaugural issue carried details of her plans for mass repatriation that she had presented to the chairman of the Conservative Party during a private meeting. Though she continued to throw her support behind a multitude of racist campaigns, including WISE, she was never to join an organisation again. She hit the headlines again in 1983 when she stood as an independent candidate in the Bermondsey parliamentary by-election, best known for the homophobic campaign run against the Labour candidate Peter Tatchell. Then nearly 70, she had a bad word to say about all her rival candidates, even dismissing the Conservative as a “multiracialist” and the National Front candidate as a “socialist”. She polled a mere 69 votes. Her antisemitism was now coming to the fore. Increasingly isolated from even the right wing of the Conservative Party, she began to spend more time with the hard right, slowly incorporating their politics into her own. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more she adopted openly antisemitic views the more she found herself on the political margins. Whereas once she openly discussed politics with the Conservative Party chairman, she was now confined to the nazi rallies of the BNP. However, her class background, which brought with it a love of empire and tradition, meant that she was never able fully to convert to its views. Under the publishing label Inter City Research, she began distributing numerous offensive and highly illegal publications. Not content with simply denying the Holocaust, she even claimed that Jews had ritually slaughtered and eaten children. Unsurprisingly, these views finally brought her to the attention of the authorities. In 1991 she was charged with ten counts under the 1986 Public Order Act for distributing antisemitic leaflets likely to stir up racial hatred. Despite being found guilty on all charges, she received only a three-month suspended jail sentence and was ordered to pay costs totalling £500. The failure by the authorities to prosecute Birdwood proved a persistent irritation to her opponents. A combination of her age, her titled background and the seeming insignificance with which the courts viewed antisemitism made her almost immune from legal action. Three years later she was back before the court, this time for the distribution of two virulently antisemitic publications, The Longest Hatred and The Snides of March. Again she received a suspended jail sentence. A third attempt to prosecute her failed in 1998 after the Attorney-General ruled that she was mentally in no fit state to stand trial. The deterioration in her mental health throughout the 1990s did not deter her from political activity. In 1992 she accepted an offer from Richard Edmonds to stand for the BNP in the general election. She agreed to stand again in 1997 but, with her health worsening, pulled out at the last moment. The largest individual distributor of racist and antisemitic material over the past 25 years, she escaped the punishment she deserved. Aside from the class aspect, this was largely because many in the establishment viewed her as, at best, eccentric and, at worst, crazed. Even press obituaries followed this line. The Times began by describing her as “a controversial and contradictory figure whose extreme views on race, politics and public morality were strangely at odds with the gentle and sympathetic personality admired by her friends”. The Daily Telegraph ended its obituary with the words: “In person she was surprisingly mild and on the surface rational”. Searchlight will remember Birdwood as one of the most important far-right political activists in the postwar period. She bridged the respectable right of the Conservative Party and the street nazis of the NF and BNP. More importantly, her racism and antisemitism attracted a layer of wealthy rightwingers who would not have dared associate themselves with openly nazi groups. In many ways this made her all the more dangerous. Using her title to win respect and deference, Birdwood was the extreme voice of Britain’s establishment. © Searchlight Magazine 2000
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Deasy (#0)
Never heard of her before, but it sounds like she was a great lady. Many years later Lady Jane Birdwood’s own family was alienated, when British National Party supporters heckled and abused her sister for marrying a Jewish man, while she was attending one of Birdwood’s numerous court appearances for producing and distributing antisemitic literature. Mom was Ada Ruth Pollock? Hello?
When in doubt, doubt.
From uk.geocities.com/nickdg_westlea/sirdavid.html - Descendants of Sir David Pollock, Last up-dated: 07/12/01: David POLLOCK b. 2 Sep 1780, m. 10 Dec 1807, Elizabeth Gore ATKINSON, d. 16 Apr 1841. Appointed Chief Justice of Bombay in 1846 and knighted in the same year. He died 22 May 1847. He was the eldest son of David POLLOCK, saddler to George III. He had 12 children (9 boys and 3 girls) of whom 3 died in infancy (2 girls and 1 boy) See also www.1911encyclopedia.org/Pollock - POLLOCK, the name of an English family which has contributed many important members to the legal and other professions. David Pollock, who was the son of a Scotsman and built up a prosperous business in London as a saddler, had three distinguished sons: Sir David Pollock (1780-1847), chief justice of Bombay; Sir Jonathan Frederick Pollock, Bart. (1783-1870), chief baron of the exchequer; and Sir George Pollock, Bart. (1786-1872), field-marshal. Of these the more famous were the two last. Field Marshal Sir George Pollock, who rendered valuable military service in India, and especially in Afghanistan in 1841-1843, ended his days as constable of the Tower of London, and was buried in Westminster Abbey; his baronetcy, created in 1872, descended to his son Frederick (d. 1874), who assumed the name of Montagu-Pollock, and so to his heirs. British islanders if they aren't dreaming up useless tales of lost tribes, are naming themselves accordingly. And perhaps with good reason.
Montagu! Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch...
When in doubt, doubt.
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
[Register]
|
||