Jane Birdwood
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The Dowager Lady Jane Birdwood (May 18, 1913-June 28, 2000) was the wife of a British aristocrat and leading figure on the far right in the United Kingdom who took part in a number of movements.
She was born Joan Pollock Graham in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, after which she changed her name to Jane in order to avoid confusion with a popular radio actress of the time. She later became the second wife of Lieutenant Colonel The Hon. Christopher Birdwood (the son of William Birdwood, 1st Baron Birdwood) and thus became Baroness Birdwood in 1954 on the death of her husband's father.
Initially serving only as a worker for her husband's passion international aid, she began to expand her political horizons after she was widowed in 1962. She first emerged as an activist in the League for European Freedom, an anti-communist group that sought to aid refugees from Eastern Europe. Around the same time, she also became involved in campaigns to support to public decency, and was briefly associated with Mary Whitehouse. In this role, she attempted to launch a number of prosecutions against productions and writers that offended her sense of taste, including the makers of controversial nude revue Oh! Calcutta! and John Bird, the author of the play Council of Love.
Birdwood then became involved in campaigns against trade unions, setting up the Citizens Mutual Protection Society in the early 1970s, which launched a failed attempt to run a private postal service. She then became involved in leading a number of far right pressure groups, including the Immigration Control Association, Common Cause, the British League of Rights (of which she was General Secretary) and Self Help, the latter attempting, unsuccessfully, to charge Arthur Scargill with treason.
Birdwood flirted with a number of political parties during her life, including briefly leading her own, British Solidarity. She became associated with the British National Front in the mid-1970s. She also worked with Ross McWhirter at this time on his right wing magazine Majority, and became a vocal critic of the Provisional Irish Republican Army after his murder. She also devoted a lot of time to the World Anti-Communist League. She stood in the 1983 by-election in Bermondsey as an independent candidate, winning 69 votes, and was equally unsuccessful when she stood as a British National Party candidate in the 1992 general election in Dewsbury. Through much of her later life, she published the journal Choice, which presented a right wing stance but was generally independent of any political party.
In 1991, she was brought to trial at the Old Bailey for ten counts of breaching the Public Order Act 1986. She was given a three-month suspended sentence and a £500 fine after being found guilty of all charges (which related to the distribution of anti-Semitic material). She was brought to trial for similar offences in 1994 and 1998, although the last one was suspended on health grounds. Her lawyer for these trials was usually Doug Christie, a Canadian lawyer best known for defending individuals accused of Nazi war crimes or racist, anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi activity.
Birdwood continued to lead British Solidarity as a pressure group, publish Choice and run a publishing venture, Inner City Researchers, until late 1999 when she was forced to stand down for health reasons. After her retirement most of these concerns passed into the hands of her associates Martin Webster and Peter Marriner.
