Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood

The Baroness Birdwood
File:Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood.png
Born	18 May 1913(1913-05-18) Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Died	28 June 2000 (aged 87) United Kingdom
Occupation	Politician, activist, publisher
Spouse	Lord Birdwood

Joan Pollock Graham (18 May 1913 — 28 June 2000), better known as Jane, Lady Birdwood, was the wife of the Christopher Birdwood, 2nd Baron Birdwood, and a patriotic activist in the British fascist movement. Born in Canada, she took part in various patriotic movements in the United Kingdom. While she had a long career of activism, best known for anti-communism and social conservative issues, the mass media mostly highlights the campaign against her following the publication of The Longest Hatred: An Examination of Anti-Gentilism in 1991.

Early life

She was born Joan Pollock Graham in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the daughter of a singer from Hull and a mother from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The family returned to Britain and settled in Yorkshire in the 1920s. She changed her name to Jane in order to avoid confusion with a popular radio actress of the time. She was cited as a co-respondent in the divorce case of Lieutenant Colonel The Honourable Christopher Birdwood (the son of Field Marshal William Birdwood, 1st Baron Birdwood) and became his second wife after the divorce was finalised in 1954; her husband's father had died in 1952.

Political activitism

Initially serving only as a worker for her husband's passion, international aid, she expanded her political involvement after becoming a widow in 1962. She was a member of the League for European Freedom, an anti-communist group that sought to aid refugees from Eastern Europe. Her activities also brought her into contact with such groups as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and individuals such as Yaroslav Stetsko. She was an early member of the Conservative Monday Club and was also President of the Foreign Affairs Circle whose secretary was Club activist Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. They were responsible for organising the great Royal Albert Hall memorial service commemorating the then 94,800,000 victims of communism on the 31st October 1967. She was one of the Monday Club delegation to No.10 Downing Street in 1972 to protest "about the new Asian invasion of Britain." It is unclear when she left the Monday Club but was possibly after their internal upheaval in 1973.

In the same period, she allied herself with campaigns to support public decency, and was briefly associated with Mary Whitehouse, becoming chair of the London branch of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association. In this role, she attempted to launch a number of prosecutions against productions and writers that offended her sense of taste, including the producers of controversial theatrical revue Oh! Calcutta! and actor John Bird, the author of the play Council of Love.

Lady Birdwood became involved in campaigns against Trotskyist controlled 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 took a leading role in several 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.

Following her departure, she was associated with the National Front for a short spell. She also worked with Ross McWhirter at this time on his magazine Majority, and became a vocal critic of the Provisional Irish Republican Army after his murder. She also devoted much time to the World Anti-Communist League.

One of her major failed efforts had her calling for the UK to enforce the Edict of Expulsion against jews in 1290, insisting the edict had never been revoked. She stood in the 1983 by-election in Bermondsey as an independent candidate, winning 69 votes, and attacked her opponents by labelling the Tory candidate a "multiracialist" and the NF candidate a "socialist". She 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 patriotic stance but was generally independent of any political party.

Later activities

In 1994, Birdwood was prosecuted for allegedly violating the Public Order Act 1986 by publishing her pamphlet The Longest Hatred: An Examination of Anti-Gentilism, which contained Holocaust revisionism and claimed the existence of a subversive conspiracy in Britain involving jewish bankers. She was sentenced to 3 months in prison, suspended and fined 550 pounds. British authorities then seized all copies of The Longest Hatred and destroyed them. Three years earlier, in 1991, she had been convicted of distributing anti-Semitic literature with the alleged intention of stirring up racial hatred.

Birdwood continued to lead British Solidarity as a pressure group, publish Choice and run a publishing venture, Inter 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, the former National Front co-leader Martin Webster and Peter Marriner, also a former British Movement activist.

Elections contested

Date of election	Constituency	Party	Votes	%
24 February 1983	Bermondsey	'Independent Patriot'	69	0.2
10 April 1986	Fulham	England Demands Repatriation	226	0.6
1992	Dewsbury	British National Party	660	1.1

Pamphlets

• The Longest Hatred: An Examination of Anti-Gentilism (1991)
• The Snides of March