Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood
Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood (18 May 1913 – 29 June 2000), born Joan Pollock Graham, was a British far-right political activist who took part in a number of movements, and was described as the "largest individual distributor of racist and antisemitic material" in Britain.[1] She was the second wife of Christopher Birdwood, 2nd Baron Birdwood.
The Lady Birdwood
29 June 2000 (aged 87)
Political activist, publisher
British National Party (1992)
Monday Club (until 1973)
Early life[edit]
She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the daughter of a singer from Hull and a mother from Newcastle, although according to her Searchlight obituary she was the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat.[1] The family returned to Britain when she was 10 and settled in Yorkshire.[2][3]
She changed her name to Jane while working in the BBC Gramophone Library in order to avoid confusion with Joan Graham, a radio actress of the time.[1] During the war she worked for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), originally in Brussels and then in the early post-war period in Hamburg. Remaining in Germany, she joined the Red Cross in 1947, becoming secretary to Lieutenant Colonel, the Hon Christopher Birdwood.[1]
They began an affair; she was cited as a co-respondent in Birdwood's divorce case and became his second wife after the divorce was finalised in 1954. Her husband was the son of Field Marshal William Birdwood, 1st Baron Birdwood); after his father died he succeeded to the title[3] in 1951. In the 1950s, she was a prominent supporter of the émigré group, the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, dominated by supporters of the extreme right-wing Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).[1] Through her work with the Association of Ukrainians, she befriended Yaroslav Stetsko, an OUN leader who read out the declaration proclaiming a Ukrainian state in 1941.[1] Stetsko had organised a pogrom in Lviv on 30 June 1941 that killed thousands of Jews and Poles.[4] A central aspect of the OUN's ideology was the belief that nations had to stay racially "pure" to be successful, and hence the OUN made it clear that in the Ukrainian state it wished to establish there would be no minorities.[5] In 1961, she visited South Africa, where she praised apartheid as an "inevitable and a social necessity".[1] Strongly opposed to independence for the colonies of the British Empire, she joined the Monday Club, which represented the right-wing of the Conservative Party opposed to decolonisation.[2]
Later activities[edit]
In March 1994, Birdwood was prosecuted for violating the Public Order Act 1986 by re-publishing her pamphlet The Longest Hatred, which denied the Holocaust and claimed the existence of a subversive conspiracy in Britain involving Jewish bankers.[2][23] According to the prosecution, Birdwood admitted to police that she had written the foreword, edited it and was responsible for its publication and distribution.[23] She was sentenced to three months in prison, suspended. According to Birdwood, the victims of the Holocaust died from typhoid.[3]
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.[1] She died from cancer on 28 June 2000. In her obituary in The Guardian, her various pamphlets outlining her anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were described as "chronicles of wasted time".[2]