27 July — 53rd anniversary of the first night of Oh! Calcutta! at the Roundhouse, which featured — as well as all the nudity — the “noisy exit” of The Dowager Lady Birdwood from the venue, according to her Telegraph obituary.
She also launched a private prosecution on the grounds of obscenity, which failed, and later the same year tried a similar thing with a different show, before veering off into the wilder shores of far-right politics, especially the virulently antisemitic bits.
Ken Tynan described his musical revue as an “experiment in elegant erotica”, and it featured one of the final works of Joe Orton, three years after his untimely death, but obviously all that was of little concern to Birdwood, to whom it was all “blasphemy and filth”.
One of the cast, Linda Marlowe, later observed that when Birdwood complained, “the police came for a week, took notes and decided not to prosecute. So they must have thought it was harmless”.
…or, as The Stage put it:
On the evidence placed before him concerning this production, the Attorney General has formed the opinion that there is no likelihood that a prosecution would be successful
So, when Council of Love, an 1893 satire on Pope Alexander VI which featured a long orgy scene, was revived at the Criterion Theatre that August, she knew what she had to do: try the 1376 Blasphemy Act instead
Terence Blacker, in his biography of writer Willie Donaldson, who was that show’s producer, describes what happened:
A rather more serious threat came from the Dowager Lady Birdwood, a nutty fascist who had just been pronounced by the Guardian as ‘the sharpest thorn in the side of the permissive society’. Having unsuccessfully reported the immorality of Oh! Calcutta! to the police, she was tipped off that significant blasphemies were occurring every evening at the Criterion Theatre. With a small group of morally minded folk, she attended one show, barracking some of the ruder scenes, then returned for three more nights to confirm that what she had seen was as shocking as she thought. Hymns were sung outside the theatre. Lady Birdwood then reported the production to the Director of Public Prosecutions for breaking the laws of blasphemy.
To be fair to the dowager, the show did feature “Alexander VI and his cardinals … participating in orgies with naked women and oiled wrestlers during the celebration of divine Mass at the Vatican”.
Donaldson, though, had hired John Mortimer. He convinced the court that the director would have had to be physically present in the theatre “supervising the actors’ every sinful move”, but weren’t, and “therefore had no control over what happened on the stage”. This slightly questionable argument won the day.
Sidenote
While looking into this, I came across an academic paper which points out that Birdwood’s summary for the Yorkshire Post of why she found Oh! Calcutta! so terribly beastly and horrid…
…sounds exactly like Edna Welthorpe’s letter complaining about Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (‘Welthorpe’ being Orton’s alter ego, which he used to stoke controversy by writing fake letters in her name).
Another sidenote
The Telegraph obit is the only reference I could find to her marching noisily out of Oh! Calcutta!, so I wonder if they’re conflating that and Council of Love. Anyway…
Back to Birdwood
Sadly, this was not the last the world heard of The Dowager Lady Birdwood, who was, indeed, as Blacker points out, a fascist, and not, indeed, altogether rational. She founded a far-right magazine with Ross McWhirter, and tried to prosecute Arthur Scargill for sedition.
Admittedly, that would have been funny, but she also stood in elections for the BNP and as an ominous-sounding ‘independent patriot’, as well as having her own party named — uh-oh — British Solidarity.
She published pamphlets “which warned of world domination by a formidable … alliance of” — can you guess? Yes, that’s right! — “Communism and Jewish financiers”, repeated the antisemitic blood libel, and was generally fucking awful.
Her husband, the second Baron Birdwood, had been chairman of the Anglo-German Society, fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society and part of the British delegation to the United Nations. All this business began after his death in 1962. Maybe she came out of her shell.
In its obituary, the Guardian observed that “There was, it seemed, a market for a lime-green spectacled cover version of Mary Whitehouse”, but it is perhaps understandable that Searchlight were a little more forthright in their headline, at least.
Sadly, being a ‘character’ made her newsworthy, and gave her and her unpleasant views a profile. Still, at least that can’t happen any more, eh?
