The trial of the then seventy-eight year old Dowager Lady Jane Birdwood under the Public Order Act opened at the Central Criminal Court on October 14, 1991. David Paget for the prosecution claimed that “This case is to do with race hatred.” (22)

The prosecution conceded that Lady Birdwood was not the author of the leaflets, but claimed that her intention in distributing them could only have been to stir up hatred against Jews. Then it claimed that she had told the police that she believed “...the Zionist element of the Jewish race was masterminding a multi-racial invasion of Britain”. (23)

The first part of this statement is inaccurate; as I think I have demonstrated in the current work, Lady Birdwood did not intend to stir up hatred against the Jews; it was her intention to start a dialogue with them. Had almost anyone else under the sun distributed these leaflets, the claim of the prosecution would have been valid, but Lady Birdwood’s mind worked in weird and wonderful ways. She thought she could start a dialogue with Britain’s Jews by accusing them of the ritual murders of Christian children and denouncing their holy scriptures as vile, anti-Christian pornography. (24)

The prosecution then claimed that Lady Birdwood had posted 1,500 copies of The Snides of March to various MPs and people listed in the Church of England Year Book. (25) She didn’t dispute this, it was her sincere attempt to warn Christians of (what she perceived as) Jews debasing Christianity. Obviously to the reader this sounds like utter nonsense, as indeed it is, but as Lady Birdwood herself pointed out in one of our interviews, the Holocaust has been rather overdone.

This is not so much in evidence nowadays, but certainly in the late seventies, when the campaign against the National Front reached its hysterical crescendo, it was almost the only thing we heard about. And the fact is that all peoples have suffered persecution and many have become persecutors in their turn. This has happened with the Jews to some extent in Israel, Occupied Palestine or whatever you want to call it. Yet such is the hypocrisy, deceit and self-abasement of the white race that it is never conceded for one moment that Jews or any other ethnic (as distinct from national) group, can ever do anything reprehensible. It is whitey and whitey alone who is racist.

The prosecution claimed further that a woman who had been sent a copy of The Snides of March reported it to the police. It was this which led to Lady Birdwood’s prosecution. One wonders what would have happened if anyone had reported the monstrosity Holocaust to the police. Or that other grossly distorted piece of pseudo-history and thinly veiled piece of anti-white propaganda, Roots. (26)

Lady Birdwood told the police, the prosecution said, that Zionists had a “complete stranglehold” on communications, television, radio and press. As both Lady Birdwood, the current writer and many others have pointed out, this is not a total fantasy: those people really are in control of the media in some (albeit limited) sense. This has not been quite the disaster for Britain that it has been for the United States where even liberal politicians have become increasingly aware of the power and duplicity of the Israel/Jewish lobby. Jews are not quite the scheming anti-Christian scoundrels that in all sincerity Lady Birdwood believed them to be, but it is at least fair to state that the media is in some sense more reflective of Jewish aspirations than Christian ones.

The Times of October 17, 1991 reported that Lady Birdwood was found guilty on ten charges, which apparently provoked uproar in the public gallery. The Jewish Chronicle, which was published the following day, reported on its front page Angry scenes as Lady Birdwood is convicted on ten race-hate charges...

For once in this vile newspaper, the reporting was fairly objective, but the following comments are worth drawing to the reader’s attention.

Mr Mike Whine, (that really is his name!), then Director of the Board of Deputies Defence Department said, “She may appear to be a dotty old woman but she has a long record of involvement with neo-Nazi organisations. The leaflets she has distributed have contributed to the rise in racist violence”.

Whine may or may not have believed that facile statement, but it is well known that the leaders of Organised Jewry (of which he is one of the most odious) brand anyone they don’t like or think doesn’t like them as anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, etc. Lady Birdwood had certainly been involved with anti-Semites who did their level best to fill her head with all sorts of nonsense, but she was not a Nazi and she was not a dotty old woman.

Whine’s claim that the leaflets she distributed somehow contributed to increasing levels of violence, either against Jews or any other ethnic minority, is poppycock, a mere unsupported assertion. Most of these leaflets were sent to people whose names Lady Birdwood found in the Church of England Yearbook. It is difficult to believe that any of the recipients of these leaflets would have been incited to burn down the local synagogue or to start a pogrom. Nor is there any reason to believe that anything like this had indeed happened. Of the recipients, one lady reported the leaflets to the police; undoubtedly the rest consigned them to the nearest waste paper basket (where they belonged) after giving them the once over.

According to the Jewish Chronicle there were cries of “This is a kangaroo court” and “You are not English, you’re scum” and “Are you happy now you’ve got your pound of flesh?” These were said to have come from her supporters. This I can quite believe, but these “supporters”, who were probably members of the British National Party, were an embarrassment to Lady Birdwood more than anything else. She was far too diplomatic and kind-natured to say anything disparaging of them, but they were not “her people” in anything other than a very broad racial sense.

Judge Capstick told Lady Birdwood that if she broke the law again she would be sent to prison; under the circumstances he could hardly have done anything else. Fortunately though, he did not send her to gaol, though others have been jailed for similar “offences” both before and since. Of course, the fact that Lady Birdwood was seventy-eight years old would in no way mitigate for her having “broken the law” although it would, naturally, be taken into consideration by any judge worthy of the name when he passed sentence. This is what Judge Capstick did in sentencing her to a two year conditional discharge plus five hundred pounds costs.

The following brief question and answer session concerns her trial. I had intended to cover this in considerable depth, but the truth is that it was an open and shut case. Addressing the jury, Lady Birdwood said: “The essence of this case is whether in a free country there can be free speech, even involving the most controversial subjects, as in the present case.”

The jury answered that question for her.

What follows are approved transcripts of my interviews with Lady Birdwood which were recorded at her Acton, West London flat on Friday, January 24, Friday, February 21, and Thursday, April 16, 1992. I have added my own notes, which should be read in conjunction with the body text.

I had called on her sometime previously and spoken to her for an hour under rather formal circumstances. The second time I called she made me a pot of tea and we spoke at length on a wide variety of subjects. Some material has been omitted from these transcripts; I have included only what I consider relevant. The annotations are entirely my own.

My impression of Jane Birdwood before our first meeting was that she was a sad, pathetic, old woman who was being led on by anti-Semites posing as “racial nationalists” to do their dirty work for their own insidious ends. I also considered her to be an anti-Semite herself, although I considered her particular brand of anti-Semitism to be more obsessive than evil. That first impression did not last long. As I think I have demonstrated ably enough in this short monograph, Jane Birdwood hated no man or woman, Jew or Gentile. Her mistrial and conviction did her a double injustice.

Click here for The First Interview
Click here for Notes And References
Click here to return to How Racism Became A Dirty Word....
Click here to return to The Jane Birdwood I Knew
Click here to return to Introduction
Click here to return to “Book Cover”

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