A beatnik police force

Jazz riots

I didn't meant to return to Beaulieu but what I have been reading about is too brilliant not to share.

Edward Montagu, who opened Beaulieu to the public in the early 1950s, had initially had a career in press and PR (one which was interrupted by a famous trial for “unnatural acts” with airmen and a prison stay but that’s a whole other story). Which meant that he was quite ahead of his time in thinking of ways to make the Beaulieu estate pay for itself.

One of his less well known ventures was the Beaulieu Jazz Festival which ran from the mid 1950s until 1961.

While this might sound quite staid now, the events were a kind of proto-Glastonbury with bands, camping and the whole thing televised by the BBC. Although admittedly the camping was run by ex-Irish Guards soldiers, which I don’t think ever happened in Somerset.

The papers complained about too much drink and drugs and bad behaviour, and other aspects seem surprisingly familiar too. One group of teenagers from Sussex called themselves the Barbarians and spent the whole weekend dressed as cavemen while another girl had the slogan ‘IDIOTS OF THE WORLD UNITE’ painted on the back of her shirt.

The fun went badly wrong in 1960 when there was a riot, apparently caused by aggro between Acker Bilk traditionalists and the modernists who preferred Johnny Dankworth. (If you are not an indie kid of my vintage, it is impossible to describe how funny this is; like a fight between fans of Barry Manilow vs those of Englebert Humperdinck). The disturbance was more serious - the lighting rig was climbed, cameras turned over, the stage stormed and a building set on fire. Lord Montagu tried again for one further year in 1961, but after more rioting, nude subathing and orgies, the festival ended for good.

This, however is where it starts to get peculiar - because Beaulieu shifted from being a socially approved precursor to Glastonbury to prefiguring much later disturbances at Stonehenge.

In Spring 1962, leaflets were distributed in Chelsea urging both the ‘trade’ and ‘moderns’ who had rioted to come to Beaulieu in August for a ‘free rave to the bitter end.’  They were signed Pete the Brolly. After being visited by the police, Pete - goatee-bearded and monocled, actual surname Dawson - admitted to being ‘the cat’ who had distributed the leaflets.  Although he did have a plan.  ‘When I wrote to Lord Montagu I pointed out that to combat any trouble I would organise a beatnik police force. There would be little risk of damage. This rave would have lasted a while. We planned to live in the forest while it was on.’

Long before hippies, travellers and free festivals, the whole idea had already been invented in the woods and fields around Beaulieu.

That’s not the end of the connection, either. The key traveller event for many years, the Stonehenge Free Festival came to an end in 1985, because ‘the authorities’ had obtained an injunction against it happening. One of the authorities was English Heritage, whose chairman was the very same Lord Montagu. One part of the convoy attempted to march towards Beaulieu in protest, but he’d apparently left the country for a while; the reverberations of history perhaps proving too much for him.

Pictures from ‘Lord Montagu’ (the film not the person) on Facebook.