Jazz Riots on a Summer’s Day

It was a warm summer evening in 1960. Lord Montague, he of the Vintage Car Museum fame, was hosting the fifth jazz festival at Beaulieu Palace House in Hampshire. Over three nights jazz enthusiasts could enjoy the sounds of Acker Bilk, Johnny Dankworth, Humphrey Lyttelton, Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and others. A television relay of some of the performances on the Saturday opening night was due to be broadcast by the BBC. Fatefully, just days before the event, Lord Montague had told the press that those who throng to the festival do not cause much damage: “They are extremely well-behaved inside the ground, I find. The grass suffers a little, but it soon recovers. My only reason for doing it is to provide for serious jazz in this country”.     

But on that opening evening on 30 July there were some less than well-behaved elements in the crowd and trouble was brewing. It was, as a Daily Mirror headline would proclaim, a ‘Beatnik Beat-Up’. What happened, according to one press report was that ‘screaming teenagers dragged down scaffolding holding TV cameras, climbed onto the bandstand, littered the estate with broken bottles – and then slept rough in the fields while firemen battled with a blaze in a building housing part of Lord Montague’s Vintage Car Museum’.

Most of the rioting occurred during a live BBC television outside broadcast and, thanks to a home taper, we now have the audio of that incident. The broadcast was scheduled to start at 22.45 and run for just 40 minutes until the late news and weather at 23.25. The recovered recording runs for just over 10 minutes. A few seconds in commentator Derek Jones reminds us that we are listening to the sound of Acker Bilk and the Paramount Jazz Band. At 1 min 35 secs we hear a bang and Derek comments that he can see smoke. At 2.15 the ‘jazz fans’ have climbed onto the lighting tower. At 6.15 by the end of Acker’s second number, Lord Montague has been on stage and talked to Acker about carrying on. At 7.00 Derek informs viewers that the “entire scaffolding holding our lighting equipment has collapsed to the ground” but still the band played on. At 9.00 Acker finally admits “we can’t see, we can’t play...it’s very sad thing, but what can you do.” At 9.30 Derek comes in “Well this is certainly not the way it was intended that this year’s jazz festival at Beaulieu should go. It got completely out of hand. No doubt about that at all.” The recording ends at 10 min 30 secs and it was about a minute later that the broadcast ended, some six minutes earlier than scheduled.

As well as the damage to BBC equipment (plus seven or eight microphones which ‘vanished’) and some musical instruments, the trail of destruction also included fire damage to a 1921 14-seater bus, an old car, two tons of straw, roundabout horses and vehicle parts. Apparently Humphrey Lyttelton’s trumpet was found in the car park and some of George Melly’s clothing halfway up a tree.  In the aftermath of the incident three people were taken to Lymington Hospital and treated for minor injuries. Later in August two men were found guilty of assaulting police officers and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment.

As to what triggered the violence, that remains a mystery.  According to one chap who attended and spoke to BBC reporters at the time it was the trad jazz versus modern jazz argument: “Most of the trouble-makers were traditional jazz fans. I think when the modern jazz was playing they didn’t like it”. The press saw it as indicative of a wider social dilemma and that it was ‘part and parcel of a general trend ...of juvenile delinquency’ and even calling to ‘ban everyone who even looks a little like a supporter of the beatnik cult’. Others suggested that it ‘should not surprise anyone who ..recalls the recent rioting as at jazz festival at Newport, Rhode Island.’ A week later The People was quite clear where the problem lay and that the ‘outbreak of beatnik violence ...must be blamed on the cult of despair preached by four strange men’. Those men were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.          

As for the jazz festival, Lord Montague announced that it would continue as planned but that he wouldn’t host another one. “We cannot possibly have a festival of this form again. I think I owe that to local people and to my staff who are not trained pugilists”. On the second night 30 uniformed police were drafted in, where normally there was just one, and CID officers mingled with the crowd.

Despite the violence, jazz fans were able to descend on Beaulieu the following year (Montagu having changed his mind in January 1961) when there was tighter security, restrictions on ticket sales and a no-alcohol policy. The only problem this time was that trouble-makers rioted in the village instead with reports of brawls between trads and moderns, 100 casualties, smashed beer and wine bottle and three arrests. Lord Montagu was forced to admit that “I can no longer run the risk of further damage to property nor allow Beaulieu residents to suffer from the undesirable crowd the festival attracts to the neighbourhood”. It was to be that last Beaulieu Jazz Festival.   

The recording of the television soundtrack was kindly donated to me by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I extend my thanks. Duncan obtained the tape from Mike Bailey in New Zealand. It had been recorded by his father who had emigrated to the country in the early 60s.