The battle of Beaulieu: when mild-mannered jazz fans turned into violent thugs

Outdoor jazz festivals – soon to return, we hope, from their Covid-induced absence – are best known for their air of gentle, wholesome fun. It’s hard to be cutting-edge when there are infants pottering about and midges biting. The ambience is best suited to traditional jazz played by chaps of a certain age, dressed in ties and with bald pates reddening gently in the sun.

But for those with very long memories, such events may remind them of a less upmarket event, 60 years ago today, when jazz fans went on the rampage in front of a similarly gorgeous backdrop. The year was 1960, and the occasion was the third Beaulieu Jazz Festival, which took place at Lord Montagu’s estate at Beaulieu, near the New Forest. Lord Montagu was something of a jazz fan, and thought this was a risk-free way to indulge his enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, it all went wrong when specimens of a new and puzzling sort of creature – the teenager – invaded the stage. Stuart Nicholson, a regular contributor to Jazzwise magazine, remembers that, as the lighting gantry collapsed, “someone grabbed a microphone and demanded ‘free beer for the working man’”.

A lone figure made it to the top of the stage – a converted merry-go-round, complete with fairground horses – and once the crowd realised he was on television, a mass climb began to join him.

How wonderfully British. The young rioter wasn’t fighting for an end to bourgeois hegemony, or even more power for the unions. It was just for some free beer.

This invader, however, wasn’t a lone eccentric. Jazz at that time was a hotbed of competing styles, with deep antagonisms between different sets of fans. These were driven by class differences as much as musical tastes. The jazz historian Duncan Heinen uncovered these simmering tensions in Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, his fascinating 2012 history of Sixties and Seventies jazz.

Heinen’s book explained how the 1960 Beaulieu Festival was really a tail-piece to the Fifties, that edgy decade of beatniks, CND marches, Angry Young men, Pop art and race riots. (It’s only because the Sixties have been so mythologised that people think of the Fifties as drab.)

Jazz was in the thick of it, though witnesses of the period never seem to agree whether a fondness for drainpipe trousers meant you were anti-nuclear power and for modern jazz, or despised Dizzy Gillespie and preferred skiffle.Some say it was a working-class thing to like modern jazz, and that middle-class rebelliousness came out in “jiving” to trad.

One indubitable fact is that the rock ’n’ roll, R&B and jazz scenes were closely interlinked, and players such as Ginger Baker could migrate from one to another. So with competing styles of jazz on the platform, plenty of beer on tap, and the provocative backdrop of a stately home, the stage was set for a classic British class confrontation.

One imagines that some of the youth were just itching to feel aggrieved, like the character in Colin MacInnes’s 1958 novel Absolute Beginners, who describes the Beaulieu festivals as “garden party’s [sic] for the ooblies and Hooray Henries”. (According to the poet Jeff Nuttall, “ooblies” was Humphrey Lyttelton’s term for devotees of the “original purist trad subculture”. George Melly preferred the term “moron”.)

Finding out what really happened that day at Beaulieu is like asking what really happened at the riotous 1913 premiere of the Rite of Spring. Some say it was bearded trad fans versus modern jazzers. Others say it was nothing to do with music at all. One witness insists it was Teddy Boys shouting “We want Acker!” (meaning trad jazz clarinettist and singer Acker Bilk), while the correspondent for Melody Maker sniffed about working-class “mobsters” coming from Portsmouth and Southampton.

Once the stage had been invaded, chaos quickly ensued. A building was set on fire, 39 people were injured, and the BBC pulled its outside broadcast feed off the air six minutes early. “Things are getting quite out of hand,” the announcer primly said.

That wasn’t quite the end of the Beaulieu Jazz Festival. Lord Montagu was game enough to try again the following year, but the cost of the increased security meant the event was no longer viable. And that was it, for “green-field” jazz festivals in the UK – until Love Supreme came on the scene in 2013.

This year's Love Supreme has been cancelled, thanks to Covid-19. It will take place next year instead, on July 2–4. But will it stir the same passions as Beaulieu did? Will someone grab a microphone after Cory Wong’s set and demand “free champagne for the working man”? Somehow, I just can’t see it.

A Love Supreme resumes in July 2021; lovesupremefestival.com