Poets' friendship forged at Brit trad jazz riot

'Beatnik' blame for festival fracas

THERE IS really no question that the American Beats cast an occluding shadow over the UK’s popular poetry scene in the 1960s. If British rock became a predominant force transatlantically by the middle of that decade, the powerplays, when it came to hip fiction and street verse, were almost always delivered from the other side of the water.

Yet there were pockets of activity on these shores and some notable individuals, who might well have tipped their hats to Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti but had the confidence to devise their own visions and the personal energy to make their mark on younger literate audiences and readers. Some were willing, happy even, to accept the epithet British Beat.

In Liverpool, there was, of course, a seismic wave of new rock‘n’roll acts and out of that ferment emerged a number of idiosyncratic wordsmiths inspired by the vernacular stylings of the US crowd but able to give their stanzas a local spin. The musical typhoon called Merseybeat would give the city’s arts life a general resurrection, a self-belief that popped the inhibitions of meek provincialism.

Figures like Johnny Byrne and Spike Hawkins and a trio who would truly make their imprint via the best-selling collection The Mersey Sound – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten – caught the city’s ears with their quirky rhymes, romantic notes and moody observations in cafés and bars. Soon the nation would take note, too.

But a pair with capital roots, Pete Brown and Michael Horovitz, were significant in spreading the gospel in London and Oxford and the South of England. Often joined by Adrian Mitchell on touring ventures, they picked up the hitchhiking spirit of Kerouac, slept on threadbare carpets and the slumped couches of friendly contacts and conceived a truly mobile version of the bohemian artist’s garret.

Pictured above: Michael Horovitz in the 1960s

There was eventually a significant coming together various of these cosmopolitan forces in June 1965, when the International Poetry Incarnation in London presented an Albert Hall bill featuring Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti alongside Horovitz, Brown and Mitchell, and drawing a remarkable 7,000 strong crowd in the process.

But I want to go back a little further here and retain a focus on Brown and Horovitz. It is barely four weeks since Brown died and, next month, it will be two years since his great friend Horovitz passed on himself. To be frank, two important pillars of our somewhat underrated poetry community have been lost to us in very quick time.

Pictured above: Pete Brown on stage

These two writers, who both took an avid interest in the relationship between verse form and music and used those interactions throughout their prolific working lives, first encountered each other at an event that would assume a notorious reputation – the Beaulieu Jazz Festival of July 1960.

What proved a gateway year for politics and culture – John F. Kennedy’s election as president and the Lady Chatterley trial, to consider only a couple of important landmarks of the time – would provide the platform for a live event that would, in so many ways, represent the multiple tensions and divisions implicit in mid-century British society.

We might even see Brown and Horovitz as a microcosm of a wider vein of inequality. Although both Jewish, the former came from poor Eastern European roots while the latter was a member of a senior religious family who had escaped the imminent terrors of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. While Brown’s education was skimpy, Horovitz’ was pursued in the lofty halls of Oxbridge. Yet Brown, a mere 19, and Horovitz, 25, clicked over jazz and poems.

But Beaulieu, centred on a medieval stately home and plush with aristocratic pastures, was symbolic of the ossified world of post-war England. Here, the historic custodian of a vast estate located between the Solent and the New Forest was making his kempt lawns available to 10,000 attendees – middle-class sorts, university-types expected – mainly taking an interest in trad jazz, the thriving pop phenomenon of the day particularly fawned over by duffel coat-wearing campus crew.

However, Lord and Lady Montagu and their grand palace home Beaulieu – ‘beautiful place’ in the original French but pronounced in the adapted English as ‘bew-lee’ – quite quickly discovered that the social fabric was not quite as stable, the clientele not quite as predictable or mutely deferential, as they had perhaps been hoping a. Changing times indeed.

In short, that year’s event – the annual celebration had been launched as early as 1956 – attracted certain cliques not so happy to toe the line. The festival line-up – many of the current stars of that Dixieland-inclined musical trend, including Acker Bilk, Humphrey Lyttelton and George Melly – was expected to generate a good-natured response and amiable smiles from the cheery but docile rows.

Pictured above: The poster for the 1960 Beaulieu festival

But the crowd were made up of a rather combustible mixture of trad obsessives, modernists who were tired of this shallow revivalism and some rogue Teddy boys who were much more invigorated by the visceral gestures of American rockabilly. With BBC television cameras present, there was an eruption of ill-tempered violence and a jazz riot ensued: the stage was stormed and dismantled, property was damaged, musicians were manhandled and their instruments widely dispersed. Further, a sizeable potting shed was burnt to the ground.

The so-called Battle of Beaulieu was as incendiary as it was unexpected. The BBC cut away from its live transmission early as fisticuffs fizzled and flames ignited. The event seemed to mark the end of a certain adolescent consensus: the aesthetic artificiality of trad was rejected by new waves of listeners seeking more authentic and earthy expression, a greater black representation of those sounds perhaps instead of this primarily milk white diet.

But it also drew attention to the subcultural fractures that were bursting onto the urban centres of the nation, as various homegrown teen tribes – Teds, bikers, mods, rockers – attempted to assert their right to exist, express themselves noisily and often with a certain muscular force. Musical taste and identity were often central.

As for the press reaction to this furore, the People, a still extant Sunday newspaper of mass circulation and a fellow traveller to the now extinct News of the World, quickly had its sociological analysis off pat. So, why had Beaulieu 1960 flared into such a furious showdown? The reporter had an answer.

‘Blame these 4 men for the Beatnik horror’ trumpeted the headline in that scandal-driven publication, naming Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso as the catalysts of the festival fireworks, though the evidence was virtually non-existent. Certainly none was present at the occasion.

Pictured above: That sensational People headline

Pete Brown and Michael Horovitz, who would already have known of these authors, all still relatively obscure to mainstream British readers, must have found the direct connection identified between the Beat Generation principals and the festival meltdown a somewhat surprising non sequitur.

Meanwhile, their own association, which rose Phoenix-like from these angry ashes, would go on to disseminate the Beat ideology widely and cite these allegedly guilty men as positive creative models for the rest of their active days.

However, the Beats, or more accurately the beatniks, would become a useful scapegoat, a place where middle England could focus its anxieties regarding society’s declining standards and the delinquent dangers posed by a novel brand of youthful over-exuberance.

See also: ‘Pete Brown: Superstar poet and Cream of the crop’, May 20th, 2023; Simon Warner, ‘Michael Horovitz obituary: A hero of British radical poetry’, New European, July 10th, 2021