Freda Jackson needed a police guard when in 1945 she played the monstrous lead character in Joan Temple’s play No Room at the Inn. “There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her,” her son Julian Bird remembers. Such was the power of her performance that audiences stood and cheered when she got her comeuppance.
This West End play was topical: it dealt with the sufferings of orphaned and evacuated children and was inspired by the same tragedy that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap. Jackson played a landlady who took in such children for the money and then abused and corrupted them. The play and the film that was made of it, which was necessarily tamer because of the censorship of the day, made Jackson famous, but derailed her promising screen career.
Freda Jackson: Northampton Rep and Errol Flynn
Jackson was born in Nottingham in 1907, the daughter of a railway porter. She was educated at High Pavement School and the city’s University College. In 1933 she was teaching English and Drama at Haywood School, Sherwood, and spending her evenings acting with a local theatre group, when a letter to the director of its repertory company won her an audition at Northampton’s Theatre Royal.
She was accepted into the company and was soon playing leading roles. Further down the cast lists was a young actor called Errol Flynn. Jackson later remembered him as “one of the most handsome men I have ever known but a very bad actor”. She denied the widely repeated story that the two of them had a fling: “He had quite a reputation with the ladies but I wasn’t really his cup of tea – he preferred the flighty bits.”
During her time in Northampton, Jackson met her future husband, the artist Henry Bird. They married in 1937 – after she had left the town to try her luck in London. She struggled for work at first, but in 1938 joined the Old Vic company and in 1940 became part of the company at the Stratford Memorial Theatre.
Back at the Old Vic in 1942, she had just come off stage as Amelia in Othello when Laurence Olivier visited her dressing room. “I nearly died with excitement because he had always been my hero,” she later recalled. “He was very enthusiastic, raving almost, and kept saying ‘This is Amelia, the only Amelia, I never want to see another Amelia!’ and things like that. I took it all with a pinch of salt, but Larry never forgot me.”
By the time No Room at the Inn opened in 1945, Jackson had been cast in three of the great films of the decade. She played a woman farmer in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s magical A Canterbury Tale, Mistress Quickly in Olivier’s Henry V, and Mrs Joe in David Lean’s Great Expectations.
Henry Bird: From Northampton’s back streets to the Royal College of Art
Like his wife, Bird came from a working-class home: his father was a baker and his mother’s family were shoemakers. He was born in the Green Street area of Northampton in 1909 and became a boy chorister at the nearby St Peter’s church. He later said the beauty and skill of the carvings there opened his eyes to the life he wanted.
Bird was only 11 when he began part-time studies at the Northampton School of Art, later taking factory and office jobs to pay his way. He eventually won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, where he won all the major prizes. When he and Jackson married, Bird was lecturing at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth.
From 1941 he moved in the same theatrical circles as his wife. He was the head scenery painter at both the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells, and the resident designer at the Embassy Theatre, where his wife so enraged audiences in No Room at the Inn. In 1950 the couple returned to Northampton and Bird took up a teaching post at the school of art where he had first studied.
Henry Bird: Northamptonshire murals and cream cakes
Bird became known for his murals, many of which he painted in and around the town – at the Guildhall, in the chapel of St Crispin’s Hospital at Duston, at Danetre Hospital in Daventry and at Denton Church. You can see his work in the Saxon church at Earls Barton, where he restored the 15th-century rood screen, painting saints in modern dress and hundreds of butterflies. And he painted the safety curtain at the Royal Theatre in Northampton, producing a rich work that blended fantasy, mythology and local history. Among the people depicted, on opposite sides of the proscenium arch, are Jackson and Flynn.
Described as “something of a genuine eccentric” and displaying the flamboyant dress sense then rather expected of an artist, Bird had a studio in the attic of the Northampton and County Club in the centre of the town. A visiting journalist described it as “half glass and sky”. There he practised the other side of his art, painting female nudes. His obituarists said his work was respectful of women and that he liked his models “big and beautiful”. He tempted them to sit for him with sherry and cream cakes, which adds a reassuring touch of Beryl Cook to the proceedings.
Freda Jackson: Hammer and horror
After her triumph in No Room at the Inn, Jackson continued her distinguished stage career, but that play and the film made of it did affect the screen roles she was offered. In Women of Twilight, which was practically a remake of No Room, she played a baby farmer who victimises unmarried mothers, and after that the parts became more extreme still until she found herself playing literal monsters. But quality will out, and many horror fans regard her performance in The Brides of Dracula from 1960 as the best by any female actor in a Hammer film.
Jackson was philosophical about this turn of events. Towards the end of her career she told a local newspaper:
“I got a bit bogged down with Hammer but I enjoyed them. It was tempting to burst out laughing but you had to play the parts with sincerity or they wouldn’t work.”
Besides, it was the British films that got smaller. After the golden age of the 1940s, they became more polite and it is hard to imagine a performer of Jackson’s power playing a supporting role in many of them. She would have acted the Rank starlets off the screen.
A 53-year marriage
From 1960, Bird and Jackson lived at Hardingstone House which, then at least, was just outside Northampton. Some have made them sound like a forbidding couple – certainly, they took their work seriously – but I have spoken to an artist who was taught by Bird and did not find him the hard taskmaster of legend. What he remembered most was how much Bird talked about his wife and how proud of her he was.
Jackson played her last West End role in 1982 at the age of 75 and among her late screen appearances was an episode of Blakes 7. When she died in 1990, Bird said of her:
“There has never been anybody like her. To say that she loved acting just would not be enough. We realised only recently when we were looking at some old clippings that newspaper banner headlines had called her London’s greatest actress.”
Bird continued to climb the stairs to his studio as long as he was able, dying in 2000.
Jackson and Bird achieved eminence in their different artistic fields and enjoyed a 53-year marriage. They deserve to be celebrated for their achievements, not just in Northampton, but wherever artistic excellence is cherished.
