This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Brian Blessed has stunned BBC Radio 4 listeners after claiming he delivered a baby girl in a park, biting through the umbilical cord and licking her face clean.

The Flash Gordon actor, 78, claimed to an astounded Libby Purves on the station’s Midweek programme on Wednesday that he had come across a woman giving birth alone in a south London park and decided to pitch in.

The discussion came up during a segment on “restful” births with midwife Mark Harris, another of Purves’s guests who founded Birthing for Blokes, a support group for men whose partners are pregnant.

Blessed claimed the incident happened in 1963 when he was starring in the BBC drama Z-Cars. “I was running all over Richmond Park and a woman was having a baby under a tree and there was nobody around,” he claimed.



“I had been brought up with babies; a kind of working class background helping with babies. I rushed across to her, she’d got her legs open,” he described, adding that the woman had immediately recognised him from the TV programme. “I said ‘breathe deeply’ and gradually I got the baby out.”

An incredulous Purves asked: “You delivered a baby in a park?”

“Yes, I delivered a baby in Richmond Park,” Blessed said. “The afterbirth came out, and the clots. I pressed her belly and got rid of the clots, and the afterbirth came out.

“Then I bit it loose and tied it into a knot, and then I just called for help and eventually an ambulance came. I was covered in blood, my shirt was covered in blood, I was wrapping and wiping her saying ‘it’s all right darling,’ and I was licking the baby’s face.”

Purves pressed further: “Brian, am I believing this?”

“It’s absolutely true,” the actor replied. “I’ve just never talked about it.”

“If it’s true, I can think of few less restful things than having Brian Blessed attend my birth in a park, but there you go.”



In another bizarre anecdote, Blessed insisted he could remember his own birth. “It sounds ridiculous but I remember being born,” he said. “I was in ice and boulders and burst through it, felt this tremendous pressure and then suddenly found myself being born and immediately saw my mother and father.”