CHAPTER SIX: Back To The Northland
Economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-in-corner reformers of every imaginable kind ...
-- Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p.113
In the late nineteenth century rural life became linked with physical and moral welfare in the minds of many. With the First World War the belief in the regenerative power of contact with the land took on even greater force. [1] It seemed that a new era had arrived in which the whey-faced poor in their rotting slums could be re-settled in suburban villages and garden cities. All over Europe, soldiers about to be demobilized were promised smallholdings. If the evils of urban living were avoided, physical and mental health would be improved. This belief focused on the fate of urban children, the seed-bed of the new world. What had been tentative and utopian pre-1914 ideas about reform through country life now seemed a practical possibility.
The 1930s saw the full development of the group of ideas we call ecologism today. It was characterized by that global perspective which is an integral part of ecological, as opposed to environmental thought. Calls for ecological awareness, the need to live according to ecological ideas and maintain ecological balances; these became widespread among a small, inter-knit group described here as High Tory.
Environmentalism and ecologism took different paths. Ecologists called for complete social and economic change worldwide. They prophesied erosion and total soil pollution if all countries did not follow their recommendations. And like all ideologues, they claimed that unless everyone played by their rules, the game was up.
On the other hand, organised environmental protection groups in Britain went in for specific problem-solving. The Council for the Protection of Rural England was established in 1928, with an active local branch structure. The first Town and Country Planning Act was passed in 1932, largely as a result of lobbying by the Council. (The first town planning act had been in 1909, but it did not include rural planning controls. [2]) The Ramblers Association was formed in 1935, and again had a strong local structure. [3] These manifestations of environmentalism implied the belief that local government, in its Fabian guise of benevolent Platonic Guardian, was the suitable means for reform. This cast of mind was to be labelled that of the 'new Jerusalemers'. [4] But a more total and radical social criticism carne from ecologists of the time. They rejected political lobbies as irrelevant to the real problems. These were seen as loss of fertility in the soil, soil erosion, loss of resources, such as the phosphates contained in human sewage, depopulation of the countryside, pollution of water and the spread of urbanism. The solution was to restructure society, especially its trade and economy.
High Tory ecologists were anti-capitalist and opposed to laissez-faire. Many were pro-German, and remained so throughout the inter-war period. But if there had ever been a moment when anti-capitalism, eugenics, racialism and rural values could have fused into an English version of National Socialism, deep differences now showed themselves. Ecological ideas in England split into two separate styles. The more radical edge of this cultural criticism was not politicized in the 1920s. D.H. Lawrence did not stand for Parliament. In the 1930s, some of his equivalents did, but the existence of the Third Reich, and its claim to support rural values, acted both as spur and bridle. It polarised the movement into admirers and abhorrers, and, eventually, as with the Chicago school of organic biologists, disheartened and silenced it. [5]
GREEN SHIRTS
One pervasive manifestation of these Back-to-the-Land ideas in the 1920s was the growth of new scout movements, offsprings of Baden Powell's Scouts, which had been designed to teach children about the countryside and form responsible characters and leaders. The Woodcraft Folk was intended to give working-class children experience of the outdoor life. It was inspired by the Woodcraft Indians founded in America by emigre Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) - he later became Chief Scout under Baden Powell. In 1916 a Quaker, Ernest Westlake (1856- 1922) started a breakaway scout movement, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. It wanted more emphasis on forestry and less on warfare. The Order maintained links after the war with the German Youth Movement, who admired its pro-mediaeval stance. Patrick Geddes was on the committee. It founded a forest school in 1928. The Order remained small and obscure, and by 1945 had faded away.
A breakaway scout group was led by John Hargrave (1894- 1982). He too was a Quaker, but one who was profoundly concerned that urban life and the First World War had produced a mentally and physically deficient race, while the elite failed to breed sufficiently. These fears about the degenerative effects of civilization and war were most common among socialist reformers. Hargrave found the Scouts too warlike and too conservative. He developed a collection of ideas which to-day sound oddly matched. He was a pantheist who was also interested in Eastern religions, but yet believed in an Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and wanted to go back to English roots. He was a socialist and a pacifist, and also had strong eugenic beliefs. He spent two years as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, and was then invalided out, so that unlike the founder of the Woodcraft Folk, he belonged to the lost war generation.
Hargrave's mixture of folk roots and a craving for Oriental religion resembled the alternative, counter-culture developed in Germany between 1890 and 1933, as did his pacifism. Both the post-war German Youth Movement and the Kibbo Kift were inspired partly by a revulsion against war, and a desire to restructure society so that such horror could never happen again. Hargrave's books were translated into German during the 1920s, and extensively read. [6] Like Tolkien and the Scandinavian novelists, such as Selma Lagerlof, Hargrave wanted to create a national myth, a substitute folk-memory for that destroyed by those false gods laissez-faire and industrialisation.
He founded a movement which meant to do more than merely introduce children to open air life: it was to establish a counter-society, and especially a potential counter-government, in the form of the Kibbo Kift Kin. The Kin consisted of a network of leaders, regionally based. Geddes, again, was an advisor to the Kin, and so was H.G. Wells - Hargrave was apparently inspired by his 'New Samurai', and wanted the Kin to be a similar elite. [7] Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian mystic, Theosophist and poet who was received with rapture in Berlin in the 1920s, Julian Huxley, zoologist, Arctic explorer Vilhjalmar Stefansson, Havelock Ellis, and Frederick Soddy were also 'Kin'. [8] Rolf Gardiner, organic farmer and Nordic racialist, was briefly 'gleemaster'. Their annual council was called the Althing, and their uniform was a Saxon cowl and jerkin, and a Prussian army cloak.
The spiritual progenitors of the Kin were D.H. Lawrence and William Morris, but where Morris and other Nordicists were inspired by the ideal of 'Teutonic democracy', Hargrave sought a Teutonic elitism. Lawrence, through his wife, Frieda Weekley, (formerly von Richtofen) had come into contact with the 'counterculture' of the artists' colony of Ascona, where Hesse and other German intellectuals created a world of Eurythmics, pacifist Wandervogel, anarchy and green proto-Nazism. Through Lawrence's books, the distinctive German brand of serious nature-worship and sun-worship affected the English nature tradition. [9]
The presence of Tagore as patron demonstrates the 'soft' element in Hargrave's programme, and the confusing synthesis of political attitudes that existed in the 1920s where communard and idealist movements were concerned. Tagore, poet, millionaire, Nobel Prize winner in 1913, and agrarian reformer, developed village communes and agricultural schools in Bengal. He saw India's future as one of agricultural reform and supported the peasants. One of his pupil assistants, Leonard Elmhirst, the son of a Yorkshire missionary, married the radical American heiress, Dorothy Whitney Straight. They started Dartington Hall, a mixture of co-operative rural regeneration and experimental education, later a home for Communist activists, and refugees from all over Europe. It was Tagore who recommended the fertile and beautiful South Devon countryside to Elmhirst (the local Rector decided they had been sent by the Devil). [10] One of the founders of Ascona, Rudolph Laban, fled to Dartington in 1938 after managing theatres and operas under the Nazis. The circle of elite, alternative intellectuals embraced any alternative political creed. The Argentinian poetess, Victoria Ocampo, met Elmhirst and Tagore in Bengal; both become close friends with her and contributed to her journal, along with another close friend, Drieu la Rochelle. [11]
Hargrave's policies at first attracted other Quakers and cooperative socialists. However, his emphasis on Social Credit policies and Anglo-Saxon pageantry began to alienate Labour Party supporters. These dissidents began a Woodcraft Folk movement. [12] Perhaps surprisingly for a movement that is still part of today's Labour Party, the Woodcraft Folk also shared a 'Volk' feeling with the German Youth Movement. The founder, Leslie Allen Paul (1905- ) was attracted to Nietzsche, Whitman, Jefferies and Thoreau. Their constitution was called the Folk Law. Like Hargrave, Paul wanted to improve the race by eugenics as well as by healthy exercise. None of these groups had any discernible anti-semitic element, but they were certainly consciously looking for Anglo-Saxon racial roots and methods of social organisation. Hargrave's ideas were to be imposed by an elite fired by mystic communion as well as by common ideals and comradeship: the Woodcraft Folk pursued policies such as a national health service, employment protection, subsidised childbearing and better nurseries and playing fields. Both groups adopted the theory of recapitulation, as it was called, derived from Haeckel's theory that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'. The American psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, argued that the developing adolescent recapitulated the history of man. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, the primitive hunter was dominant. [13] This formative phase should be used to educate and train the adolescent youth, - we encountered this idea as a rationale behind Seton in Chapter Five.
Hargrave absorbed his Social Credit ideas from Rolf Gardiner, who was briefly a member of the Kin and a friend of D.H. Lawrence. Hargrave and Major C.H. Douglas, (1879-1952) founder of Social Credit, both wrote for Gardiner's paper, Youth. Social Credit policies were similar to G.K. Chesterton's Distributism. They opposed the payment of interest, and wanted all credit to be issued by the state. If credit were a state monopoly, like currency, deflationary collapses would be averted, and malevolent financial interests controlled. The economic theory evolved by Douglas was a variant of criticisms of Say's Law. Jean Baptiste Say thought that supply must always equal demand, because the money that went into production remained in circulation to create purchasing power. Marx had implicitly attacked this theory through his model of surplus value. Keynes was to point out that depressions could develop because in times of deflation people preferred saving to expenditure (although he did not explain what happened to money saved that prevented it going into circulation via the banking system). Douglas saw the 'leakage' of purchasing power as caused by finance capitalism. His A+B theorem became famous. This argued that wages, salaries and dividends (A) paid by one firm, would be never enough for purchasing the firm's product (B). The B was money paid elsewhere as, for example, interest charges and bank charges. The state should issue credit to make up the difference, thus providing sufficient purchasing power to keep the economy going, and providing it to the productive worker. Finance capitalism was unproductive, because under it, interest left the productive sector. International finance damaged national economies (the term multinational was not then in use: probably, Douglas would have used it). Like today's green anti-trade, anti-finance-capitalist theories, Social Credit lent itself easily to a blanket condemnation of mercantilism, greed, materialism, and exploitation, although it emphasised the value of the productive craftsman, entrepreneur and farmer. Douglas argued that as long as there was spare capacity, state-issued credit would not be inflationary. [14]
Douglas spent most of his working life as an engineer in India, South America and other non-European areas. During the First World War, he was Assistant Director of the Royal Aircraft Works at Farnborough. [15] He had the simple but unconventional folk wisdom of the outsider. His followers included the Tory, anti- Whig lobby, but also appealed to those with a puritanical dislike for unrooted money, or who had suffered financial or emotional loss from modernization. Douglas, however, was an individualist, and believed in the value of technology. In fact, he saw existing financial institutions and bankers as obstacles to technological progress, as a dead hand. Here, as with Henry Williamsom, and many inter-war fascists, was the Wellsian vision of clean, efficient, unwasteful technology, hampered by traditionalists and vested interests, yearning to be set free by sensible engineers and trained bureaucrats. [16]
Social Creditors opposed usury and the banking system, and believed in the 'just price'. Support for this creed came from farming communities in the Dominions, as well as from fundamentalist Protestant groups and right-wing Catholics. Silvio Gesell, monetary reformist, inspirer of Keynes and member of the Munich Soviet, believed in a form of Social Credit, as did Gottfried Feder, the early Nazi. Social Creditors, once won over to the blinding simplicities of the A+B theorem, perceived themselves as the good, the sane, the normal, in opposition to the destructive and malevolent creators of 'the system'. It was a short step from opposing finance capitalism to opposing what were seen as the destructive effects of exploitative, utilitarian untramelled capitalism on the physical, valued world. Social Creditors cherished conservative values.
The Kin depended on Hargrave's dynamic and inspiring leadership, but he was too much of an individualist to keep such a group together, much less expand it. His increasing belief in occult forces, his slogan that' All is Energy' came to seem more and more irrelevant after the Depression began. In fact, Hargrave merged the Kibbo Kift with a group of unemployed workers in Coventry, formed in January 1931 into a 'Legion of Unemployed', with an inner ring known - ominously - as the Iron Guard. Later, the Legion was known as the Green Shirts. The similarity of names between the Legion, the Iron Guard and Green Shirts of Rumania is striking, and can hardly be coincidental, but whether Hargrave knew of or understood the implications is uncertain. The Legion also demanded a just price, a national dividend and national credit. When the groups merged, the Kibbo Kift adopted the green shirts and dropped some of their Anglo-Saxon archaisms, while in January 1933 it changed its name to the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit. It saw itself as a populist but non-violent movement, which would reform society directly, not through parliamentary democracy. [17]
Hargrave's abilities as a propagandist and creator of pageantry kept the Green Shirts alive for a few more years. In 1935, inspired by the success of the Social Credit Party in Alberta, Canada, the Green Shirts changed their name again to the Social Credit Party of Great Britain. They put up a candidate in South Leeds who polled a respectable 11 per cent. After this Hargrave, thinking himself more powerful than he was, began to attack Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England. Major Douglas withdrew his support from the new party. It then came under the ban of the 1936 Public Order Act, which outlawed uniformed marches. Although the Social Credit Party still exists, the days of the Green Shirts were over. Like other pro-rural groups in Britain, they had suffered the constant jeers of the more fashionable intellectuals. By 1944 they were dismissed by the later notorious Tom Driberg, Socialist MP and representative of the new urban left, as a 'small, fantastic cult of nature-worshippers.' [18]
The Green Shirts saw themselves as a third factor in politics, neither communists nor fascists, neither capitalists nor socialists. Candidates stood against the British Union of Fascists; in Liverpool, Green Shirt candidates were attacked by a fascist activist after beating him in a local election. [19] Rhetoric about a Third Way was common to the radical Right and revolutionary conservatives in Europe at this time. However, the Green Shirts had an element of Quaker niceness, of world unity pacifism, that failed to attract a loyal constituency. Hargrave's book of oracular sayings has a positive and preaching tone and a vacuous and somewhat self-indulgent content. The group has been defined as occultist, or 'illuminated', in the sense of claiming a secret knowledge: although one ex-member of the Kibbo Kift Kin is quoted as fearing that it would eventually have led to a religious fascism, the group seems to have been in essence apolitical. [20] Apart from an urge to return to Saxon roots and revive the countryside, it had no policies. D.H. Lawrence's comment on Hargrave was:
I agree with him on the whole ... but he knows there's no hope ... so he's full of hate, underneath. But, for all that, on the whole, he's right. If it wasn't for his [Hargrave's] ambition and his lack of warmth, I'd go and Kibbo Kift along with him ... But by wanting to rope in all mankind it shows he wants to have his cake and eat it. [21]
'Kangaroo', the fascist leader in Lawrence's novel of that name, published in 1923, strangely parallels Hargrave. In the book Somers/Lawrence is drawn to the dictator, but rejects Kangaroo's embracing, comradely love in words similar to those used about Hargrave. Although it was not the inclusiveness but the intensity of Kangaroo's love which alienated the writer, the tone of the objection is very similar, as is the sympathy extended towards an existentialist criticism of hedonism.
'You see', he [Kangaroo] said, 'Christianity is a religion which preaches the despising of the material world. And I don't believe in that part of it ... I believe that the men with the real passion for life, for truth, for living and not for having, I feel they now must seize control of the material possessions, just to safeguard the world from all the masses who want to seize material possessions for themselves blindly, and with nothing else. The men with soul and with passionate truth in them must control the world's material riches and supplies; absolutely put possession out of the reach of the mass of mankind, and let life begin to live again, in place of this struggle for existence, or struggle for wealth.' [22]
The Kin's ideology of local cells and leadership excluded serious parliamentary efforts to gain political power, which was surely correct in a two-party system, but hardly left much lee-way for action, given the rejection of terrorism, violence or a coup (assuming for the sake of argument that these would have had any prospects of success). They were neither a special interest group nor a mass movement nor a powerful, behind-the-scenes clique. However, like the Woodcraft Folk, their hiking and camping activities inspired loyalty and comradeship. By providing a platform for 'alternative' financial ideas, and a network of luminaries who could be kept in touch with each other, the Kin possibly helped to keep alive and stimulate a belief in English rural roots. It is an interesting commentary on the differences between England and Germany that whereas in Germany such a movement only began to succeed following the Depression, in England, the Depression finished it off. Perhaps the British Union of Fascists picked up too much of its support. The Green Shirts are mentioned in police records as taking part in anti-B.U.F. marches and demonstrations, while the Woodcraft Folk occasionally supported Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Perhaps it fell between two stools: the aim of unpolitical propagation of Anglo-Saxon nationalism on the one hand, and the desire to organise a new social force on the other. A Quaker inspired by Indian Scouts, Nietzchean energistics and New Zealand Social Credit, was probably the nearest England had to a Hitler. His poems and slogans like 'All is Life. There is no Life but Life', came close to self-parody. Without an identifiable scapegoat figure, his movement was not likely to or designed to capture serious nationalist-cum-green support. Exclusivist nationalism does not work if you try to include everybody.
THE SAXON KINSHIP
The group we shall look at now consisted of more specific exponents of ecological ideas, who had an understanding of the dangers of soil erosion. They supported whole food and organic farming decades before such matters became common currency. Two of them, Rolf Gardiner and Lord Lymington, were founder members of the Council of the Soil Association in 1945. These two also wanted closer links with Germany. What was the German connection? Among Haeckel's converts was D.H. Lawrence. According to the memoirs of a childhood friend, Lawrence as a boy was influenced by Haeckel's rationalism and nature-worship, which he read in one of Haeckel's popularized scientific works, Riddle of the Universe. It may seem strange that a writer associated with an irrational creed of 'blood' should have been so inspired by an evolutionist, but Haeckel believed will and beauty played a role in descent: Lawrence later rejected the idea of determinist evolution, but this was not necessarily a reaction against Haeckel, who supported the theory of mutation through 'cell irritation' (i.e., not slow selection via survival). Certainly, one author attributed to Haeckel a major role in Lawrence's best-known works, and to the development of his cosmology, especially his combination of 'causal evolution with Nature mysticism.' [23] Lawrence was not a programmatic ecologist, as I have defined it, but his intellectual background was saturated with a mixture of nature-worship and anti-anthropomorphism. He later came into contact with the sun-worshipping colony of artists and anarchists at Ascona, mentioned above. One author goes so far as to say that the Leavises' articles in praise of Lawrence, English village life and Richard Jefferies resemble the articles published in Die Tat, Diederichs' volkisch journal. [24] (Diederichs was a neo-Conservative, nationalist German who published many young National Socialist intellectuals, such as Ferdinand Fried, Ernst von Salomon and Giselher Wirsing.) Although Lawrence profoundly influenced the pro-Nordic Gardiner, this comparison appears to me problematical. It brings out the problems of the necessarily retrospective historian. It is possible to quarry Lawrence for exciting references to race, eugenics, blood, and so on, [25]while the famous end of The Rainbow expresses an anti-urban, and indeed, anti-mankind critique that approaches nihilism.
She saw ... the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley ... a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat ... And the rainbow stood upon the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the earth's corruption were living still. [26]
Birkin's desire to see man destroyed, if only 'this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees' is preserved, has the same illiberal, anti-human force. [27] Certainly, Lawrence's intuitive but detailed perceptions of landscape, and the people embedded in that landscape, have the total nature defined earlier as essential to the ecological package-deal and appear to resemble the language of proto-Nazis. However, the apolitical quality of Lawrence's vision, the puritan individual morality, his refusal to engage in domination or submission, removes his work from the world of political radicals and reformers. Ecologists wish to avert apocalypse. Lawrence did not.
Lawrence, though, was a powerful influence on the ideas and style of Rolf Gardiner (1902-1972). As Gardiner was an early ecologist, this is an example of continuity of ideas, but also of their mutation. Gardiner's active political career began early. He was born in London into a wealthy trading West Country family, which had estates in Malawi, and a family business in London. His father was an Egyptologist. His mother was half Swedish and half Austro-Hungarian Jewish. [28] He became a Guild Socialist while at Cambridge, where in 1923 he began to edit a magazine, Youth, to which he brought a strong leaning towards the German Youth Movement and Social Credit, and in which he attacked the philosophy of the Bloomsbury Group and Keynes. He was founder of the Cambridge Social Credit Study Circle. He was a founder member of the Soil Association, and member of its Council. Well after the Second World War, he was still active in promoting organic farming, and was engaged in a vigorous correspondence about Ronald Blythe's Akenfield in the Observer in 1969. [29] He later criticized his involvement in the Kibbo Kift, which he dismissed as 'mummery', a mixture of 'political idealism' borrowed from H.G. Wells and Major C.H. Douglas. [30]
Like several pro-Germanist ecologists between the wars, Gardiner leads a strange sort of double life in literature about the twentieth century. Readers of Griffith's Fellow Travellers of the Right will have come across him as a fervent supporter of Nazi rural policies and paganism, but those interested in ecology will have found warm-hearted support of Gardiner from John Stewart Collis, in The Worm Forgives the Plough, a description of his wartime experiences working on the land which includes admiring references to Gardiner as an employer and dedicated ecologist. Embarrassed academics still recall Gardiner - who loved music - singing a song to the corn spirit when his daughter married an Oxford don, but an expert on the nature tradition in English literature found Gardiner's contributions 'impressive'. [31] He was High Sheriff of Dorset between 1967 and 1968, while giving lectures to the Radionic Association. He bought an estate in Dorset in the 1920s and farmed it organically. He planned to start a rural university there. His children did not take up country life. However, the estate, Springhead, at Fontmell Magna, survives as a centre for rural studies and organic farming.
Gardiner's first work was a booklet, privately published in London, and published in Dresden by a German journal, Die Hellerau Blatter. It was written while he was still an undergraduate, after he took a folk-dancing troop to Germany in 1922. It described his love of folk-dancing and the spiritual importance it had for him. At a time when Morris dancing is seen as a precious folksy idea, tied up with every kind of absurdity, too stale to be a funny joke even in the days of the Ealing comedies, it is hard to realise the electric excitement that underlay the discovery of English folklore, music and dancing before the First World War. The movement soon split, with the English Folk Dance Society attacked by the more militant, for being fuddy-duddy. 'It has become respectable, and respectability in England is the death warrant of any vital enterprise ... and individual enterprise is the hall-mark of life, of creativeness.' [32] Gardiner's account restores some of the thrill of discovery and new meaning: it is not concerned so much with anthropology or the Folk as with a philosophy of life. He draws from the living dance lessons on man's attitude to nature, to the soil, to sex and to politics. His emphasis on life and creativity, on harmony and balance, included the suggestion that Folk Dance could bring back to us 'a liberty, a harmony of existence, for lack of which we are now most brutally suffering'. [33] He attacked 'the black soul of a selfish individualism' in favour of the 'naturalness, communality, and freedom' of the folk dance. [34] He yearns for a self-forgetfulness that will take the bearer above himself. 'The sword dance ... above all an emotional unity, [it] set in voltaic commotion every electron in the souls and bodies of the dancers, till they are consumed ... by one blind, electric, purging flame of ecstacy, an exaltation, a cathartic frenzy, ... ' [35]
He stressed the joy of fusion again in the Morris dance, the surging, electric fluid ... fusing the whole six of you ... yet at the same time each individual dancer is himself, distinct, apart.' [36] Dance and song as a purgative, regenerative mixture was, again, an Asconan cult. Rudolph Laban's mistress invented eurythmics at Ascona. The American Martha Graham and the Communist Margaret Barr were to pursue it at Dartington Hall. Gardiner's longing for a patterned communality might have led him to Marxist Socialism or the Christianity of C.S. Lewis, but the pull of the land was to be a stronger influence, towards dreams of a united and pagan England and Germany. In a later article, 'Meditations on the Future of Northern Europe', he wrote of man's need to search for 'the country of his heart, that place or region where he can ultimately take root and bear fruit like a tree, and which for him becomes symbolic of the unseen home whence he is sprung, and whither he will return.' [37] He produced that apparently omnipresent demand among right-wing rejecters of capitalism, a 'third way'.
The Christianisation of Europe has been the spirit-urge, the Christian urge, which in its later stages becomes the urge of Science ... The moot point is, whether human beings are going to reverse direction and switch back to the old, unconscious way of living, the way of peasants, of savages, or evolve a third way of life, a sort of synthesis of consciousness and unconsciousness, a living not from the blood nor from the intellect, but from some principle more central and more eternal than either. [38]
Describing the power of nature's laws, he wrote,
We live on a plane whose life marches to one dominant rhythm. Setting aside all disparities, we can discern a law governing our earth-existence, cyclical recurrence ... life ... ebbing and flowing in mysterious processes of contraction and expansion; even the human heart has its systole and diastole. [39]
The Lawrencian influence is obvious here, and Lawrencian ideas ran through Gardiner's semi-religious work, World Without End (London, 1932), which began, interestingly enough, with an epitaph from Kangaroo, and a dedication to Lawrence for freeing Gardiner and his generation from 'dead tradition'. This work attacked party politics, and the attempts to escape existing party structures which Gardiner called 'New Partyism'. He opposed this along with European fascist parties, as 'middle-class attempts at restoring male power, common, vulgar, mean, urban ... ' the 'pathetic attempt by suburbia to re-establish itself in the soil'. [40] The spirit of the age was so strong that one could escape it only by personal spiritual re-birth, a theme that was taken up recently by Rudolf Bahro, the German 'fundamentalist' Green, who saw any compromise with politics as damaging the ecological cause. Gardiner was to quote Lawrence again in 1943:
'We must plant ourselves again in the universe.' This, verily, is the need of a human race impoverished by abstraction, and living more and more like the machines it has invented. Here is our whole programme, the discipline of organic relationships and organic growth. The study of ecology, in this extended sense, now becomes our most imperative science. [41]
Lawrence had written to Gardiner in 1928 praising the more 'physical' German youth, and the creed of 'song, dance and labour'. [42]
Gardiner emphasised the organic metaphor: 'But it [living according to an ecological law] means the subjection of ourselves and our tools to a larger organic authority, the authority of the Natural Order, which is based on rhythmic laws.' [43] In this wartime book, Gardiner produced plans for a Back-to-the-Land programme, and farmers' co-operatives. He quoted from Richard Jefferies and Rudolf Steiner on the need to replenish a debilitated soil with decayed organic matter. 'The life-quality or vital essence of plants and animals are all important for the well-being of men.' [44]
Gardiner's pro-German politics continued alongside his interest in nature and organic farming. In 1928, he was co-editor of a symposium, Britain and Germany, published as Ein Neuer Weg, (A New Way Forward) in Germany by a Youth Movement publisher, the Bund der Wandervogel und Pfadfinder. It included a calendar of Youth Movement activities between 1922 and 1928, as well as discussions of Anglo-German relationships. Gardiner claimed a non-political and independent stance for the book, but he called for 'a new union of Celtic-Germanic peoples, from the Adriatic to the Arctic, the Vistula to the Atlantic.' [45] In World Without End he talked again of a Baltic union, of an England joined to Prussia, but not, at any cost, to places influenced by Latin culture, like Heidelberg and Munich. [46] Anyone who yearned for past imperial glories or the White Dominions, he continued, should realise that Europe was Britain's destiny. [47] This was an unusual stance, especially among conservatives, in a time when the Empire dominated British politics.
Essays in the 1928 symposium described a visit to Northumberland by German student groups from Hanover and Brandenburg; the programme included sing-songs and talks on 'The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry'. [48] Erich Obst wrote about the British character. He was Professor of geo-politics at Hanover, and Herbert Backe, responsible for German agriculture between 1942and 1945, studied under him in the 1920s. Kingsley Martin, later the pro-Soviet editor of the New Statesman, also contributed an essay. Gardiner rejected 'any nonsensical racial theory, such as a dogmatic belief in the 'Nordic Race' ... We restrict things to Northern Europe and a common Germanic sympathy ... the practical and spiritual possibilities are here, and not elsewhere.' [49] Despite this disavowal, Gardiner was enthusiastic about the Nazi takeover early in 1933.
A selection of Gardiner's writings published by the Springhead estate lists his tours and visits abroad with folk dancers and choirs, but omits any reference to Gardiner's visits to Walther Darre, or any mention of pro-German sympathies. Yet these were not accidental ornaments to his beliefs, but fundamental to them.
Gardiner became attached to the circle around Lord Lymington, later the Earl of Portsmouth, who, like Gardiner, visited Walther Darre, Nazi Minister for Agriculture, in the 1930s, although it was Gardiner who was Darre's house guest. (In 1943, he broadcast a kind of recantation of his acquaintance with Darre on the BBC, arguing that Darre's ideals had been betrayed by the Nazi Party.) Wyoming-born aristocrat and land-owner, Gerard Lymington was an Anglo-Saxon nationalist, although his inspiration was less recondite than that of Hargrave. In 1930, he became leader of a group formed to revive English customs and provide a network of similar-minded sympathisers, the English Mistery. He went on to form a similar but more activist group called the English Array in 1936 which, while it opposed war with Germany, also opposed disarmament. They held meetings at Gerard Lymington's country home, and, up to 1938, concentrated on soil fertility, erosion and pollution. [50] The Array was formed mainly from landowners and ex-army officers, - it included Reginald Dorman-Smith, Minister of Agriculture in 1939, and later to be Governor of Burma. Membership was especially strong in East Anglia.
In 1938, Gardiner became a contributor to a new journal called The New Pioneer, a magazine edited by Lymington and Beckett, ex-member of the National Socialist League. Members of the League believed that Mosley was in the pay of international financial interests and that the B.U.F. was too soft on the Jews. They wanted to rouse the masses to overthrow democracy. Unlike Mosley, who supported Mussolini, but believed in gaining power through Parliament, Beckett and his ally, William Joyce (later 'Lord Haw-Haw') were radical Nationalists. They had been members of the National Socialist League. Beckett resigned before joining Lymington. They were disillusioned with Mosley, who had expelled them from the British Union of Fascists, and were opposed to the foreign nature of fascism and its foreign funding. Presumably a pro-German sympathy was the link between these men - too extreme for Mosley - and the High Tory nationalists, two groups who were widely separated by education, class and style. Beckett had originally been an Independent Labour Party M.P., and shared a real socialist commitment with William Joyce. He does not seem to have had much influence on the New Pioneer. Contributors included A.K. Chesterton, who had recently resigned from the B.U.F., Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, the expert on tanks and other advanced military tactics, and various anti-war and B.U.F. supporters. However, Gardiner dominated the journal, which devoted much of its space to calls for a Back-to-the-Land programme.
In its attitude to Germany the journal took a fairly moderate tone at first and then became more strident. [51] However, its emphasis on healthy soil, healthy food and rural regeneration was constant. Although the existence of Nazi Germany's peasant ideology must have been known to the contributors, no overt link was made in the articles. Lymington himself had written Famine in England in 1938. It prophesied a future of soil erosion and degradation in an England unable to feed herself, or to buy in food. It aroused considerable interest, and led to the formation of his group Kinship in Husbandry. The Kinship included many organic farmers, followers of Steiner's bio-dynamic agricultural method, grass experts, seed-breeders and nutritional experts.
Nearly all the issues of New Pioneer dealt with these and similar ecological questions. In May 1939, the work of Seebohm Rowntree and Viscount Astor, who had written a typical Fabian tract on agricultural economics which opposed smallholdings as outdated and inefficient, was attacked for not mentioning humus. The edition of June 1939 talked about soil erosion and the need for land reform, which would allow 'responsible initiative in peasant ownership', while 'controlling the land in the interests of the nation'. [52] The issue of July, 1939 drew an analogy between farm and nation: 'like a farm, a country should be one organic whole', and talked about the deleterious environmental effects of imported food. [53] The New Pioneer was agriculturally nationalist. It called for more resources for British farmers. It complained that ten million pounds was given to re-settle Czech refugees, but that nothing was given to compensate Hampshire smallholders when their crops were ruined by storms. [58] There was a strong Fosterian note in this:
The New Pioneer is the man who faces inwards. His is not the new world to conquer, but the old world to redeem ... His are not the illimitable lands, forever beckoning, but his to find the pass across the lost horizon of our own purpose. Earth's perimeters will go to other races unless we are reborn at home. [40] Redemption ... will come by fanning the spark of flourishing life that survives in ourselves. [55]
England had to
Restore Health, which means wholeness to our people. Therefore health must be both physical and moral. For health and security we are concerned with the care and development of our soil. Without a healthy and productive soil we cannot have physical health, we cannot have economic security and we cannot have the sense of reality and real values that will give us spiritual health. [56]
Haeckel's teaching affected the English 'Youth Movement' in one specific way that seemed to contradict its strong racial element. His theory that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny, that the child growing in the womb recapitulated all the stages of evolution, inspired positive, environmental health and education measures. It helped support a strong belief in the value of environmental improvement, especially pre-natal treatment. This interest, which had led to the formation of experimental preventative and total health groups such as the Peckham experimental 'Pioneer Health Centre', was part of the New Pioneer ethos; indeed, the founders of the Peckham experiment took part in Kinship in Husbandry meetings. [57] Recommendations for good pre-natal feeding included food grown in healthy soil, wholemeal bread, eggs and vegetables. Articles contrasted 'The England of to-day as symbolised by the mass-produced tins of the centralised milk factory; and the England we wish to see symbolised by the pigs bred in the cottage garden ... and the manure from the pigs returning to enrich the soil', while the erosion fears of the period were emphasised. [58] The fundamental history of civilisation was, they argued, the history of the soil. The collapse of civilisations was due to the soil becoming desert when cities 'forget the soil on which they fed'. 'Man, being an animal,' was 'bound to the soil'. The city-dweller, cut off 'from one side of his cosmic nature', lost wisdom. The decline of Rome was a favourite example. [59]
Erosion was a major issue for the ecologists of the 1930s. One of the first uses of the word in its normative sense was in a geographical survey of soil erosion world-wide, with particular reference to North America, The Rape of the Earth (1939). This influential work discussed the need for an ecological equilibrium which was further defined as the' ecological balance of the original flora and fauna.' [60] It was wrong for man to upset the equilibrium of animal ecology, while land reclamation by ecological methods, that is, enclosing and leaving alone, was the cure. Price support and price controls for agriculture, social security, action to prevent rural unemployment, were also part of the programme. But the emphasis remained on a healthy, organically nourished soil. The cycle of nutrients, from soil to vegetables to animal to soil, was seen as a wholeness we had lost, a chain whose most important link had been broken. Books by Dr G.T. Wrench received a sympathetic hearing in the New Pioneer, which shows, again, the emphasis on environmental rather than eugenic influences. Wrench argued that 'a mother of C3 class, if undiseased herself, may ensure a A1 baby', while the discovery of untouched Indian tribes in remote valleys had led to investigations to discover the causes of their superior teeth, health and longevity. [61] Indian village compost- making, the re-cycling of rotted animal and human wastes was the cause. Stone ground wheat meant that the whole grain, with all its nutrients, was ingested, and European rats were compared unfavourably by this writer with Indian rats which ate organic breadcrumbs. 'One feels that the [European] rat would sooner sit and work at a bench or at a desk than make his muscles glow with hard work upon the field.' [62]
Lord Lymington, in his autobiography A Knot of Roots, claimed that 'by 1928, I was probing into the problems of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and leaping by instinct rather than knowledge towards some of her 1962 conclusions'. [63] During a visit to Germany in 1931, he visited one of the Kaiser Wilhelm agricultural stations. He was impressed by their phylloxera-free vines, sweet lupin for cattle fodder, and early ripening maize, but found that the only common language for discussion was Latin. Lymington knew Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, one of Rudolf Steiner's early agricultural lieutenants, and possibly acquired some of this ecological awareness from him. Although Pfeiffer's book on biodynamic farming was not translated into English until 1938, he ran two bio-dynamic farms in Wa1cheren, Holland, and Lymington went there each year from 1935 to 1939, once with Sir Albert Howard. [64]
The interlocking circles around Gardiner and Lymington spanned British National Socialists, men with ugly hair cuts and razor-scarred faces, researchers and experimenters like Sir George Stapledon, the grass breeding specialist at Aberystwyth, who helped form the revolution in farm productivity after the Second World War, and Sir Albert Howard, who ran an agricultural research institute in India. They included the pro-German writers described by Griffiths, such as Edmund Blunden, who typified the intellectual middle-class love affair with Germany, and who, when war broke out, expressed the sneaking desire to one of his pupils at Oxford that Goering might become Protector of England, because he would restore blacksmiths to every village. [65] There were country gentry who wanted peace with Germany, and rowdy baronets. The poet and playwright Ronald Duncan was another close friend of Lymington and Gardiner, as was Arthur Bryant, the historian.
Lymington entertained and corresponded with believers in wholeness, health and preventative medicine such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, author of a history of art and nature in India, China and mediaeval Europe. The Lymington circle included Dr Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute. Carrel, of French origin, was a Nobel Prize winner who specialised in tissue transplants. His book, Man the Unknown, stressed the need for a holistic medicine, for seeing the human organism as a whole. Lymington believed that Carrel had lost his Rockefeller laboratory through his holistic message, but his Rockefeller file shows, apparently, that he retired to Vichy France and had an institute there. He died in 1944. Lymington was a Conservative M.P. between 1929 and 1934, and was part of a Young Tory group in 1930, based on himself, R.A. Butler, Harold Balfour and Michael Beaumont. [66] He resigned in 1934 over British agricultural policy, and admitted he was lucky not to be interned under Regulation 18B during the war, as happened to various members of the B.U.F. and the Anglo-German Fellowship. He became head of a local agricultural war board. The post-war welfare state and its grey atmosphere did not suit this extraordinary patriot and adventurer, and in 1950 he emigrated to Kenya.
Lymington also contributed to the Anglo-German Review. This was not concerned with rural problems or ecology, although there was one article on the German agricultural settlement programme, 'Escape from the Slums', which praised the cottage and allotment schemes. [67] Lymington supported a benevolent dictatorship and a united Europe; he appreciated the freemasonry of international aristocracy that he found on his visits abroad.