Rolf Gardiner
Henry Rolf Gardiner (5 November 1902-1971) was an English rural revivalist and sympathizer with Nazism. He was founder of groups significant in the British history of organic farming, as well being a participant in inter-war far right politics.
Life
He was born in Fulham, London and brought up when young mostly in Berlin. He was educated at West Downs school, Rugby School, and then at Bedales School.[1][2] He was a student at the St John's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Kibbo Kift.[3]
Initially he was a youth leader, involved in exchanges with Germany.[4] He was heavily influenced in the 1920s by D. H. Lawrence;[5] he visited Lawrence in Switzerland in 1928.[6] At this period he was also much concerned with English folk dance, and convinced morris dance revivalist Mary Neal that morris was an essentially masculine form.[7][8] He founded the Travelling Morrice in 1924, with Arthur Heffer.[9]
He took over Gore Farm in Dorset, bought by Henry Balfour Gardiner in 1924, from 1927, and continued what became a large-scale forestation project, based on training he had received at Dartington Hall. Here he set up a support group, the Gore Kinship.[10]
He married Marabel Hodgkin in 1932; she was the daughter of the Irish fabric designer Florence Hodgkin.[11][12] In 1933 he and Marabel bought the estate at Springhead, Dorset.[13] They developed the Springhead Ring as a crafts network, as well as farming the estate. On Gardiner's death the Springhead Trust was formed.
The family owned tea estates in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Gardiner was active in the 1950s in dealing with colonial officials, with a view to conserving the underlying land.[14]
Politics of the far right
He was a member of the English Mistery, and then the English Array, and wrote for the Array's periodical New Pioneer.
Kinship in Husbandry
In 1941 he formed with H. J. Massingham and Gerald Wallop, Lord Lymington the Kinship in Husbandry, a group of a dozen men with an interest in rural revival. It was a precursor organisation of the Soil Association, which was set up in 1946.[15][16]
Original members were: Adrian Bell, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Bryant, J. E. Hosking, Douglas Kennedy, Philip Mairet, Lord Northbourne, Robert Payne, C. Henry Warren.[17][18]
The group first met in Edmund Blunden's rooms at Merton College, Oxford, in September 1941.[19] They drew ideas from agricultural experts: Albert Howard, Robert McCarrison, George Stapledon and G. T. Wrench.[20]
Other members were:
In official eyes, this grouping or think-tank was treated with less suspicion than its correlated far-right political organisations. It had some effect on agricultural policy, particularly in relation to self-sufficiency.[23] It also had an impact on the thinking of the Rural Reconstruction Association founded in 1935 by Montague Fordham, and the Biodynamic Association.[19]
Family
His father was Alan Henderson Gardiner, the Egyptologist. His mother Hedwig, nee von Rosen,[1] was Austrian, though with a Jewish father and Swedish-Finnish mother. Margaret Gardiner, mother of Martin Bernal, was his sister.[24].
The composer Henry Balfour Gardiner was his uncle. The conductor John Eliot Gardiner is his son.[25] The artist Howard Hodgkin is another grandson of Florence Hodgkin.[26]
Marabel's father was Stanley Howard Hodgkin, a first cousin of Roger Fry, through Mariabella Hodgkin who married Edward Fry.[27][28][29][30]
Notes
- ^ a b http://www.audensociety.org/20newsletter.html
- ^ http://www.utopia-britannica.org.uk/pages/Springhead.htm
- ^ Julie V. Gottlieb, Thomas P. Linehan, The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain (2004), p. 192.
- ^ R. Moore-Colyer, A Northern Federation? Henry Rolf Gardiner and British and European Youth, Paedagogica Historica, Volume 39, Number 3, January 2003 , pp. 306-324.
- ^ http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mss/collections/dhl-resources/circle.phtml
- ^ David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence, Dying Game, 1922-1930: The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence (2004), p. 397.
- ^ http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/england.htm
- ^ http://www.kibbokift.org/who.html
- ^ http://www.answers.com/topic/morris-ring-1
- ^ Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England (2002 edition), pp. 181-2.
- ^ http://www.meg-andrews.com/showitem.php?item=6654
- ^ http://awt.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=adgedge&id=I16632&ti=5538
- ^ http://www.springheadtrust.co.uk/history.php
- ^ Colin Baker, Seeds of Trouble: Government Policy and Land Rights in Nyasaland, 1946-1964 (1993), pp. 159-160.
- ^ Richard J. Moore-Colyer, Back to basics : Rolf Gardiner, H.J. Massingham and "A kinship in husbandry". Rural History, 12:1 (2001), 85-108.
- ^ Richard Moore-Colyer and Philip Conford, A ‘Secret Society’? The Internal and External Relations of the Kinship in Husbandry, 1941–52, Rural History (2004), 15 : 189-206.
- ^ Julie V. Gottlieb, Thomas P. Linehan, The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain (2004), p. 187.
- ^ For Kennedy (1893-1988), see Michael Brocken, The British Folk Revival, 1944-2002: 1944-2002 (2003), p. 45.
- ^ a b Rolf Gardiner, English patriot and the Council for the Church and Countryside (PDF), p. 15.
- ^ a b Philip Conford, A Forum for Organic Husbandry: The New English Weekly and Agricultural Policy, 1939-1949 (PDF), p. 3.
- ^ http://www.angmeringvillage.co.uk/history/Articles/Jenks.htm
- ^ http://www.ihspress.com/jorian-jenks-18991963.php
- ^ Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (2002), p. 53.
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/jan/05/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries
- ^ http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608002389/John-Eliot-Gardiner.html
- ^ http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/howardhodgkin/chronology.htm
- ^ http://awt.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=adgedge&id=I16587&ti=5538
- ^ http://awt.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=adgedge&id=I16560&ti=5538
- ^ http://awt.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=adgedge&id=I16557&ti=5538
- ^ http://awt.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=adgedge&id=I16562&ti=5538