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.

Early life

He was born in Fulham, London and brought up when young mostly in Berlin. He was educated at West Downs school from 1913,^[1] Rugby School, and then at Bedales School.^[2][3] He was a student at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Kibbo Kift.^[4]

Initially he was a youth leader, involved in exchanges with Germany.^[5] He was heavily influenced in the 1920s by D. H. Lawrence;^[6] he visited Lawrence in Switzerland in 1928, and has been called his first genuine "disciple".^[7]

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.^[8][9] He founded the Travelling Morrice in 1924, with Arthur Heffer, having taken a team of English dancers to Germany in 1922, and in 1923 met a few of the surviving dancers while walking in the Cotswolds with the poet Christopher Scaife.^{[10][11][12][13]} Gardiner was not, however, a founder of the Morris Ring, set up in 1934.^[14]

Landowner

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, with conifers and beech trees.^[15] Here he set up a support group, the Gore Kinship.^[16]

He married Marabel Hodgkin in 1932; she was the daughter of the Irish fabric designer Florence Hodgkin.^[17][18] In 1933 he and Marabel bought the estate at Springhead, Dorset.^[19] They developed the Springhead Ring as a crafts network, as well as farming the estate. It also hosted much musical activity.^[20] On Gardiner's death the Springhead Trust was formed.

The family owned tea-growing estates in Nyasaland (now in Thyolo District, Malawi), known as the Nchima Tea and Tung Estate, of which Gardiner became chairman.^[21] Gardiner was active in the 1950s in dealing with colonial officials, with a view to conserving the underlying land.^[22] He had written about erosion in Nyasaland and Uganda already in the 1930s, in the New English Weekly.^[23] The Estate became a Trust in 1962.^[24]

Politics of the far right

He was editor of the magazine Youth from 1923, when still a student. It had been founded in 1920, and at that point was left-leaning and supported guild socialism. In Gardiner's time it became internationally oriented and Germanophile, and his own political interests turned to Social Credit.^[25] He also published articles by John Hargrave with whom he had associated in the Kibbo Kift.^[26] After its split from the Woodcraft Folk, Kibbo Kift was in transition, en route for the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland ("Green Shirts").

It has been suggested that Gardiner moved from the ideas of guild socialism and social credit, current in the circle of A. R. Orage, towards a search for a masculine brotherhood, through his involvement in the "folk revival".^[27] His views of folk music and dance have been called "fundamentalist".^[28] In any case he took up with and formed small groups, rather than political organisations.

Gardiner later broke with Hargrave, of whom Lawrence disapproved.^[29] In 1929 Gardiner was writing with approval in the Times Literary Supplement of the Jugendbewegung (German Youth Movement) and its anti-scientific outlook.^[30] He debated the German Youth Movement in 1934 with Leslie Paul, in the pages of The Adelphi.^[31]

In a series of publications from 1928 he articulated racial theories (Baltic peoples versus Mediterranean peoples) and the need for national reversals of "impoverishment" of the stock.^[32] It has been said that he was an "ecocentric" looking for a united and pagan England and Germany, and a supporter of Nazi pro-ruralist policies.^[33] He expressed anti-Semitic views from 1933, writing first in German.^[34]

He was a member of the English Mistery, and then of the English Array, formed in 1936. Writing in the Array's Quarterly Gazette, Gardiner was an apologist for German "leadership" in Central Europe, dictatorships, and "racial regeneration".^[35] He later wrote for the periodical New Pioneer set up in December 1938 by Lord Lymington and John Beckett, as a pro-German and anti-Semitic organ.^[36]

After World War II, he kept in touch with Richard Walther Darré, an SS man and NSDAP agriculture minister of the Nazi era.^[37]

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.^[38][39]

Original members were: Adrian Bell, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Bryant, J. E. Hosking, Douglas Kennedy, Philip Mairet, Lord Northbourne, Robert Payne, C. Henry Warren.^[40][41]

The group first met in Edmund Blunden's rooms at Merton College, Oxford, in September 1941.^[42] They drew ideas from agricultural experts: Albert Howard, Robert McCarrison, George Stapledon and G. T. Wrench.^[23] Other members included Laurence Easterbrook^[23] and Jorian Jenks.^[43][44]

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.^[45] It also had an impact on the thinking of the Rural Reconstruction Association founded in 1935 by Montague Fordham, and the Biodynamic Association.^[42]

Works

• The Second Coming and Other Poems, 1919-1921 (Vienna 1921)
• Britain and Germany. A Frank Discussion instigated by Members of the Younger Generation (1928) editor with Heinz Rocholl
• World Without End: British politics and the younger generation (1932)
• England Herself: Ventures in Rural Restoration (1943)
• Water Springing from the Ground: an anthology of the writings of Rolf Gardiner (1972) editor Andrew Best

Family

His father was Alan Henderson Gardiner, the Egyptologist. His mother Hedwig, née von Rosen,^[2] was Austrian, though with a Jewish father and Swedish-Finnish mother. Margaret Gardiner, mother of Martin Bernal, was his sister.^[46]

The composer Henry Balfour Gardiner was his uncle (the folk-song collector George Barnet Gardiner, with whom Balfour Gardiner worked, was however not a relation).^[47] The conductor John Eliot Gardiner is his son.^[48]

The artist Howard Hodgkin is another grandson of Florence Hodgkin.^[49] Marabel's father was Stanley Howard Hodgkin, a first cousin of Roger Fry, through Mariabella Hodgkin who married Edward Fry.^{[50][51][52][53]}

References

External links

• Springhead Trust, Dorset