1. Stapledon, R. G., ‘The Changing Countryside’, Welsh Review 111(1944), 8. Stapledon's many works, including The Land Now and Tomorrow (1935) and The Hills and Uplands of Britain: Development or Decay? (1937) underline his revulsion against the abandonment of the land in the interests of a flawed economic doctrine, and offer wide-ranging solutions to the problem of regenerating the moribund agricultural industry to conserve rural populations and landscape and environmental amenities. For an appreciation of Stapledon see,Google ScholarMoore-Colyer, R. J., ‘Sir George Stapledon (1882–1960) and the Landscape of Britain’, Environment, and History, 5 (1999), 221–236.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

2. Astor, Viscount and Rowntree, B. S., British Agriculture, The Principles of Future Policy (London 1938), p. 113Google ScholarWhetham, E. H., ‘The Agriculture Act, 1920 and its Repeal “The Great Betrayal”’, Agricultural History Review 22 (1974), 48Google ScholarCooper, A. F., ‘Another look at the “Great Betrayal”’, Agricultural History 60 (1986), 80–104.Google Scholar

3. Brown, J., Agriculture in Britain, 1870–1947 (Manchester, 1987), 83–84Google ScholarTracy, M., Government and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1880–1988 (3rd edition, 1989), 159.Google Scholar

4. Tracy, Government and Agriculture, p. 161 Rooth, T., ‘Trade Agreements and the Evolution of British Agricultural Policy in the 1930s’, Agricultural History Review, 32 (1985), 190.Google Scholar

5. For some of the means of adjustment to the new realities see, Moore-Colyer, R. J., ‘Farming in Depression: Wales between the Wars, 1919–1939’, Agricultural History Review 46:2 (1998), 177–196.Google Scholar

6. A. G. Street, very much the ‘voice’ of farming at the time, was himself forced to establish a dairy herd and thus became a despised ‘cowkeeper', a lowly member of the agricultural hierarchy. On more than one occasion he wrote of and broadcasted the fact that a Wiltshire farmer whose income derived from selling milk would hardly dare enter the same railway carriage as a lordly arable farmer!

7. Street, A. G., Hitler's Whistle (London, 1943), 293.Google Scholar

8. For the general background see Muggeridge, M., The Thirties (London, 1940) and for rural depopulationGoogle ScholarSaville, J., Rural Depopulation in England and Wales (London, 1957). In War and the Countryside, 1939–45 (London, 1988), Sadie Ward provides fascinating details of the problems confronted by urban evacuees arriving in a countryside, many areas of which lacked even basic domestic amenities, while Country Life of 19th February 1934 deals extensively with this issue. By the outbreak of World War II up to 30 per cent of the rural population of Britain had no mains water, relying on standpipes, and even water carts, while earth, bucket and chemical lavatories continued to abound.Google Scholar

9. This subject has received much attention recently. See for example, Bermingham, A. C., Landscape and Ideology: The English Rural Tradition, 1740–1860 (London, 1987) Short, B. (ed), The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis (Cambridge, 1992)Google ScholarJeans, D. N., ‘Planning and the Myth of the English Countryside in the Inter-War Period’, Rural History 1:2, 1990CrossRefGoogle ScholarMatless, D., ‘One Man's England: W. G. Hoskins and the English Culture of Landscape’, Rural History, 4:2, 1993 and Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998)CrossRefGoogle ScholarMiller, B., ‘Urban Dreams and Rural Reality: Land and Landscape in English Culture, 1920–1945’, Rural History 6:1, 1995CrossRefGoogle ScholarGruffudd, P., ‘Back to the Land, Historiography, Rurality and the Nation in Inter-War Wales’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N S 19, 1994CrossRefGoogle ScholarMandler, P., ‘Against “Englishness”: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia’, Transactions of Royal Historical Society 7:7, 1997Google ScholarMoore-Colyer, R. J., ‘From Great Wen to Toad Hall: Aspects of the Urban-Rural Divide in Inter-War Britain’, Rural History, 10:1, 1999. A German perspective if offered inCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedBergmann, Klaus, Agrarromantik und Grosstadtfeindschaft, (Marburg, 1970).Google Scholar

10. Stapledon, R. G., Disraeli and the New Age (Faber, 1943), passim. Meanwhile the geographers Cornish and Younghusband believed science to have revealed nature to be more than a mere mechanism, but essentially spiritual as well as material.Google Scholar(Matless, D., ‘Nature, The Modern and the Mystic: Tales from early Twentieth Century Geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. N S 16, 1991, 274–276).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Murray, J. M. in The Adelphi 20 (2), 1944.Google Scholar

12. Ashby, A. W., ‘The Effect of Urban Growth on the Countryside’, Sociological Review, xxxi(4), 1939, 17.Google Scholar

13. His philosophy is summarised in Reconstruction and the Land (London, 1947).

14. Farmers Glory (London, 1932) The Endless Furrow (London, 1934 Farming England (London, 1937).

15. Astor and Rowntree, p. 283.

16. Report of the Committee on Land Utilisation in Rural Areas, Cd 6378, 1942.

17. ibid., Report of the Committee on Land Utilisation in Rural Areas, Cd 6378, 1942. p. 17.

18. ibid., Report of the Committee on Land Utilisation in Rural Areas, Cd 6378, 1942. p. 121.

19. Disraeli and the New Age, p. 163. Living as he did for much of the time in Wales, Stapledon may have been influenced by his observation of Welsh farmers for whom the accumulation of high levels of profit was not the sole consideration. To them, religious observance, kinship bonds and standing in the community were of major importance and, as A. D. Rees so convincingly demonstrated, the completion of a poem or essay for the local eisteddfod was every bit as important as generating wealth. Few men would dream of bringing in hay on a Sunday regardless of the weather since, ‘loss of crops is preferable to the loss of status which would result from unfaithfulness, not only to one's God, but to the standards cherished by one's forbears’. (Rees, A. D., Life in a Welsh Countryside: A Social Study of Llanfiliangel yng Ngwynfa (Cardiff, 1950), 184).Google Scholar

20. New English Weekly, Jan 1, 1942, 93–4. The N.E.W., founded and edited by A. R. Orage until his death in 1934, was subsequently edited by Phillip Mairet. Originally devised to foster the ideals of Social Credit promulgated by C. H. Douglas, the N. E. W. became increasingly involved in the 1940s with the advocacy of organic farming, rural life, environmental affairs and issues of human health and nutrition. (Conford, P., ‘A Forum for Organic Husbandry; The New English Weekly and Agricultural Policy, 1939–1949’, Agri-cultural History Review 46(2), 197–210).Google Scholar

21. While richly deserving of one, Gardiner as yet has no biographer. Of his copious output of writings little has been published although Andrew Best's anthology, Water Springing from the Ground (Springhead, 1972) brings together a collection of extracts which provide a full favour of Gardiner's thought. Rolf Gardiner receives a good deal of attention in Wright, P., The Village that Died for England (London, 1995) while his mass of archival material located in the library of the University of Cambridge awaits detailed study. David Matless has focused upon both Gardiner and Massingham in Landscape and Englishness, while Malcolm Chase has considered details of Gardiner's life in ‘Rolf Gardiner: An Inter-War Cross Cultural Study’, inGoogle ScholarHake, B. and Marriott, S. (eds), Adult Education between Cultures (Leeds, 1992): and ‘Heartbreak Hill: Environment, Unemployment and Back-to-the-Land in Inter-War Cleveland, Oral History, Spring 2000, 28(1), 33–42.Google Scholar

22. Wessex: Letters from Springhead, Christinas, 1959.

23. The Bünde was proscribed by Hitler in 1933, yet some of its ideas were, in a warped and distorted form, incorporated in Baldur von Schirach's Hitler Youth.

24. Massingham, H. J. (ed), The Natural Order; Esssays in the Return to Husbandry (London, 1945), 137. Since polyphonic music with its complex hierarchical nature compelled obedience and subjection to form, it also tended to reflect the essentials of political order.Google Scholar

25. Gardiner, R., England Herself: Ventures in Rural Restoration (Faber, 1943), p. 126. Much of Gardiner's world view is summarised in this remarkable book. Like Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott, Balfour Gardiner had been part of the ‘ Frankfurt Group’ of English musicians whose romanticism was largely rejected by changing musical tastes after the Great War, so much so that Gardiner more-or-less abandoned music. Much of the musical and artistic endeavour at Springhead was inspired by Rolf Gardiner's wife, Marabel, herself a fine musician.Google Scholar

26. Although some participants found it all a little bit odd. Many of the miners of East Cleveland who visited Springhead could hardly take seriously the elements of nature worship, chivalry, and woodcraft any more so than the young composer Michael Tippett (Wright, p. 186). The emphasis at Springhead on the celebration of tradition, Englishness, localism, the ‘purity’ of rural values and, by implication, a rejection of urbanism finds some parallels in the popular pageants organised by Louis Napoleon Parker in the first two decades of the twentieth century. There was, however, an important distinction. While the pageants stressed the themes of continuity, deference and the power of the traditional local elite, Gardiner had little time for social distinctions which would hinder, rather than help the drive towards a new rural order (See, Woods, M, ‘Performing Power: Local Politics and the Taunton Pageant of 1928’, Journal of Historical Geography 25(1), 1999, 57–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Youth and England, 1923 in Best (1972), pp. 19–21.

28. England Herself, p. 170. Besides England Herself, World Without End (London, 1932), several volumes of poems, and essays in German and English works edited by others, Gardiner produced an enormous amount of unpublished writing in both English and German. Much of his thought is encapsulated in the privately published essays and letters under the titles North Sea and Baltic, Wessex: Letters from Springhead and The Springhead Ring News Sheets. Some material from these sources is printed by Best, the remainder is located in the Rolf Gardiner Archive in Cambridge University Library.

29. The idea of the ‘purifying’ qualities of rural life was implicit in Women's Land Army propaganda during the Great War. Urban women returning to the land would preserve the land itself, concurrently themselves becoming more robust, more physically desirable and more fitting as companions for men settling the far-flung corners of the Empire. Grayzel, S. R., ‘Nostalgia, Gender and the Countryside: Placing the “Land Girl” in First World War Britain’, Rural History, 10(23), 1999, 133–170CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedHitler, , Mein Kampf, trans Murphy, J., (London, 1939).Google Scholar

30. Lymington, (The Earl of Portsmouth), Alternative to Death (Faber 1943). It may well be that Portsmouth's friendship with T. S. Eliot, a director of Faber's, enabled him to persuade the company to publish this rather distasteful volume. Lymington had met both Hitler and Goering (of whom he was an unashamed admirer) and in his autobiography he expresses some surprise that his campaign to persuade Britain against going to war with Germany did not lead to his internment. (The Earl of Portsmouth, A Knot of Roots (London, 1965) p. 197). Stapledon, meanwhile, expressed his belief in the clear superiority of the British imperial race in Disraeli and the New Age.Google Scholar

31. Portsmouth, Knot of Roots, pp. 126–33. The ‘Array’ of course, was a male organisation. In his Famine in England (London, 1938), Lymington descants upon the differences between men and women and observes that the first duty of education is to imbue girls with an understanding of housecraft as one of the bases of husbandry. In the same volume, incidentally, he writes feelingly of excrement, proposing (quite without irony), the establishment of an Oxford Chair in the correct uses of dung.

32. Throughout much of Gardiner's life the Springhead estate was the spiritual home of the ‘Springhead Ring’, a consultative body of friends from a wide social range devoted to music, the development of Land Service camps, and the cultivation of world peace and cultural relations between England and northern Europe. Rolf and his wife Marabel's spirits live on through the Springhead Trust, established in 1973 to endorse their vision for the estate and to secure it in perpetuity as a centre for ecology, music and the arts and crafts. Rolf's son, the distinguished conductor and musicologist Sir John Elliot Gardiner, manages to combine farming the estate along organic lines with a fiendishly busy musical life. I am at present engaged in preparing a revisionist view of Rolf Gardiner who has tended to be viewed by historians as one of the leaders of a coterie of ruralists bent upon introducing a form of fascism to England.

33. I am currently preparing a critical appraisal of Massingham's work. In the early 1920s he was closely involved with the struggle against the importation of exotic plumage for ladies’ clothing. See Moore-Colyer, R. J. ‘Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds: the struggle against the Plumage Trade, 1860–1922’, Rural History, 11:1 (2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. These views inform many of his books, typically, English Downland, Batsford (London, 1936) Shepherd's Country, Chapman and Hall (London, 1938) Country Relics (Cambridge, 1939) The Tree of Life, Chapman and Hall (London, 1943) Men of Earth (Chapman and Hall, 1943) and The Faith of a Fieldsman, Museum Press (London, 1951).

35. Massingham to Gardiner, November 15th, 1940 (Cambridge University Library Rolf Gardiner MSS, J3/15). [Hereafter ‘R G MSS’]

36. Massingham to Gardiner, March 11th, 1941, R G MSS J3/15.

37. Much of it, of course, from the American ‘dust bowl’. (R. Gardiner, ‘A Kinship in Husbandry’, unpublished draft objectives; R G MSS).

38. ibid.. Much of it, of course, from the American ‘dust bowl’. (R. Gardiner, ‘A Kinship in Husbandry’, unpublished draft objectives; R G MSS).

39. ibid.. Much of it, of course, from the American ‘dust bowl’. (R. Gardiner, ‘A Kinship in Husbandry’, unpublished draft objectives; R G MSS).

40. Portsmouth, Alternative to Death, p. 11.

41. Rolf Gardiner, unpublished notes, RG MSS.

42. Portsmouth Knot of Roots, p. 82.

43. Massingham to Gardiner, March 8th, June 6th, July 7th, 1941; RG MSS J3/15.

44. Massingham to Gardiner, July 10th, 1941; R G MSS J 3/15.

45. Massingham to Gardiner, March 8th, 1941; R G MSS J3/15.

46. Blunden (1896–1974) was at the time Fellow and Tutor at Merton and would eventually become (1965–8), Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His biographer refers to the poet's friendship with Adrian Bell and Massingham (to whom he dedicated one of the Waggoner poems) although he makes no mention of the Kinship. (Webb, B., Edmund Blunden; A Biography (London, 1990), p. 124). Bryant (1899–1985) was an extraordinarily prolific populist historian whose secretary, interestingly enough, was A. G. Street's daughter, Pamela (D N B).Google Scholar

47. Bell, A., The Open Air (London, 1936), p. 13.Google Scholar

48. Mairet had been involved with the Arts and Crafts Movement in Chipping Campden in his earlier years and had acted with Lilian Bayliss in the Old Vic shortly after the Great War. Under T. S. Eliot's influence he became associated with the Christian Social Movement chaired by M. B. Reckitt. (Times obituary). Massingham's enthusiasm for Warren eventually waned as the latter showed an unhealthy interest in agricultural modernisation and mechanisation. So much so that Massingham came to condemn him to Gardiner as ‘a two-faced lackey’ (Massingham to Gardiner, August 21, 1943; RG MSS J3/15).

49. Gardiner was a regular contributor to Portsmouth's journal, The New Pioneer which managed to combine features on the condemnation of pasteurised milk and canned food within an overtly pro-German and implicitly anti-Semitic framework. Gardiner and Portsmouth were closely involved in a plan for establishing a post-war Land Settlement Scheme for Wessex based on the organic principles set out in Portsmouth's Alternative to Death.

50. Working closely with Rolf Gardiner, who had been appointed as the government's agent for flax production in the south-west, Hosking fought a rearguard action against the wartime authorities in his concern for quality against mass-produced quantity. Gardiner's crusading zeal for promulgating the idea of a regional guild of growers, spinners, and weavers producing ‘Wessex fabrics from Wessex fields’ fell foul of the bureaucracy and he was obliged to resign as government agent in 1942. (Wright, 195–6).

51. Most of these sketches are from respective obituaries in The Times. Further details appear in Matless, David, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998). In a forthcoming article dealing with Rolf Gardiner's involvement with the Council for the Church in the Countryside I will give additional information on Jenks and others in the ‘Kinship in Husbandry’.Google Scholar

52. Rolf Gardiner, draft memorandum July 1943 R G MSS J3/15. The books were Massingham's Men of Earth (Chapman and Hall), Hennell's British Craftsmen (Collins), Portsmouth's Alternative to Death, Warren's The Land is Yours (Faber) and Gardiner's England Herself.

53. A perfectly reasonable view which may have been as ancient as farming itself. Our prehistoric forbears probably made little distinction between economic and spiritual activity (See, Moore-Colyer, R. J. ‘The Horse in British Prehistory: Some Speculations’, Archaeological Journal, 151, 1995, passim).Google Scholar

54. Wessex: Letters from Springhead, Whitsun, 1964, (52). Despite the forces of dechristianisation abroad in the middle of this century, few adherents of the existing social order were prepared to contemplate the decline of the Church as a traditional source of leadership in rural areas. The middle and working classes, however, saw things differently, as evidenced by the heated debate over means of commemorating the dead of the Great War. While the elite called for plaques and crosses, the people demanded Memorial Halls and recreation facilities to be administered, free of patronage, by democratically-elected committees. (Mansfield, N., ‘Class Conflict and Village War Memorials, 1914–24’, Rural History 6, 1995, 77–78CrossRefGoogle ScholarGrieves, K., ‘Common Meeting Places and the Brightening of Rural Life: Local Debates on Village Halls in Sussex after the First World War’, Rural History 10:2, 1999, 171–192CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedBurchardt, J., ‘Reconstructing the Rural Community: Village Halls and the National Council of Social Services, 1919 to 1939’, Rural History 10:2, 1999, 193–216).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. Kinship Casebooks, 1944 RG MSS J3/15. Cobbett's railings against enclosure, his disapproval of the detachment of the gentry from the soil, and their corruption by the ‘money power’ and his suspicion of the urban commercial and manufacturing classes struck a sympathetic note with Massingham. He included a lengthy essay on Cobbett in The Wisdom of the Fields (Collins, 1945).

56. ibid., RG MSS J3/15. Cobbett's railings against enclosure, his disapproval of the detachment of the gentry from the soil, and their corruption by the ‘money power’ and his suspicion of the urban commercial and manufacturing classes struck a sympathetic note with Massingham. He included a lengthy essay on Cobbett in The Wisdom of the Fields September 16th and November 17th, 1941.

57. R. Gardiner to H. Batsford (n d), 1942 Massingham to Gardiner, February 6th, 1942 RG MSSJ3/15.

58. Massingham to Gardiner, February 6th, 1942; RG MSS J3/15.

59. University of Reading, Rural History Centre DX225 A3.

60. University of Sussex Library, Massingham to M. B. Reckitt, August 24th, 1943.

61. ibid., University of Sussex Library, Massingham to M. B. Reckitt, September 24th, 1943.

62. ibid., University of Sussex Library, Massingham to M. B. Reckitt, August 25th, 1943.

63. Gardiner was deeply hurt by this social isolation. Whatever he may have felt about Germany, he was an Englishman to his roots and was mortified when prevented from joining the Home Guard at the outbreak of the war. (I am grateful to Gardiner's daughter, Mrs. Rosalind Richards, for this information.)

64. Massingham to Gardiner, August 12th, 1943; RG MSS J3/15.

65. Gardiner to Massingham, August 1943; RG MSS J3/15.

66. Massingham to Gardiner, August 16th, 1943; RG MSS J3/15.

67. Gardiner to Massingham, August 19th, 1943; RG MSS J3/15.

68. Massingham to Gardiner, August 21st, 1943; RG MSS J3/15.

69. John Buchan has not been generally recognised as a ruralist novelist. However novels like The Thirty Nine Steps, Greenmantle, The Three Hostages, Mr Standfast, and The Island of Sheep with their intimately-observed descriptions of landscape and countryside quintessentialise the Tory view of the landscape with its opposition to urban, commercial and ‘intellectual’ values.

70. See, for example, Midmore, P., ‘Towards a Postmodern Agricultural Economies’, Journal of Agricultural Economics 47:1 1996, 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71. Both Gardiner and Massingham condemned the lack of imagination painfully apparent in much inductive scientific work. In 1942 Gardiner wrote ‘The chief malady of English intellectual life in the recent past has been the oligarchic power-lust of the minor bureaucrats of science. These irresponsible accountants of the intellect need reduction at the behest of a more comprehensive authority, just as financial accountancy needs to be more subordinated to the service of a social morality’.