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‘Somewhere Quite Different’: The Seventies Generation of Organic Activists and their Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

PHILIP CONFORD
PHILIP CONFORD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 6AA, UK; 88 St Pancras, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 7LR.
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Abstract

This paper takes as its starting-point different perspectives on the organic movement's history since the 1940s. It identifies the polarised views of those who see a linear continuity in its development and of others who claim that a new generation of ‘counter-urbanites’ in the 1970s introduced an entirely distinct element. Drawing on recorded interviews with several of the leading figures in the seventies generation, the article argues that this generation was not as independent of its forebears as some of its members have claimed. It also throws light on the experiences of those who were inspired by the ‘self-sufficiency’ philosophy of John Seymour. The Steinerian Bio-Dynamic movement is identified as an important thread of continuity, as is the role played by two long-lived organic farmers, Dinah Williams and Mary Langman. While the seventies generation indeed affected the organic movement's direction from the 1970s onward, particularly through the Organic Growers Association, the case for a complete disjunction between different phases of organic history remains inadequate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , October 2008 , pp. 217 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

Notes

1. Tracey Clunies-Ross, ‘Agricultural Change and the Politics of Organic Farming’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bath, 1990), pp. 144, 169–70.

2. David Frost and Carolyn Wacher, ‘A New Incarnation – The Role of the Organic Growers Association in Changing the Production and Marketing of Organic Produce’, Organic-Research.com (January 2004), 5N, 7N. The ‘other scholars’ are Professor Richard Moore-Colyer and the sociologist Matthew Reed. Conford, Philip, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 211Google Scholar.

3. Frost and Wacher, ‘New Incarnation’, 5N. Clunies-Ross, ‘Agricultural Change’, p. 144; Interview with Angela Bates, North Witham, 3rd March 2007.

4. Frost and Wacher, ‘New Incarnation’, 9N.

5. Interview with Riccardo Ling, Sydenham, 28th March 2006.

6. Interview with Patrick Holden, Bristol, 26th April 2006.

7. Interview with Peter Segger, Cilcennin, 9th June 2005. Segger described his early experiences in West Wales in an article for the bio-dynamic journal Star and Furrow 50, 23–26.

8. Interview with Carolyn Wacher, Aberystwyth, 10th June 2005.

9. Interview with David Frost, Llanrhystud, 9th June 2005.

10. Interview with Dr. Nic Lampkin, Aberystwyth, 10th June 2005; interview with Rachel Rowlands, Borth, 7th June 2005. The topic of the organic movement's attitude to orthodox science requires a lengthy study in its own right.

11. Part of Tolhurst's response to the questionnaire sent to growers by Frost and Wacher for their article ‘New Incarnation’; copy provided for author by Carolyn Wacher.

12. Tolhurst, response to questionnaire. Peter Segger, ‘A Healthy Revolution’, OGA Newsletter 2 (April 1981), 1.

13. Interview with Sue Coppard, Bradford-on-Avon, 25th April 2006; ‘Organic Farmers of Tomorrow’, Span 55 (November 1971), 8.

14. Pamphlet, ‘A Brief History of WWoOF’ (April 1990).

15. Interview with Alan and Jackie Gear, Snettisham, 10th October 2006.

16. Alan and Jackie Gear, 10th October 2006. On Hills, see Hills, Lawrence D., Fighting Like the Flowers (Hartland, 1990)Google Scholar.

17. Interview with Lawrence Woodward, Hamstead Marshall, 28th July 2006.

18. Interview with Craig Sams, Hastings, 19th July 2005; Sams, Craig, ‘Case History: Green & Black's’ in Wright, Simon and McCrea, Diane (eds), The Handbook of Organic and Fair Trade Food Marketing (Oxford, 2007), p. 109Google Scholar.

19. Interviews with Craig Sams, Hastings, 19th July 2005, and Gregory Sams, London, 4th November 2005.

20. Interview with Dr. Anthony Deavin, Epsom, 6th April 2005.

21. Coward had been a member of Viscount Lymington's far-Right society the English Array, was a leading figure in the Soil Association's Wessex Group, and in 1989 was the subject of a television documentary directed by Joanna Barlow, daughter of another organic veteran, Dr. Kenneth Barlow. Dick Kitto was an expert on composting techniques. Commander Robert L. Stuart had farmed and gardened organically since the 1940s, and in the 1960s and 1970s ran Soil Association Weeks at his home at Chirnside, on the Scottish Borders. These conferences featured some of the most distinguished organic personalities, such as the agriculturalist Professor R. Lindsay Robb. Working Weekends on Organic Farms newsletter March 1974 [Coward]; May 1977 [Kitto] 4; August/September 1978 [Stuart] 5. Sykes's Humus and the Farmer (1946) and Massingham's The Small Farmer (1947) were recommended in the January 1975 issue, 6. In the summer of 1979 an International Organic Assembly was held at Malvern Wells, featuring ‘two crusty (and amazing) old crowd-pullers’, Lawrence Hills and Richard St. Barbe Baker: newsletter June-July 1979, 4.

22. On Mairet, see Conford, Origins, 164–74 and 191–94. On John Seymour see Peacock, Paul, A Good Life: John Seymour and His Self-Sufficiency Legacy (Preston, 2005)Google Scholar.

23. Interviews with Dinah Williams, Borth, 7th to 8th June 2005.

24. Interview with Mary Langman, North Cadbury, 28th June 2000; interview with Patrick Holden, Bristol, 26th April 2006. Some of Langman's correspondence relating to the Soil Association's inner conflicts is held in the Association's archives.

25. Interview with Julian Rose, Pangbourne, 2nd June 2000; interview with Richard Young, Broadway, 27th April 2005. Barlow, Kenneth and Bunyard, Peter (eds), Soil, Food and Health in a Changing World (Berkhamsted, 1981)Google Scholar. Yellowlees, Walter, A Doctor in the Wilderness (Aberfeldy, 2001)Google Scholar.

26. OGA Newsletter 6 (July 1982), 2. Segger, interview, 9th June 2005.

27. Holden, interview, 26th April 2006.

28. Deavin, interview, 6th April 2005.

29. Clunies-Ross, ‘Agricultural Change’, p. 170.

30. Ibid., p. 121.

31. Frost and Wacher, ‘New Incarnation’, 9N. Interview with Massingham's widow Penelope, Long Crendon, 12th August 1998. On Massingham, see Nicholas Gould, ‘A Eulogist of Traditional Husbandry’, Ecologist, May 1976, pp.128–31, and Moore-Colyer, R. J., ‘Back to Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H. J. Massingham and “A Kinship in Husbandry”’, Rural History 12:1 (2001), 85–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Interview with Roger Newman Turner, Letchworth, 17th July 2006; Angela Bates, interview, 3rd March 2007; interview with David Stickland, Swaffham, 8th November 2007.

33. Frost and Wacher, ‘New Incarnation’, 11N.

34. Frost and Wacher, ‘New Incarnation’, 9N. On the significance of Purpose, the New English Weekly and Dmitri Mitrinovic for the early organic movement see Conford, Origins, pp. 169–70, 174–89 and 166–68. Durrell, Lawrence and Miller, Henry, A Private Correspondence (London, 1963), pp. 30–31Google Scholar; Perles, Alfred, ‘Goethe – A Letter to Henry Miller’, Purpose 11:1 (January–March 1939), 17–25Google Scholar. Miller refers to W. T. Symons, editor of Purpose and one of the editorial board of the New English Weekly, as a friend who supplied him with books, in The Books in My Life (London, 1952), 323. For the influence of Mitrinovic on Alan Watts see his autobiography, In My Own Way (London, 1973), pp. 109–13. Faber published two books by the American environmentalist Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (1948) and The Limits of the Earth (1954), in the latter of which titles we might perceive a pre-echo of the environmentalist work of the early 1970s, The Limits to Growth. Faber also published Ill Fares the Land (1945) by Carey McWilliams, a study of the destructive effects of agribusiness techniques on agricultural workers and the soil. Environmentalist concerns existed years before the publication of Silent Spring and the emergence of the counter-culture. On Rodale, see Jackson, Carlton, J. I. Rodale: Apostle of Nonconformity (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; see also the Rodale Press publication, The Basic Book of Organically Grown Foods (New York, 1973): ‘a hope for the future quality of life’, as its back cover puts it, a book which pays tribute to the influence of Howard and McCarrison.