Abstract
In February 1942, T. S. Eliot wrote in his capacity as editor at Faber and Faber to Viscount Lymington, praising the drafts of his forthcoming book Alternative to Death: ‘I was rather pleased, incidentally, to find your suggesting something that has occurred to me independently, which is that a real aristocracy can only be founded or revived on a relationship between right social organisation and values and the land.’2 Although we know that Eliot was no progressive thinker, it would also not do to label him a fascist, as though that dealt with the matter. What was it that Eliot saw in Lymington’s back-to-the-land ideas? And why were these ideas the clearest expression of Lymington’s own far right ideology, an ideology that was manifested in his running of the English Array (earlier the English Mistery) and his bankrolling of the British Council Against European Commitments? What were the connections before 1939 — and for some, as we will see, even after — between aristocracy, agricultural reform, the landscape, racism and ‘national revival’?
Now to set one’s face against this deeply implanted bias, to invite modern men, and particularly modern women, in the teeth of their morbid sentimentality, to change their attitude and to honour and look up to the sound, to protect the sound from extermination by the unsound, and to resist their being sacrificed for the latter — in fact, to assume towards humanity the very attitude which, to a farmer contemplating his animals and his crops is a commonplace of good husbandry, is to-day one of the most difficult and precarious of undertakings, particularly for the head of a State. Anthony M. Ludovici
The movement back to nature proves itself contrary to nature a thousand times over, because development is part of nature and turning back is against nature. Victor Klemperer1
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Notes
A. M. Ludovici, ‘Hitler and the Third Reich’, part III, English Review, 63 (1936) 234;
V. Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933–1941, trans. M. Chalmers (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 355, entry for 10 January 1939.
Viscount Lymington, ‘Folly or Fertility: An Essay on Agriculture and National Independence’, English Review, 64 (1937) 428, 421, 429.
U. Linke, German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 15. See also, on the notion of ‘organic purity’
S. Straus, ‘Organic Purity and the Role of Anthropology in Rwanda and Cambodia’, Patterns of Prejudice, 35, 2 (2001) 47–62.
H. P. Greenwood, The German Revolution (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1934), p. 11.
See R. Griffiths, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Fascism (London: Duckworth, 2000).
Viscount Lymington, ‘Hammer and Sickle’, English Review, 57 (1933) 185.
See D. Mellor, ed., A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935–55 (London, 1987);
F. Trentmann, ‘Civilization and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994) 583–625.
But see also the work of P. Mandler: ‘Against “Englishness”: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 7 (1997) 155–75;
P. Mandler ‘The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English National Character, 1870–1940’, in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, eds. M. Daunton and B. Riegner (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 119–44.
H. G. Wells, ‘Developing Social Elements’, in The Works of H. G. Wells: The Atlantic Edition, vol. IX: Anticipations and Other Papers (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924 [orig. 1902]), pp. 82–3.
J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
R. G. Stapledon, The Land Now and To-morrow (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), p. vii.
G. Stapledon, ‘Agriculture and the Countryside’, in The Way of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), p. 92 (originally delivered as a lecture to the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, Chester, 14 October 1938).
L. J. Picton, ‘Diet and Farming’, in England and the Farmer: A Symposium, ed. H. J. Massingham (London: B. T. Batsford, 1941), p. 111.
For more on Kinship in Husbandry, see D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), pp. 104ff;
P. Conford, ‘A Forum for Organic Husbandry: The New English Weekly and Agricultural Policy, 1939–1949’, Agricultural History Review, 46, 2 (1998) 197–210;
and, for a more appreciative view, R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Back to Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H. J. Massingham and “A Kinship in Husbandry”’, Rural History, 12 (2001) 85–108. The fact that most of these men cannot unproblematically be called ‘fascists’ (Bell especially) suggests the validity of Griffiths’s argument (see note 7 above).
T. H. Sanderson-Wells, Sun Diet, or Live Food for Live Britons (London: John Bale, 1939).
See also P. Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2001), pp. 136–7. As Conford notes (p. 138), the views of writers such as Sanderson-Wells and Carrell show how ‘an organic interpretation of human life, conflating the biological with the spiritual, leads to a totalitarian model of the state’.
E. B. Balfour, The Living Soil: Evidence of the Importance to Human Health of Soil Vitality, with Special Reference to Post-War Planning (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), p. 13.
Cf. ibid., p. 17; Lord Northbourne, Look to the Land (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1940). Although the Soil Association has been effectively purged of fascist affiliations, it still has a tendency to promote some rather ‘mystical’ books on the land. See the books for sale at its web-site: www.soilassociation.org.
H. J. Massingham, ‘Introduction’ to English Country: Fifteen Essays by Various Authors (London: Wishart & Co., 1934), p. ix.
Viscount Lymington, Horn, Hoof and Corn: The Future of British Agriculture (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 59.
Cf. G. Pitt-Rivers, ‘Is There a Population Problem?’, New Age, 27, 5 (3 June 1920) 69–71;
L. C. Money, ‘Renew or Die!’, Nineteenth Century and After, 123 (1938) 129–46.
Lymington, Horn, Hoof and Corn, pp. 106, 121. Compare the comments on race of H. Peake, The English Village: The Origin and Decay of its Community. An Anthropological Interpretation (London: Benn Brothers, 1922), pp. 37–46. Lymington was influenced, after 1935, by the French physician
Alexis Carrell, whose book Man, the Unknown (London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1935), p. 319, argued that ‘Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.’
See the writings of the English Mistery’s founder, William Sanderson: Statecraft (London: Methuen & Co., 1927)
and William Sanderson That Which was Lost: A Treatise on Freemasonry and the English Mistery (London: Constable & Co., 1930). On the English Mistery/Array and its relationship with fascism, see chapter 6.
A. M. Ludovici, Health and Education Through Self-Mastery (London: Watts & Co., 1933).
Viscount Lymington, Famine in England (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1938), p. 118. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate Lymington’s reply to Ludovici’s letter. The stress of writers like Lymington and Ludovici on eradicating the ‘Jewish spirit’ of ‘Manchesterism’
see, for example, Ludovici, A Defence of Conservatism: A Further Text-Book for Tories (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927), pp. 153–4), recalls the words of Werner Sombart: ‘In order to free ourselves from the Jewish spirit — said to be the chief task of the German people and, above all, of Socialism — it is not enough to exclude all Jews, not even enough to cultivate an anti-Jewish temper. It will be far better to transform the institutional culture that it will no longer serve as a bulwark for the Jewish spirit.’ See A New Social Philosophy, trans. K. F. Geiser (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969 [1937]), p. 179.
W. Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982 [1911]), p. 344.
L. [Lymington], ‘Notes on Rural Life and Land Tenure’ in Return to Husbandry, ed. E. Blunden (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1943), p. 18.
Gardiner, England Herself Ventures in Rural Restoration (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), pp. 9–10.
Cobbett’ [= A. M. Ludovici, pseud.], Jews, and the Jews of England (London: Boswell Publishing Co., 1938), pp. 65–6.
Further references in the text. Ludovici’s inspiration was W. Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [orig. 1830]).
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 110ff; M. Chase, ‘This is No Claptrap, This is Our Heritage’, in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, eds. C. Shaw and M. Chase (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 128–46; idem.
M. Chase, ‘Rolf Gardiner: An Inter-war, Cross-cultural Case Study’, in Adult Education between Cultures: Encounters and Identities in European Adult Education since 1890, eds. B. J. Hake and S. Marriott (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1992), pp. 225–41;
P. Wright, The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
See J. L. Finlay, ‘John Hargrave, the Green Shirts, and Social Credit’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5 (1970) 53–71.
R. J. Moore-Colyer argues that ‘Gardiner had little time for fascism as such.’ ‘Rolf Gardiner, English Patriot and the Council for the Church and Countryside’, Agricultural History Review, 49 (2001) 195. But the condemnation of the BUF or the racial policies of the Nazis does not absolve Gardiner of pro-fascist tendencies. Moore-Colyer performs the same operation on Massingham, implying that his very clearly stated anti-Nazism (which is not in doubt) means that he could not at the same time advocate policies in Britain that were at best ultra-conservative. It is worth noting in this regard that Massingham’s strongest anti-Nazi statements were not made until well into the war. Nor does the fact that ‘many of his writings underpin the very basis of the concerns for organic holism, localism, and food quality currently adumbrated by rural economists and strategists’ mean that the latter are in any way reliant on Massingham’s work.
See R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘A Voice Clamouring in the Wilderness: H. J. Massingham (1888–1952) and Rural England’, Rural History, 13 (2002) 199–224. For the view that Massingham saw the land and ethnicity as intimately linked, see C. Palmer, ‘Christianity, Englishness and the Southern English Countryside’:
A Study of the Work of H. J. Massingham’, Social & Cultural Geography, 3 (2002) 33.
R. Gardiner, ‘Reflections on Music and Statecraft’, in Water Springing from the Ground: An Anthology of the Writings of Rolf Gardiner, ed. A. Best (Fontmell Magna: Springhead Trust, 1972), pp. 99, 100. ‘Masculine renaissance’ was one of Ludovici’s most loved ideas.
Gardiner to Lymington, HRO 15M84/F195; Bryant papers E51. See also G. Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 154ff.
R. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991). On Lintorn-Orman
see J. V. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement 1923–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 11–42.
See R. O. Paxton, ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’, Journal of Modern History, 70 (1998) 1–23.
See, for example, G. R. Searle, ‘Critics of Edwardian Society: The Case of the Radical Right’, in The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability 1900–1914, ed. A. O’Day (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 79–96;
A. Bauerkämper, Die ‘radikale Rechte’ in Grofdbritannien: Nationalistische, antisemitische und faschistische Bewegungen vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991).
H. E. Moore, Back to the Land (London: Methuen & Co., 1893), p. xiii.
A. White, ‘The Inevitable’, in The Views of ‘Vanoc’: An Englishman’s Outlook (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1910), p. 65.
See also A. White, The Modern Jew (London: William Heinemann, 1899)
and A. White, Efficiency and Empire (London: Methuen & Co., 1901).
Lord Willoughby de Broke, ‘National Toryism’, National Review, 59, 351 (May 1912) 413–27; idem.
Lord Willoughby de Broke ed., The Sport of Our Ancestors (London: Constable, 1921).
See G. D. Phillips, ‘Lord Willoughby de Broke: Radicalism and Conservatism’, in Edwardian Conservatism: Five Studies in Adaptation, eds. J. A. Thompson and A. Mejia (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 77–104.
C. S. Orwin and W. F. Drake, Back to the Land (London: P. S. King & Son, 1935), P. 9.
C. Brereton, ‘A Programme for Agriculture’, English Review, 64 (1937) 190–1.
R. Gardiner, ‘When Peace Breaks Out: Tasks of Youth in a Post-War World’, in Return to Husbandry, ed. E. Blunden (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1943), p. 24; idem., ‘Youth and Europe’ in Water Springing from the Ground, p. 20;
J. C. Squire, ‘Introduction’ to E. Blunden, The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932), p. vii. Matless correctly observes (Landscape and Englishness, p. 126) that ‘There is a sense in organicist work of the melancholy pleasure inherent in documenting something doomed.’
E. Blunden, English Villages (London: William Collins, 1941), p. 20.
See also Blunden, ‘Ourselves and Germany’, Fortnightly Review, 145 (1939) 618–26, for a very pro-German statement.
A. B. [Adrian Bell], ‘Husbandry and Society’, in Return to Husbandry, ed. E. Blunden (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1943), pp. 5–6.
The Earl of Portsmouth, A Knot of Roots: An Autobiography (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), p. 197.
A. Bryant, Unfinished Victory (London: Macmillan & Co., 1940), p. 141; Lymington to Bryant, 9 January 1940, Bryant papers E60. F.. Lorimer, ‘The Mein Kampf Ramp’ (16 August 1941), Lorimer Papers, MSS Eur.F177/85. Earlier Bryant had applauded the way in which, thanks to Hitler, Germany ‘has returned now to her own spiritual atmosphere, and for all her economic misery and necessity she feels that she has found her soul. In awakening her Hitler has shown himself to be a great German.’
See Bryant, ‘Summary’, in The Man and the Hour: Studies of Six Great Men of Our Time, ed. A. Bryant (London: Philip Allan, 1934), p. 144. The essays were originally lectures delivered at Ashridge at the end of 1933, under the title ‘Makers of Modern Europe’.
A. Bryant, English Saga (1840–1940) (London: Collins with Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1940), p. 313.
A. Williamson, A Patriot’s Progress: Henry Williamson and the First World War (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), p. 153.
H. Williamson, ‘Introduction’ to J. Russell, English Farming (London: William Collins, 1941), p. 10.
See Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 159–60; D. Grant, ed., Your Daily Bread (London, 1944).
See P. Conford, ‘The Myth of Neglect: Responses to the Early Organic Movement, 1930–1950’, Agricultural History Review, 50 (2002) 89–106.
J. Jenks, From the Ground Up: An Outline of Rural Economy (London: Hollis & Carter, 1950), p. 215.
See also J. Jenks, The Country Year (London: SPCK, 1946); idem.
J. Jenks, British Agriculture and International Trade (London: Council for the Church and Countryside, 1948); idem.
J. Jenks, The Stuff Man’s Made Of: The Positive Approach to Health through Nutrition (London: Faber and Faber, 1959) by which point the stress was much more firmly ‘ecological’.
G. T. Wrench, Reconstruction By Way of the Soil (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), p. 85.
See J. E. Tunbridge and G. J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: the Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Chichester: John Wiley, 1996);
B. Graham, G. J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge, A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold, 2000);
and the essays in B. Graham, ed., Modern Europe: Place, Culture, Identity (London: Arnold, 1998). The countryside is always under threat because, of course, the England that is portrayed in magazines such as This England ‘is not a country that really exists or ever existed except in literature.’
S. Silver, ‘That England’, Searchlight, 305 (November 2000) 20.
See also Raymond Williams’ classic study The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).
See M. Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
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Stone, D. (2003). The British Far Right and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. In: Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505537_6
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