Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 338

Rolf Gardiner (1902–71) is a figure of interest in various spheres of activity: folk dance, music, forestry, organic farming, conservation, youth movements, Anglo-German relations and ‘radical Right’ politics. Refused membership of the Home Guard on account of his perceived pro-German sympathies, he was nevertheless accepted by the establishment in later life. He was chairman of the Dorset branch of the CLA, High Sheriff of that county in 1967, and chairman of the European Working Party for Landscape Husbandry. A founder member of the Soil Association, he became an elder statesman of the organic movement.

Jefferies and Tyldesley concentrate on the most controversial period of Gardiner’s life, from the 1920s to the 1940s, during which his relationships with German youth groups, his ambivalent attitude to the Nazi regime and his cultural pessimism about England’s future marked him out as what Richard Griffiths, one of the contributors to this book, termed a ‘fellow-traveller of the Right’. Gardiner’s inter-war activities present a dilemma for the organic movement, since his approach to agriculture played a key role in his resistance to the cultural and political developments of mid-twentieth century England. Robert Waller, biographer of Gardiner’s mentor, Sir George Stapledon, once told me that he had admired Gardiner enormously as a forester and environmentalist, but detested his politics and his arrogance. The problem, though, is whether the politics can really be divorced from the environmentalism; and it is compounded by the difficulty of determining exactly where Gardiner stood politically. The editors state that their aim is ‘neither to indict nor to exculpate Gardiner, but to situate him historically’.

To illustrate Gardiner’s historical context, Jefferies and Tyldesley have drawn together an impressive selection of scholars. Jefferies himself writes on Gardiner’s links with the German naturist movement, while Tyldesley has undertaken some fascinating detective work on his friendship with Max Plowman, which sheds light both on Gardiner’s attitude to pacifism and on Plowman’s attitude to Nazism. David Fowler argues for Gardiner’s importance as a pioneer of ‘youth culture’, a phrase which has a somewhat different meaning today from what Gardiner would have understood by it. Georgina Boyes examines Gardiner’s role in the revival of English folk dance, a tradition he incorporated into his farming activities. Richard Griffiths and Dan Stone analyse the complexities of Gardiner’s political position, with Stone in particular tracing the connections between politics and organic farming in Gardiner’s thought and practice.

Richard Moore-Colyer’s essay on ‘Rolf Gardiner, farming and the English landscape’ is the most directly relevant to agricultural historians, a detailed account of Gardiner’s struggles to regenerate substantial areas of Cranborne Chase through afforestation and soil improvement. Moore-Colyer demonstrates that Gardiner was far from being an impractical dreamer; he was a highly disciplined worker who transformed his surrounding landscape for the better and was prepared to experiment with the unfashionable techniques of organic husbandry. Gardiner believed firmly in local initiatives and resisted the abstract uniformity imposed by a centralized State: an attitude that led him into conflict during the War with the Ministry of Supply, over the issue of flax production. As always, Moore-Colyer’s style combines scholarship with wit. I especially enjoyed his account of Gardiner’s early morning ‘character-building run[s] in the nude across a stretch of Cranborne Chase, no doubt to the alarm of any poachers who happened to be drifting home after their nocturnal forays’.

The editors offer an Epilogue that looks, with tantalizing brevity, at Gardiner’s post-war activities and discusses how far his ideas may have influenced a subsequent generation of environmental activists. Even if they did not directly do so, one can still discern various parallels between Gardiner’s concerns and those of later environmentalists. It is perhaps significant that E. F. Schumacher formed a friendship with Gardiner from the mid-1960s. Much work on the last two decades of Gardiner’s life remains to be undertaken.

As to whether the book avoids either condemning or whitewashing Gardiner, it seems to me that it is indeed very fair-minded: so much so that he perhaps gets off rather lightly. Many of his comments, as quoted in these essays, are rebarbative, and although Richard Griffiths warns against the judgement of ‘guilt by association’, the fact remains that Gardiner chose to associate with the SS, the SA and some of the most dedicated British sympathizers with Nazism, such as the estate owner Viscount Lymington and the eugenicist Anthony Ludovici.

Jefferies and Tyldesley are to be praised for having brought together such an authoritative range of perspectives. Whatever one’s view of Gardiner, he was clearly a remarkable, many-talented man, prescient enough to see the implications of western culture’s disregard for the biological realities on which our existence depends, and to emphasize the centrality of agriculture to national life. He is indeed, in the editors’ phrase, ‘worth more than a footnote in the history of inter-war Britain’.