Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain

Mike Tyldesley, Matthew Jefferies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409412045
• eBook ISBN: 9781317061922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Folk dancer, forester, poet and visionary, Rolf Gardiner (1902-71) is both a compelling and troubling figure in the history of twentieth-century Britain. While he is celebrated as a pioneer of organic farming and co-founder of the Soil Association, Gardiner's organicist outlook was not confined to agriculture alone. Convinced that a healthy culture and society could only flourish when it was rooted in the soil, Gardiner sought national regeneration too. One of the most colourful and controversial figures of the interwar period, Gardiner believed Britain's future lay not with its doomed empire, but in ever closer union with its 'kin folk, kin tongued' neighbours in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Fascinated by the Weimar Republic's myriad youth leagues and life reform movements, Gardiner became an important conduit between North Sea and Baltic. Yet while an enthusiasm for hiking, nudism, folk dancing and voluntary labour camps must have appeared harmlessly eccentric to many in 1920s Britain, by the late-1930s Gardiner's continued engagement with Germany was to have altogether darker connotations. This volume, which brings together seven scholars currently working on different aspects of Gardiner's life and work, eschews a straightforwardly biographical approach and instead focuses on the decades when he was at his most dynamic and radical. Situating Gardiner within the wider political and cultural contexts of the interwar years and exploring youth culture, the origins of the organic movement, Anglo-German relations and British cultural history, it is an essential addition to modern history libraries.

Figure 1.1 Portrait of Rolf Gardiner (1928), by Maxwell Armfield

Chapter 1
Rolf Gardiner: Pioneer of British Youth Culture, 1920–1939

David Fowler

Introduction

Rolf Gardiner is a neglected figure in the history of British youth culture. This chapter will argue that he was one of the prime movers in the development of youth culture in British universities between the two world wars. Drawing on his personal papers, published essays and on contemporary perceptions of Gardiner, the chapter will chart his extraordinary influence as a shaper of ideas about youth culture and youth activity in the era of cinema, the Jazz Age and the rise of Nazism on the European Continent.1

Gardiner is a gift for the social historian of the interwar years because he was at the forefront of the development of youth movements in and beyond Britain. Moreover, his extensive correspondence with other youth enthusiasts reveals that he was interested in developing a youth culture in an era which, certainly in Britain, has been seen to lack a distinct youth culture.2 This chapter introduces some of the rich archival material on Gardiner held in the Cambridge University Library. It seeks to demonstrate Gardiner’s credentials as an interwar pioneer of British youth culture; a neglected theme in the growing secondary literature that views him, essentially, as a British Nazi sympathizer of the 1930s.3 From his late teens and on into his undergraduate years Gardiner developed a serious interest in youth culture, editing a student periodical at Cambridge with the grandiose title Youth: An Expression of Progressive University Thought. He believed that youth movements were not leisure organizations for adolescents but, potentially, intellectual movements for galvanizing the thoughts and aspirations of young, articulate youth in the universities, such as himself. What distinguishes Gardiner from his contemporaries in the universities, some of whom also started cults of youth – Harold Acton and Brian Howard being the most celebrated examples – is that Gardiner’s cultural movements developed well beyond the Ivory Towers of Oxford and Cambridge; as, uniquely for this period, he set about establishing student movements that linked English and European students in an exercise in cultural fusion and an exploration of new ways of living.4

Rolf Gardiner’s pursuit of new ways of living for student communities, and his fascination with youth culture as a concept, is unusual for the period between the two world wars. Reflecting in 1931 on his efforts to build an Anglo-European youth culture during the 1920s he told a friend:

For me the [folk dance] tours have proved stepping stones to wider and more ambitious fields of action … it was these wider activities which I was seeking and aiming at when we started the ‘Travelling Morrice’ together. I hoped that the tours would lead to a new vision determining our work as a generation in England, not merely stop at folk-dancing.5

But Gardiner’s youthful visions have been largely forgotten. When he died in November 1971 the Cambridge college where he studied between 1921 and 1924, St John’s, knew hardly anything about him. The college magazine, The Eagle, recorded simply that Rolf Gardiner, ‘forester’, had died.6 Gardiner evidently thought that a biography would eventually be written about him. He would not have kept such meticulous records going back to his school reports if he did not, and he would not have asked his closest friends and associates to return all his letters to them. Moreover, he thought from his early twenties that he was a significant cultural figure and confided in his diary that the person who researched his life would find the important intellectual currents in his thinking and activities in the letters he wrote.7

He was aware, at this early stage of his life, that he did not have the discipline to complete books and make all his various activities and ideas immediately accessible to future academics. Nonetheless, Gardiner has left a vast collection of letters, many handwritten and some quite lengthy: the longest so far discovered is a 12-page defence of his philosophy on life to his close friend and fellow Morris dancer Arthur Heffer, an Oxford graduate of the 1920s and, subsequently, a Cambridge bookseller.8 Gardiner’s letters are written with a steady hand and are, invariably, literary efforts. Heffer, for example, chided him for being too influenced by D.H. Lawrence’s writing style; saying far too much about his moods and feelings, the weather, drawing attention to people’s foibles, and enthusing about the miners of the north-east of England and their sword dances.9

Much of Gardiner’s voluminous correspondence is fascinating, once one gets used to his florid writing style. Gardiner’s letters touch on all sorts of things: people, the books that he was reading, youth movements, cultural enthusiasms, relationships, his philosophy of life, politicians, and Hitler and Nazi Germany. He also wrote many articles for literary journals such as New English Weekly, The Times Literary Supplement, Encounter, and The Listener. He wrote several letters that were published in The Times. He wrote two books: England Herself: Ventures in Rural Restoration (published by Faber and Faber in 1943) and World Without End: Politics and the Younger Generation (1932); published around the same time as A.L. Rowse’s first book with a very similar title, Politics and the Younger Generation (1931).10 Intriguingly, Rowse had talked in this work about the pro-German youth enthusiasts of the early 1920s, so he may well have been aware of Gardiner.11 Rolf Gardiner also co-edited a volume of essays, Britain and Germany (1928) and he wrote an essay on English youth in a book published by Harvard University Press in 1940, for which Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the Preface. She praised Gardiner’s essay for its foresight and so, in a sense, he had gained a global reputation as a youth culture enthusiast by the early years of the Second World War; something not stressed in the existing historical literature.12 Towards the end of his life, Gardiner was commissioned to write a further book on landscape, though he did not live to complete it.13

There is a short entry on Rolf Gardiner in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but it hardly touches on his central role as a prime mover in the development of youth culture.14 Nor does it offer any conceptual models of how Gardiner’s life should be studied by historians. I would argue that he is best seen as a counter-cultural figure in inter-war England rather than as a British Nazi. I will attempt to demonstrate this through a focus on four themes: his home background and years at Cambridge; his brief association with one of the established English youth movements of the 1920s, the Kibbo Kift Kindred; his own attempts to establish new youth movements in Britain, in which university students made contact with working-class communities in the north-east of England; and, fourth, his extraordinary efforts to bring about cultural contact between young Britons and Germans in the aftermath of the First World War. His first international folk dance tour of Germany took place in 1922 and these international ventures continued throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Indeed, Gardiner had a significant impact in intellectual circles, and in the quality press of the period, as an advocate of ‘internationalism’.

The issues for historians to grapple with in Gardiner’s early life are: to what extent was he self consciously motivated by a concept of youth culture? To what extent was he influential in its development? How representative of other student cultures at Cambridge in the early 1920s is Gardiner’s enthusiasm for youth culture? Was he trying to introduce German ideas about youth culture into Britain? Or was he trying to export English culture, as he saw it, to Germany?15

Gardiner’s Early Life

Henry Rolf Gardiner was born on 5 November 1902 in Kensington, West London. A myth has developed in the historical literature that Gardiner was a product of rural England, active in Dorset and always naturally disposed to peddle anti-urban sentiments in his writings.16 In fact, he was from a very cosmopolitan family based in Holland Park, West London, and his parents regularly entertained intellectuals from the universities, writers from Europe and liberal-minded people interested in the arts.17 In essence, Gardiner grew up in a family that was on the fringes of Bloomsbury and his criticisms of intellectuals in his later writings would have been forged early on when he witnessed groups of adults invading his home and depriving him of his parents’ attention. In his early twenties, he developed an extreme contempt for academic types; referring to them as the ‘Metallic people of Bloomsbury and King’s’. He had in mind people like the economist J.M. Keynes, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and the other ‘brainy writers’, as he put it, who all left him cold. His parents were austere people and he seems to have seen very little of them in his childhood. His father Alan Gardiner was an Oxford-educated Egyptologist of independent means, who was sent to inspect Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1921. His mother, Hedwig, was from an Austro-Hungarian aristocratic family and frequently travelled abroad. The large number of letters in the Gardiner archive to and from his parents, dating from his early childhood, is a strong indication that he did not see much of them.18

Gardiner’s upbringing was extremely privileged. His birth was officially announced in The Times on Saturday 8 November 1902 and early photographs provide glimpses of a genteel upper middle-class childhood. One photograph from his childhood shows him and his sister Margaret (1904–2004), in their playroom in Holland Park. The room is vast and the ceiling not even visible. Rolf is leaning on a rocking horse and both children are with their nanny. Other photographs reveal that the children were fond of dressing up. One taken in the Isle of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rolf Gardiner: Pioneer of British Youth Culture, 1920–1939
• 2 Rolf Gardiner and German Naturism
• 3 ‘Potencies of the earth’: Rolf Gardiner and the English Folk Dance Revival
• 4 Rolf Gardiner, Farming and the English Landscape
• 5 Rolf Gardiner and Pacifism: The Case of Max Plowman
• 6 The Dangers of Definition: Post-Facto Opinions on Rolf Gardiner’s Attitudes towards Nazi Germany
• 7 Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi?
• Epilogue: Rolf Gardiner: Eminence Vert?
• Bibliography
• Index