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Towards 'Mother Earth': Jorian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and The Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 39(3), 353–371. ISSN 0022–0094. DOI: 10.1177/0022009404044445 Richard Moore-Colyer Towards ‘Mother Earth’: Jorian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and the British Union of Fascists Even when shorn of its unpalatable racial outlook, the economic, social and cultural stance of the interwar ultra-Right in Britain has long been derided as at best naïve and fanciful, and at worst obscurantist, illiberal and socially divisive. Immediately after the Great War, however, from the perspective of the Right, the social and political landscape of Britain appeared to be in alarm- ing turmoil, and, despite the whimsical conjecture of the contemporary historiography which tried to link incipient fascism to native traditions, the reality was that the Right was motivated above all by fear. As heightened Trades Union activity raised the threat of communism and suffragette excesses the breakdown of traditional society, the Right quailed at the possibility of civil war in Ireland, bemoaned Britain’s declining capacity to protect the Empire and doubted the sustainability of those deracinated communities crowded into the smoky and noisome towns.1 And if this were not enough, there was always the mythical ‘Judaeo-Bolshevik plot’ to subvert world order lying in wait to feed its angst. Underlying its concerns and anxieties was the belief in a general cultural decline, born of industrialization and urbanization, which was somehow reducing the nation’s vigour and sense of purpose and which, unless countered, would steadily erode the structure of society itself. As the social consequences of economic growth, and more especially urbaniza- tion, became self-evident, so the Right looked to the countryside as a renew- able source of vitality which would serve as a ‘spiritual’ antidote to the perceived dislocation of city life. National regeneration, it was believed, might be achieved by a re-examination of the nation’s rural roots; a sort of revival of the agrarian tradition wherein lay the ‘true’ spiritual strength and cultural and moral virtues of the British people. This rural-nostalgic and usually organicist theme formed a common thread woven into the policies of most ultra-Right groupings of the 1920s and 1930s. This applied as much to Rotha Lintorn- Orman’s British Fascists and the veterinary surgeon Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League as to the British People’s Party founded in 1939, or to the orga- nization that eclipsed them all, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), launched in October 1932. This article seeks to outline details of the 1 T. Linehan, British Fascism, 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester 2000), 140–4; M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1830–1980 (London 1992), passim. Downloaded from jch.sagepub.com at Universitaetsbibliothek Bern on August 21, 2015 354 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3 rural policy of the BUF and in so doing to highlight aspects of the career of Jorian E.F. Jenks (1899–1963) who was not only the architect of that policy, but was to become a leading player in the Soil Association between 1947 and his death in 1963. An anti-modern, neo-romantic and quasi-sacramental approach to rekin- dling the mythical rural roots was a keystone of the policy of an important non- Mosleyite body, the English Mistery, and its offshoot, the English Array, the former founded by William Sanderson in 1931.2 In the sense that Jorian Jenks and the BUF were probably influenced by the thoughts and writings of members of the Mistery and the Array, they are briefly considered here, with Gerard Wallop, Viscount Lymington, an important ‘behind the scenes’ figure in the early years of the Soil Association, being given some prominence. The English Mistery, whose membership embraced reactionary Conservatives like Lymington and Michael Beaumont MP, virulent antisemites like Anthony Ludovici, and the future Cabinet Minister Reginald Dorman-Smith, was anxious to promote an agrarian revival based on a peasant partnership under the aegis of a trained/qualified élite motivated by a drive towards agricultural self-sufficiency.3 A broadly similar programme was promulgated by the English Array, formed by Lymington after a disagreement with Sanderson in 1936. The Array, however, an unashamedly pro-German body, readily embraced anti- semitism, thereby parting company with many admirers of nazi Germany for whom the persecution of the Jews had been a cause of some embarrassment.4 Lymington was also associated, along with John Beckett and William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) with the eccentric Marquis of Tavistock’s British People’s Party and was himself the founder of the British Council against European Commitments, a pro-German, anti-war group whose membership included Beckett and Joyce along with other nazi supporters and Array members of the ilk of A.K. Chesterton and George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers.5 In December 1938, Lymington launched the New Pioneer, a journal ‘friendly to all movements which have the national regeneration of this country as their object’, but in reality an organicist, eugenicist and antisemitic mouthpiece for the ultra-Right. While the New Pioneer carried helpful articles on milk pasteurization, soil cultivation and the use of town waste on farmland, alongside diatribes against the decline of the independent peasant, these were interspersed with rabid anti- 2 For the general background, see F. Trentmann, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents: English Neo- Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29, 4 (October 1994), 583–625. 3 Dorman-Smith was MP for Petersfield (1935–41), President of the National Farmers Union (1936–37) and Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries (1939–40). For Rolf Gardiner and further historiographical details see R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Rolf Gardiner, English Patriot and the Council for the Church and Countryside’, Agricultural History Review, 49, 2 (2001), 187–210. 4 R. Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism, 1939–40 (London 1998), 14–22. Lymington, who eventually became the 9th Earl of Portsmouth, had met Mussolini in 1932 and was to meet Hitler in 1939 (Lord Portsmouth, A Knot of Roots, London 1965). 5 Griffiths, op. cit., 53. Downloaded from jch.sagepub.com at Universitaetsbibliothek Bern on August 21, 2015 Moore-Colyer: Jorian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and the BUF 355 Zionist and pro-nazi invective. A.K. Chesterton wrote of the enslavement of Britain to the ‘money power’ and Anthony Ludovici castigated the degeneracy of urban England, using his review slots to condemn profiteers, racketeers and effeminates and to engage in National Socialist rhetoric.6 Lymington, whose overall tone was antisemitic rather than pro-nazi, praised the ‘fine regenerative work’ being undertaken in Germany, while concurrently condemning the ‘utterly alien’ practice of miscegenation with almost as much vigour as he warned against an Anglo-German war which would mean ‘the shattering of everything worth preserving in Europe for the benefit of the international revolutionary and money-lender’.7 Francis Yeats-Brown, meanwhile, took every opportunity to attack Zionism, and the Germanophile Rolf Gardiner, in expounding the virtues of labour service in Germany, noted that in the Baltic states, ‘the Jews are the real exploiters of German decline and Lettish incom- petence’.8 The outpourings of the New Pioneer enshrined much of the Weltanshauung of the non-Mosleyite Right, and aspects of its ruralist philo- sophy paralleled that of Jorian Jenks and the BUF. Yet there was an important distinction which hinged upon the notion of State intervention. Economic reac- tionaries like Lymington and Rolf Gardiner were happy with the imposition of tariffs as a means of promoting self-sufficiency, but they could not countenance fascist ideas of further involvement of the state in the domestic market. Herein lay one of the fundamental conundrums of fascist rural policy, that of reconcil- ing the promotion of a peasant-based rural revival with the philosophical keystone of state corporatism.9 To non-Mosleyites like Lymington and Rolf Gardiner, the latter of whom regarded Mosley’s fascism as ‘the pathetic attempts of suburbia to re-establish itself in the soil’, the bureaucratic corpo- rate state with its bluster and folie de grandeur, its woolly rhetoric and grandiose gestures, lacked any sense of reality.10 The fascination for Mussolini in many quarters was all very well, but the very idea of this preposterous poseur being in some alchemical way moulded in mystical union with his people struck the non-Mosleyites as patently absurd. That the corporate state (for all the 6 New Pioneer, 1, 8 (1938); 1, 2 (1939); 1, 3 (1939); 1, 4 (1939). 7 New Pioneer, 1, 5 (1939); 1, 8 (1939). 8 New Pioneer, 1, 6 (1939). 9 G.C. Webber, The Ideology of the British Right, 1918–1939 (London 1986), 139. Lymington continued, throughout the war, to be involved with a variety of right-wing organizations and to his immense surprise avoided internment. He made his maiden speech in the House of Lords as Earl of Portsmouth in October 1943 when he contributed to a debate on aspects of food quality initiated by Lord Teviot, subsequently President of the Soil Association. Disillusioned with post- war Britain, he eventually retired to his family estates in East Africa. His books, Famine in England (1938) and Alternative to Death (1943) proclaimed the organic revival. (For further details see his autobiography, A Knot of Roots (London 1965). A. Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (1989); P. Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh 2000); R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Back to Basics, Rolf Gardiner, H.J. Massingham and “A Kinship in Husbandry”’, Rural History, 12, 1 (2001), 85–108.
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