Anne Fernie gave this talk for the Ragged University on 11th February 2016 in Manchester: This talk is in effect a ‘companion piece’ to the ‘Countercultural Imperative’ talk presented in April 2015. The focus is now upon movements and individuals in England during the period 1880-1935. We noted before how German ‘life reformers’ spread their influence directly to the counterculturalists in the USA during the 40s and later 1960s and how many of their ideas (e.g. vegetarianism, spa baths, outdoor pursuits) became mainstream even during their lifetimes. The English experience forms an interesting contrast in that the English as a whole proved less tractable than their German cousins in adopting ‘ruralist’ ideas that were viewed overall as ‘crankish’ and ‘faddist’. The close relationship that many of the English pioneers had with their German counterparts also inevitably led to suspicion in the years following WW1 and especially in the late 1920s and 30s casting a further pall of ‘Eco-Fascist’ ignominy over the cult of health, wellbeing and folk revival ‘Blood and Soil’ movements. We will review some early manifestations of the cult of the outdoor/alternative lifestylers such as the early carvanners, the fetishisation of Native North American culture, the Garden City movement then examine a selection of the more outstanding ‘cranks’ and ‘faddists’ such as John Hargrave, Rolf Gardiner, Ernest Westlake, Archie Belaney and Ernest Seton who are now largely and unfairly forgotten. The Woodcraft and ensuing Kibbo Kift groups will be discussed in more detail, the latter being an wonderful example of a very English response to the cult of the outdoor and how it too was drawn into the spirit of the age, transforming itself by 1935 into The Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit, the largest unformed paramilitary street-army of 1930s Britain. They hated the Fascist Black Shirts and ‘fat cat’ financial institutions espoused a ‘Third Way’ beyond Capitalism and Marxism – ideas very prescient to the contemporary social and political discourse. As with the German experience one concludes that whilst the hegemonies of the age are now ancient history, it is the outsiders and counter-culturist’s ideas that have endured and become mainstream. The fun is discovering where these apparently ‘age old’ ideas actually originated – often from the most surprising and unexpected sources.

2. ‘We must plant ourselves again in the Universe.’
D.H. Lawrence

4. Barmby leading a
demo in 1848

5. Punch 1852
Punch 1898

8. Commons Preservation Society
(1865 National Trust (1895), National Footpaths Preservation Society (1884

9. Edwardian camping pioneers existed in an era before paid holidays so the first elite caravanners were known as
‘Gentlemen Gypsies’
Augustus John ‘Romany Rye’.

12. Carpenter was a former curate, a guest of Thoreau, author of a poem, Towards Democracy & various Labour anthems, a devotee of Hindu mysticism &
philosophy, a vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, naturist, advocate of sustainable farming, environmentalist & an advocate of the Rational Dress Movement.
Carpenter 1894 by Roger Fry
Feted as the ‘first modern gay liberationist’ Carpenter lived openly with George
‘Georgette’ Merrill, his working class lover for 47 years 1881-1928 , lobbied for a change
in the law re homosexuality and wrote poety extolling the joy of homosexual love. He
wrote the pioneering ‘The Intermediate Sex’ (1908). Their affair inspired E.M.Forster’s
novel ‘Maurice’ (written 1913-14 only published 1971)

13. 1905. Carpenter wearing his famous Indian-style sandals.
Carpenter introduced sandals to
British life. His friend Harold Cox
went to Kashmir & sent back a
pair after which C made his own.
‘Shoes, he decided, were ‘leather
coffins.’ Bernard Shaw never
wore them after they ‘cut his
feet’. Disciples went to
Millthorpe, including a woman
dress-reformer who walked
miles in the rain, wearing a
roughly cut blue serge dress and
sandals which kept getting stuck
in the mud. An employee at
Millthorpe, George Adams, took
up sandal-making. When he fell
out with Carpenter, he moved to
the newly established
Letchworth Garden City, in
Hertfordshire, and established a
small sandal business there.
‘
Through a thousand beautiful forms – so beautiful! –
Through the gates of a thousand hearts –
emancipated, freed,
we will pass on:
I and my joy will surely pass on. (Carpenter)

14. WW1 marked the final disintegration of moral outlooks. It was even seen as the ‘end’of western European civilisation,
what James Webb called, "a flight from Reason". Simultaneously in the early 1900s the relationship between town and
country underwent a period of dramatic change, as the growth of suburbs and transport systems (the first electric
tube line in 1890 & growing number of suburban train lines before 1914) allowed people to escape from London to
the countryside. Class distinctions also began to change:
‘After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social
class…. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is
recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council
housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a
slum’
(Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius).

15. The League of Health (1917) & The Sunlight League (1924)
Caleb Saleeby, an English physician, writer, temperance reformer & journalist was also known for
his support of eugenics (Eugenics Education Society 1907; book: ‘Parenthood & Race Culture,
1909). During World War I, he was an adviser to the Minister of Food and advocated the
establishment of a Ministry of Health. Was pro the education of women so they ‘could become
better mothers’. At this time the suffragette movement was at its peak & he also wrote that he
could see no good reason against the vote for women: ‘I believe in the vote; I believe it will be
eugenic’. Founded the Sunlight League & lobbied government in 1924 for clean air, smoke
abatement and the benefits of sunlight.
Caleb Williams Saleeby (1878-1940)
founder of the Sunlight League

16. The Sunlight League (1924) The League aimed to
educate the public about
‘Nature’s universal
disinfectant, stimulant and
tonic’ and advocated
heliotherapy – direct
exposure to the sun. The
League campaigned for a
variety of causes including
mixed sunbathing and the
relaxation of the rules for
appropriate attire for
sunbathing. Towards the
end of the 1920s
sunbathing clubs were
opening around London
including Finchley and
Sidcup while the Yew Tree
Club devoted to physical
culture and nudity opened
in Croydon.
The Yew Tree Camp in Croydon

17. The cult of nudism started in Germany with the creation of Paul Zimmermann's Freilichtpark in 1903 & first appeared
in Britain in the late 1920s. One of the first resorts to open was Sun Lodge in Upper Norwood, S.E.London. From 1928,
members of the Sun Bathing Society would meet at weekends to soak up the invigorating, health-giving rays and
enjoy other activities such as ‘rhythmic dancing.’ Locals would gather around the boundary fence trying to catch a
glimpse of the bathers & In 1929, the police were called in at the Welsh Harp Reservoir near Wembley to protect
naturists from rioters. Compared with Germany, nudism remained a minority activity in England and it rarely strayed
from its suburban, home-counties’ roots. The clubs had strict conventions and rules of etiquette designed to convince
a doubting public that sex was the last thing on the nudists’ minds.
Magazines dated 1935-58 The ‘Sunlight League’s’ 1st English nudist conference

18. Social Hygiene Movements: The New Health Society (1925)
The social hygiene movement – a fusion of evolutionary, eugenic and sociological
theories, drew a connection between poverty, ill health & ‘inadequate breeding’. It
was feared that the middle classes were in decline while ‘degenerates’ were on the
ascendant. Health & happiness could be achieved by a ‘hygienic regimen’
including a high-fibre diet, outdoor exercise & sun-bathing, with birth control and
men's dress reform. The League’s understanding of health as a personal
responsibility and duty of citizenship sidestepped the question of poverty and
inequality & conformed to mainstream opinion at the time. It also has distinct
parallels with mainstream attitudes towards health today.
…a renaissance of beauty for men – true masculine beauty of the body and mind,
the bloom of a joyful spirit – might mean happier marriages, well-born and
beautiful children, a healthier and more beautiful race (Dion Byngham, New Health
Journal, 1932).

19. The MDRP emerged out
of the Sunlight League &
New Health Society:
‘Most members wish for
shorts; a few for the kilt;
nearly all hate
trousers. Some plead for
less heavy materials and
less padding; others for
brighter colours; but the
villain of the piece is the
collar-stud. A wail has
gone up throughout the
land; man is clutching at
his throat and crying.’
(Times 17 June 1929).
Social Hygiene Movements: the Men’s Dress Reform Party (1929)

20. Social Hygiene Movements: the Men’s Dress Reform
Party (1929)
En route to the M.D.R.P. Coronation competition in 1937

21. Ebenezer Howard: Social Reform through ‘Humane Housing’

23. Londoners, on
their Sundays off,
made special
excursions by
train to study
Letchworth’s
strange collection
of smock-wearing
Esperanto
speakers and
theosophists. A
local newspaper
cartoon of the
time portrays this.

24. William Morris 1884
Socialist League.
The Fabian Society,
Fellowship of the New Life
Vegetarian Cycling Society Socialist Clarion Field Clubs

25. The early – mid 1930s was the heyday of ‘Back to Nature’ movements including Socialism, Pacifism & also right-wing
tendencies. In 1932, the writer S. P. B. Mais led 16,000 people onto the South Downs to see the sunrise over
Chanctonbury Ring. The Nature Cure Clinic was opened in Marylebone in 1928, adapting German & Eastern
homeopathic ideas. Raw fruit and vegetable juices were championed & Dr. Edward Bach promoted the healing effects
of flower essences he had found whilst collecting dewdrops from plants at dawn.
The culture of native and peasant peoples (including
gypsies & Native American Indians) was celebrated as
being close to nature & to be emulated.

26. ‘Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” John Muir
Early 19thc U.S and Canadian woodsmen (many of Scots or French extraction) paved the way for the
woodcraft skills & veneration of nature that were exported back to the UK. As noted below however, it was
the technological developments pioneered in England around 1865 such as lightweight tents and sleeping
bags weighing no more than 7lb in total that revolutionised long range trekking and camping both in the UK
and the USA/Canada

27. A Scottish woodcraft pioneer, he
founded the Boy Scouts of America & adapted American Native Indian techniques. His book was hugely
influential on consequent Woodcraft & back to nature groups in England such as John Hargrave’s KK &
Westlake’s Order of Woodcraft Chivalry & Baden Powell’s Boy Scout movement.

28. Seton [left] With Baden Powell
Ernest Seton’s ‘nine principles of woodcraft’ The Birch
Bark Roll (1927).
……Picturesqueness in Everything, Very great importance
should be attached to this. The effect of the picturesque is
magical, and all the more subtle and irresistible because it
is not on the face of it reasonable. The charm of titles and
gay costumes, of the beautiful in ceremony, phrase, dance,
and song, are utilized in all ways.

29. Born in Hastings, 1888, Archie Belaney was controversial but influential . Aged 17, he went to Canada, living with the
Ojibwas in northern Ontario & learned to hunt, trap and survive. He falsely claimed that he was the child of a Scotsman
and an Apache woman, using the name Grey Owl. In the 1930s, he came to the Prince Albert National Park to run a
program on beaver conservation.
He wrote 3 popular books on the importance of conserving beavers: Pilgrims of
the Wild, The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People, & Tales of an Empty
Cabin. Huge public interest in his books/talks paved the way for conservation
programs. At Belaney’s death, it was discovered that his claims of Native ancestry
were false. For a number of years, the story of his subterfuge overshadowed the
importance of his conservation work.

30. Westlake founded The Order in 1916 as a reaction against the militarism of Baden Powell’s Scouting movement.
Thought that women should be “regarded as an incarnation of God” and “worshipped in spirit and in truth.” He
developed his Order of Woodcraft Chivalry & dubbed Dionysus, Pan, and Artemis” as his “Woodcraft Trinity.”
Westlake envisioned a forest park for his group, full of buffalo and other big game animals at his Hampshire
estate ‘Sandy Balls’.

31. ROLF GARDINER (1902-1971): 1920s ‘militant folk consciousness’
Folk dancer, forester, poet, visionary, a pioneer of
organic farming; co-founder of the Soil Association &
‘saviour of the world from soulless mechanisation’.
Believed that a healthy culture & society would flourish if
rooted in the soil leading to a national regeneration .
Thought that Britain's future lay not with its doomed
empire, but in closer union with its 'kin folk, kin tongued'
neighbours in Germany & tried to build an Anglo-
European youth movement during the 1920s. .
People like Rolf Gardiner were true cultural subversives -
pop stars before pop stars even
existed. D.Fowler (biographer)
How well I know these ancient droves, know
them by instinct rather than by the map..’

32. Gardiner founded the Gore Kinship, later the Springhead Ring, and organised study groups and camps for the revival of
rural England. Throughout the 1930s the Springhead Ring ran camps to create a `reinvigorated stock of countrymen' .
1930s Dorset hosted other similar groups. The ‘Wessex Agricultural Defence Association’ and the more nationalistic
‘English Array’ each had links to Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists. Each tried unsuccessfully to woo Gardiner
into their ranks. Gardiner co-founded the ‘Kinship in Husbandry’ in 1941. The Kinship later became Soil Association
(1946). One other of its founding members was Jorian Jenks, author of ‘None Need Starve’ and agricultural advisor to
Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists.
The Soil Association used a stylised
Triskellion as an emblem

33. Gardiner was
responsible for the
revival of many
Folk-Dance groups, &
in 1922 toured Germany
with one
such group. In 1924
he founded the
Travelling Morrice.
Continued to tour
Germany & taught it to
the emergent Hitler
Youth. He claimed the
dance was a thoroughly
masculine and virile
ritual of pagan nature
worship
In 1920 the magazine Youth was launched. This had been a left leaning magazine, but by 1923 Gardiner had become
its editor, and the magazine became nationalist and pro-German.

34. Leslie Paul described himself as a socialist, in love with a mystical vision of England. He was a writer & journalist &
was a member of the Kibbo Kift but at age of 16, set up his own ‘Wheatsheaf’ lodge within the Kindred. He then
decided he wanted a single group that ‘brought all the South London lodges together’. He called this group the
‘Brockley Thing’. It broke away from K.K. & became the Woodcraft Folk, an anti-militarist alternative to the scouts,
which was open to both boys and girls & which still exists today.
‘The Woodcraft Folk seek to establish a new social order. They
believe that when the worker achieves freedom from wage slavery
and the fruits of the earth are garnered by the toilers, then will a
new stage of development open out to man . . .We go out of the
town and away to the hills and woods . . . After the ugliness and
monotony of the smoky city we find new life among the green
growing things and new health in the sun and the four winds. And
this health together with our understanding enables us to fight
tenaciously for the social betterment.’
Who's For the Folk? Woodcraft Folk pamphlet No. 2 (3rd. ed., 1926), p. 1.
Paul during his time in the KibboKift, early 1920s

35. ‘Little Otter’ Lesley Paul & the Woodcraft Folk
In 1933, 500 young members of the Folk camped around a Bronze Age
standing stone in Herefordshire to hear a lecture on ley lines while
two boys crouched in wicker cages on top of the monument. Paul
lived in a cottage in Devonshire where he sunbathed naked &
denounced leather shoes. ‘Vegetarianism was in the progressive air,’
Paul later wrote. ‘New food shops catered for fantastic new-life tastes.
… I drank a mixture of malted milk, hot water and olive oil which was
held to have the most beneficial effects on one’s colon and nerves.’ He
was an admirer of the Soviet Union, a socialist, and a pacifist.
‘Pacifism had an extraordinary affinity for vegetarianism, & so we
lived on enormous wooden bowls of garlic-flavoured salad, and
messes of lentils and roasted pine-kernels garnished with leeks. We
thrived.’

36. ‘Tall, with sharp, almost Romany features, an aquiline nose,
and a mass of wavy black hair‘, Hargrave (1894-1982) was an
eccentric visionary and polymath; illustrator, cartoonist, wood
carver,
anti-fascist, thriller novelist, inventor, psychic healer & a
forefather of the modern anti-capitalist movements. He hated
the restrictions/‘shackles’ of industrialised society.
‘White Fox’
Hargrave 1920s
‘We should recognize once and for all‘ that the ideas and
ideals which may have fitted fairly well into the social fabric
of 1908’ [year Scouts formed] ‘may be very ill-fitting "reach-
medowns" in 1920.’ J.Hargrave

37. John Tracey:
‘Hargrave liked to be dramatic He walked almost on tip toe
like a Red Indian. I travelled in cars with him and he could
be normal enough . But he was self-centred in
conversation, he wanted people to listen to him, he could
get on his high-horse. His whole life was spent trying to be
special, trying to get his ideas adapted in some sense’.
In the 1970s musician Chris Judge Smith (founder of van
der Graaf Generator) wrote a musical about Hargrave & the
KK.:
‘John H was the most extraordinary person, the most
compelling I have ever met in my life…he had an enormous
presence….the KK responded to contemporary ills with
intellectual & physical courage, men & women alike an
energetic, creative community with ideas above their
station.’
D.H Lawrence, 1928
‘Hargrave is brilliant but not
easy…’ (Leslie Paul)
‘….I want individualists. I have no wish to “boss it” over
anyone. I ask for one thing only. Work: show results.’
(Hargrave).

38. Hargrave served as a stretcher-bearer during the Dardanelles campaign. He was passed over as Gilwell camp chief by
Baden Powell & in 1920 began to write a series of provocative articles for London Scouting's The Trail as 'White Fox',
the spokesman of a woodcraft left revolt against the Scouts’ paternalistic and militaristic tendencies. In 1920,
anticipating his expulsion, he launched a new, more woodcraft-centred, primitivist, and tribal grouping, based once
again upon Thompson Setons writings. Hargrave called it the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (KKK) - an archaic dialect
phrase for 'Proof of Great Strength'.
‘White Fox’ John Hargrave
Hargrave also borrowed from Stanley Hall’s 'recapitulation’
theories as used by the OWC &was greatly influenced by
the Utopian world-brotherhood visions of author H. G.
Wells (who became a KK member), evident in books like A
Modern Utopia (1905), The Outline of History (1920), and
Men Like Gods (1923).
Despite receiving support from socialist and co-operative
groups in south London, the KKK (unlike Paul’s ‘Woodcraft
Folk’ group) did not set out to be a left-wing outdoor
movement.

41. K.Kift’s magazine
‘the Nomad’.
Hargrave’s woodcraft books. He also wrote Confession of the Kibbo
Kift (1927), The Great War Brings it Home (1919) and Young Winkle (1925).
Lonecraft (1912), his best selling
book, was the start of the UK
Lone Scout program & has
been credited as one of the 2
books that popularised scouting
and Woodcraft in Europe, the
other book being Ernest
Seton’s Book of Woodcraft
1918

42. German Kibbo publications

43. Wrist Band designed by John Hargrave: 1920 - 1930
Scaldic Staff
Dove Totem: 1920-1930 White Fox Totem

45. The Kibbo Kift had a number of prominent members: Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, May Billinghurst, Mary Neal CBE, the
journalist Henry Nevinson and the photographer Angus McBean. The advisory Council also included: the arctic explorer
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the psychologist/author Havelock Ellis, the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, the Bengali
poet Rabindranath Tagore, the author H. G. Wells and the biologist Sir Julian Huxley. However the bulk of its members
were ’….mostly clerks, minor civil servants, garage hands and teachers, living in the Home Counties.' (Rolf Gardiner, a
former KKK member and youth activist).

46. The Kindred used the native American greeting of the
outstretched arm and raised open hand (to show you held
no weapon) and Hargrave was “somewhat annoyed” when
he discovered that the Italian Fascists’ raised arm salute
looked exactly the same.
Hargrave dropped the hand greeting when too many
photos of Nazis in Germany with raised arms “caused
confusion”. He did not like Nazi ideology calling it ‘racial
absurdities and Nordic nonsense’

47. Gleemaster ‘Hawk’, (Edward Denton Crickborn b.1901). He
was a Boy Scout, Bushman’s Thong and King’s Scout. He
joined the Kibbo Kift in his twenties.

51. Preceded by the Great Kist, the Kindred walked in solemn
procession round Athinastead, silent save for the Headman’s
‘Peace be to All’, echoed by the Heralds at the end of the Iona
procession. ‘Peace be to all beings’…Far off could be seen a
double line of torch bearers with torches a gleaming &
flashing in the Fire Dance of Festival “

52. In 1924, the peak year for the Kindred, the total attendance at the annual camp was only 236. Hargrave s leadership
came under direct challenge from the south London co-operative groups over the issue of whether or not he could
override the decisions of a local branch (Leslie Paul’s the ‘Brockleything’, later Woodcraft Folk) in SE London. According
to Paul, 1/3 of the Kindred resigned that day due
to Hargrave’s ‘dictatorial tactics’
’

54. ‘Kibboettes’

55. ‘Kibboettes’

56. More ‘Kibboettes’

57. Kibbo Tents

58. Kibbo ART. ‘Metropolis meets the Middle Ages’

60. ‘A Private Army in England’
‘”Kommandant” Hargrave [right]
salutes his troops’

61. ‘Iron discipline reigns in the camp…..’ (The Swiss Illustrated Newspaper)
‘The Greenshirts/Social credity party was almost Facist’ (Leslie Paul)

64. Mosley
& wife
ca.1936

66. • ‘Action For Conservation’: online at: http://www.actionforconservation.org/#!about/cbwn C
• Barnes, Simon (2016): The Sacred Combe: a search for humanity’s heartland (London: Bloomsbury)
• ‘Caught by the River’: http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/
• ‘Earth Matters on Stage’ online at: https://emosfestival.wordpress.com/
• ‘History of Eco Theatre’ online at: https://ecospherictheater.wordpress.com/category/theory/
• Leopold, Aldo (1949): A Sand County Almanac. Excerpt ‘The Land Ethic’ online at:
http://www.waterculture.org/uploads/Leopold_TheLandEthic.pdf
• May, T. (2007): ‘Beyond Bambi: toward a dangerous ecocriticism in theatre studies.’ Theatre Topics 17.2: 95-110.
• ‘Superhero Clubhouse’ online at: http://www.superheroclubhouse.org/
• The Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts’ online at: http://www.sustainablepractice.org/