The politics of the organic movement – an overview

Since 1945, an Agricultural Revolution has occurred in Britain whose significance and impact outstrip anything which occurred in the 18th century. It has turned farming from the practice of husbandry into a form of industrial production, transformed the landscape through its destructive effects on traditional features and substantially changed the nature of the food we eat. It has ignored what the agronomist Sir George Stapledon (1882-1960) termed ‘the Law of Operative Ignorance’ – the fact that every scientific advance opens up new areas of uncertainty – and as a result, Britain’s fields are in danger of becoming an outdoor laboratory for the benefit of the biotech industry. As farmers go out of business – especially in dairying, a form of agriculture particularly well suited to our soil and climate – we face the prospect of depending increasingly for our survival on imported food and oil. To describe this as unwise is to understate the case: ‘suicidal’ would be more accurate.(1)

Yet anyone wishing to learn about this agricultural revolution from Andrew Marr’s recent book A History of Modern Britain will find just one index reference to agriculture: in the Prologue he refers to the slump which affected UK farming from the 1870s until 1940. On the social, economic, geographical and cultural impact of industrial agriculture since the war, the reader finds nothing but passing references to BSE, the Countryside Alliance and Tesco. Even the foot-and-mouth fiasco of 2001 is absent. If Marr were writing the book today, when there is some glimmering awareness dawning of our potentially desperate situation, perhaps he would treat the subject of farming with more respect. Does the explanation for this extraordinary lacuna lie in a distaste for the earthy experiences of agriculture, or simply in an unimaginative assumption that food can be taken for granted? Is there perhaps a covert belief that farmers and growers partake in ‘the idiocy of rural life’ and that their activities are inferior to and less important than those of technologists and media folk? Or is there a liberal unease with the political stance of Tory farmer/land-owners and the reactionary supporters of the Countryside Alliance?

These speculations on Marr’s reasons for ignoring a major feature of post-war British history may serve as a prologue to the main purpose of this essay: consideration of the political dimension to the organic movement, which has always argued for the national necessity of a flourishing agriculture and for the creation of a vibrant rural economy and culture based on farming. It has, in fact, envisaged a considerably larger agricultural population than is envisaged by the proponents of ‘efficient’, industrialised farming. From its early days in the 1930s, it has urged a greater degree of national self-sufficiency, resisted the ideology of free trade and protested against the exploitation of overseas economies and natural resources. It was environmentally and ecologically aware at least 25 years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and it has always sought a more equal balance of rural and urban, of agriculture and industry.(2)

Mary Langman, who worked during the 1930s and 40s at the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, South London (one of the most important organisations in the organic movement’s development) farmed in Kent and served the organic cause right through to the millennium. She maintained that the Soil Association (arguably the most significant of the various organic bodies) was strictly non-political.(3) By this she seems to have meant non-party political; but a movement which holds the positions just outlined must be considered to have a strong political dimension to it, however that might be expressed in terms of party allegiance. This article will demonstrate that for more than seventy years prominent figures in the organic movement (hereafter ‘organicists’) have been involved in political activity at almost every point on the ideological spectrum. One implication of this fact is that no coherent organic politics can be said to exist – that a support for organic cultivation is compatible with any and every political position. This might make sense if one assumes that the organic movement is about nothing more than methods of cultivation, but leading organicists have always seen the movement as a force for social change: one current luminary assured me a couple of years ago that it is ‘revolutionary’, while Lawrence Woodward, Director of the Organic Research Centre in Berkshire, told the Organic Growers’ Alliance conference at Cirencester in December 2006 that the organic movement’s purpose is to change the world. In the movement’s formative years, organic cultivation was just one aspect of a strategy to establish an ‘organic’ society to replace the mechanistic, atomised urbanism of an industrialised nation – an aim which, as we shall shortly see, allied the early movement with the ‘radical Right’ of politics.

How useful, though, are the terms Left and Right? Jorian Jenks, the Soil Association’s first Editorial Secretary, was a leading British Union of Fascists (BUF) member and therefore ‘right-wing’; but he was opposed to free trade, believed that finance capitalism was destructive of national interest and the environment, and deplored the power of Big Business: positions, which, once upon a time, were held by the Left.(4) The generation of organic activists, who in the 1970s were influenced by John Seymour’s self-sufficiency ideas and the commune movement, distinguished themselves from the older generation, whom they saw as essentially reactionary; but it might reasonably be argued that the ideal of self-sufficiency is itself a nostalgic retreat and that rejection of the role of the state fits in nicely with the current ideological drive to deregulation.

The whole issue is complex almost to the point of impenetrability, and no attempt will be made in this article to impose any abstract framework on the inchoate variety of political positions adopted by organicists over the past seven decades, though I shall at the end make one suggestion about a common thread which can be perceived. Instead, we shall content ourselves with a slog around the empirical foothills which will provide material for anyone ambitious enough to try scaling the greater heights of organic political theory.

The 1930s and 40s: links to the radical Right

Ever since the groundbreaking work of Richard Griffiths, it has been undeniable that the early organic movement was bound up with what historians term ‘the radical Right’. Further work in this area has been undertaken by various academics. (5) I would argue that the movement really began to coalesce in 1938, following the publication of Viscount Lymington’s Famine in England. This polemic was widely and well reviewed – even in the New Statesman – and particularly influenced Eve Balfour, who founded the Soil Association in 1946. Its publication led to a conference at Lymington’s Hampshire estate in July 1938 which brought together several key figures in organic history: among them, the agricultural botanist Sir Albert Howard, the nutritionist Sir Robert McCarrison, R. G. Stapledon, and the landowners Rolf Gardiner and Lord Northbourne. Lymington had been Conservative MP for Basingstoke from 1929 to 1934, resigning his seat in disgust at parliamentary democracy’s inability to deal with the economic depression. He admired Mussolini; he was prominent in William Sanderson’s English Mistery and went on to establish his own version of it, the English Array; he knew the Nazi leadership personally; he ran an anti-war, pro-organic newspaper called New Pioneer, and was lucky to escape internment during the war. He was also a close friend of the extreme anti-semite and eugenicist Anthony Ludovici, helping him find a publisher for his book Jews and the Jews in Britain. As I have argued elsewhere, it is impossible to separate his agricultural activities from his political aims.(6)

Lymington was also a close friend of two other ‘squires’, the Dorset forester, farmer and folk-dancer Rolf Gardiner, and the East Kent landowner Lord Northbourne. Gardiner’s sympathies for Germany have been well documented; the British security services were so wary of him that he was denied access to post-war Germany for some years. His defenders claim that he was a naïve romantic who knew nothing about politics, but a researcher is badly needed who can investigate German archives for records of his activities on the Continent. As for Northbourne, who wrote one of the best summaries of the organic case, Look to the Land (1940), it would appear that he belonged to the BUF for a short time before deciding that Mosley was in the pay of the Jews. It would also appear that he was a friend and admirer of the leftist S. G. Hobson.(7)

In 1941 Lymington and Gardiner established the Kinship in Husbandry, a group whose name smacks somewhat of ‘blood and soil’, to promote the interests of primary producers against those of the ‘unproductive middle-man’ and to try to make the case for a flourishing post-war rural economy. Its members included the topographer H. J. Massingham, who, the records show, fell out seriously with Gardiner on account of the latter’s Nazi sympathies; the farmer and botanist J. E. Hosking; the poet and author Edmund Blunden; the historian Arthur Bryant, whose 1939 book Unfinished Victory was a paean of praise to Hitler (and can never, in my experience, be found alongside Bryant’s patriotic histories in second-hand bookshops); and Philip Mairet, editor of the New English Weekly, a periodical devoted to the twin causes of organic husbandry and Social Credit finance reform.(8)

Some other figures need to be mentioned. Jorian Jenks, Mosley’s agricultural advisor, has already been referred to. He edited the Soil Association journal Mother Earth from its inception in 1946 until his death in 1963, and edited the journal Rural Economy during the 1940s and 50s; he supported Mosley’s attempted comeback in 1948. Henry Williamson was another admirer of Mosley, dedicating The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941) to him; like Gardiner, he has been defended as a ‘Romantic’, even his membership of the BUF apparently not entitling him to be called a Fascist. The fact that he was a Bolshevik supporter after World War 1 has drawn less attention; clearly he tended to political extremism. And there was the Marquis of Tavistock (later the Duke of Bedford), a monetary reformer who advocated organic husbandry and ran the British People’s Party, a fringe organisation perhaps best described as national-socialist. Massingham put his name forward as a possible Kinship member.(9)

These organicists wrote chiefly on agricultural and rural life, but the organic movement was from the start curious about the relationship between the soil, plants, nutrition and human health. There was widespread concern between the wars about the state of national health, a concern that often had an economic and racial dimension. Were the nation’s industries losing man-hours through sickness? Was the potential fighting-force adequate for the next war, or were we, as Sir Albert Howard suggested, ‘building a C3 nation’? More apocalyptically, were the white races in danger of decline as a result of urban living and lack of vitality in their foodstuffs? As Geert Mak has pointed out, a concern for health and purity was a widespread feature of European thought at this time, and so advocacy of wholesome, ‘honest’ food could sit easily with a eugenicist agenda for a pure race. Most extreme among those on the organic movement’s fringes were Ludovici, who recommended incest and mass murder, and Dr. Alexis Carrel, who thought that painless lethal chambers would help rid the white races of their ‘degenerates’. Ludovici condemned the organicists for concentrating on dietary issues and ignoring the importance of breeding. Emphasis on breeding is rare in early organicist writings, though it can be found in Lymington, Stapledon and L. J. Picton; and Dr. Innes Pearse of the Pioneer Health Centre addressed the Eugenics Society. One is sometimes aware that, even in their efforts to offer ‘honest’ food to the British population, some of the organicists have the ulterior motive of racial improvement.(10)

Edgar Saxon’s journal Health and Life is an interesting case in point. In November 1938 it printed a piece on the healthy outdoor life – ‘good-natured fun prevailed’ – purportedly being enjoyed in Germany, and at times its articles came very close to a ‘blood-and-soil’ philosophy, advocating for instance ‘a virile, eager and rooted nation’, with its roots ‘deep in a faithfully husbanded and fertile soil’. While Saxon himself, despite expressing such views, regarded Nazism as ‘a cruel and heartless pagan cult’, his assistant Harry John Byngham, who de-christened himself ‘Dion’ and believed as late as 1939 that nudism was the way to peace in Europe, admired Ludovici and Aleister Crowley, and worked for the Duke of Bedford’s journal Peoples [sic] Post in the years after the war.(11) When one considers also the record of Lords Teviot and Sempill, Ronald Duncan’s sympathy for feudalism and the hierarchical Toryism of the Lowestoft MP, Pierse Loftus, it is not hard to make a strong case for the British organic movement as an example of the reactionary romanticism which was one current in the broader stream of European fascism.(12)

And yet. It is more complex than this, as we can see if we go back further. The organic family tree contains among its roots the socialist William Morris, the anarchist Kropotkin and the Tolstoy-an C. W. Daniel, Edgar Saxon’s mentor. Various important figures had been involved in socialist politics: Philip Mairet and his colleague on the New English Weekly, Maurice Reckitt, were Guild Socialists, while Aubrey Westlake, a London doctor with a Hampshire estate, was active in Labour politics in Bermondsey, later converting to Social Credit. A number of figures later prominent in the organic movement were involved in Dimitrije Mitrinovic’s cosmic-socialist New Britain movement in the early 1930s: these included Mairet and Westlake, George Scott Williamson (co-founder of the Pioneer Health Centre), Lawrence Hills the horticulturist and John Stewart Collis, author of books of ‘poetic ecology’ in the post-war years. Mitrinovic and his disciples were monetary reformers, favouring Major C. H. Douglas’s doctrine of Social Credit.

I have examined elsewhere the close links in the 1930s and 40s between the organic movement and monetary reform; these stemmed from the organicists’ belief that national agriculture could not flourish under the existing financial system, which favoured free trade. Social Credit was another offshoot of socialism; rejected by the Labour Party, it tended to the Right. Some of its adherents were anti-semitic, but this was not inevitable. Edgar Saxon was a Social Crediter, and Health and Life at one point supported John Hargrave’s Green Shirt movement.(13)

The Christian Socialist Chandos Group – Mairet and Reckitt were again key figures – originated as a pro-trade union response to the collapse of the General Strike, and its first book, Coal, was published by the left/liberal Hogarth Press. The organic farmer Laurence Easterbrook was for a long time the New Statesman’s agricultural correspondent, writing some brilliant articles in the late 1930s; during the war and afterwards, he wrote for the liberal News Chronicle. F. C. R. Douglas, Labour MP for Battersea and a farmer and barrister, argued the organic case regularly in the pages of the Fertiliser Journal, and applied his legal knowledge to establishing the Soil Association as a charity. Sir Stafford Cripps, a friend of Eve Balfour since they campaigned together against tithes in the 1930s, was on the verge of joining the Association at the time of his death, and received a brief obituary in Living Earth.14

The whole area is bewilderingly complex. If any conclusion at all can be drawn from this period it is that organic politics consisted of opposition to state socialism, big business and the finance system, favouring instead a much greater degree of national self-sufficiency, devolution of government, a reformed monetary system, a more even balance of rural and urban, and a tilting of economic advantage towards producers and consumers. While some form of ‘regional socialism’ would be acceptable, the planned society of the New Towns, the National Health Service and the socialist agriculture of writers like F. W. Bateson and C. S. Orwin were entirely the wrong way to go. Organic societies grew locally, ‘from the ground up’. But how, one has to ask, would the new economy and the change in social balance be brought about if not by the power of the state?(15)

The 1950s and 60s : a conservative stance?

After the war, Tom Williams’s major Agriculture Act of 1947 confirmed Britain on the path of industrialised agriculture, with the emphasis on ‘efficiency’ (measured by output per man rather than, as the organicists advocated, output per acre). The Soil Association, founded the year before, was the most significant of the various organic groups in existence after the end of the war. It has been said that the organic pioneers were ignored, but this is not the case: they posed a threat to the vested interests of the chemical fertilizer companies, who maintained a propaganda campaign against them in the pages of the farming press. Eve Balfour’s book The Living Soil (1943) was widely reviewed and by 1948 was in its eighth edition. The Soil Association was founded in response to the interest it aroused.(16)

Balfour was the niece of Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, but few of us hold the same views as our uncles. Reading Chapters IX and X of the first edition of The Living Soil, you could at times imagine that you are reading R. H. Tawney. According to the scholar Erin Gill, who is researching Balfour’s life, she had sympathy for moderate forms of socialism and disliked the Fascist movement. Patrick Wright describes her as having ‘laundered’ the views of Famine in England, enabling the Soil Association to free itself from the far-Right taint of Viscount Lymington’s racialism.(17)What, then, can be made of the presence of Lymington (by now the Earl of Portsmouth), Sempill, Teviot and various Kinship members on the Soil Association Council, and of Jorian Jenks as editor of Mother Earth?

To be blunt, I don’t know. Purely from the pages of Mother Earth, it would be difficult to discern a strong ‘radical Right’ ideology at work: would Cripps have been willing to join the Soil Association if this had been so? Of course, a careful decoding of the subtext might enable politically-minded readers to believe they could identify ulterior motives; Portsmouth and company presumably saw the Association as one means of promoting their vision of a regenerated Britain. And since the organic philosophy emphasises ‘holism’, it might be argued that Jenks’s agricultural views could not be separated from his political convictions. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the organic movement’s political character dwindled after the late 1940s. Social Credit was insignificant, its periodical, the New English Weekly, folding in 1949; Christendom, the voice of medievalist Christian socialism, ceased the following year; Peoples Post was never more than a fringe publication, and the Marquis of Tavistock (by then the Duke of Bedford) died in 1953. Lymington (since 1943 the Earl of Portsmouth) devoted himself increasingly to his Kenyan estates. H. J. Massingham described the earth as a matter of such vital importance ‘as to be above and below politics’, expressing this view in practice by writing Prophecy of Famine with the socialist Jew Edward Hyams, whose New Statesman article ‘Soil and Socialism’ had impressed him. But while Massingham could agree with most of Hyams’s analysis, neither he nor his organicist colleagues could accept land nationalisation as a solution to the problems. (18) Nor did they accept the nationalisation of health provision: the NHS was regarded as a ‘national sickness service’ because it ignored preventive medicine, closed down experiments like the Pioneer Health Centre and paid no attention to the role of nutrition.

The organic movement in the 1950s and 60s is a topic requiring far more research, but my impression is that its political stance, in so far as it had one, leaned towards the Conservatives while being wary of the excesses of business in the fields of food production and agricultural efficiency. Soil Association membership lists show a significant number of titled, military and professional members, in addition to the usually conservative farmers and landowners. By the mid-1960s, though, at least two Association members were restive, complaining that its journal tended to align the Association with conservative politics. A response signed by, among others, Eve Balfour, the journal’s new editor Robert Waller, Association President the Earl of Bradford and Vice-President Sam Mayall, stated that the Association included among its members all shades of political opinion, because the issue of soil fertility knew ‘no frontiers, no politics’.(19)

Jorian Jenks’s death in 1963 marks something of a turning-point in the organic movement’s political history, as the editorial department of the Soil Association then passed for nearly a decade into the hands of Robert Waller and Michael Allaby. Allaby came to the Association by chance, but, having been much affected by Silent Spring, he sympathised with its ecological outlook. He was a Labour Party member in the 1970s while working for The Ecologist. Waller was a liberal who found the politics of Gardiner and Portsmouth rebarbative and who had scant regard for the aristocrats and military figures to be found in the Soil Association’s upper echelons. He and Allaby proved to be kindred spirits and set about trying to make the Association, with its strong but little-known track record of ecological concern, a leading organisation in the burgeoning environmental movement. Allaby recalled that in the early days the office received considerable mail from various far-Right groups, but that this declined with time. He and Waller argued that ecology was not about purity, but about variety.(20)

Schumacher

Waller discovered that E. F. Schumacher, who was writing impressive pieces for The Observer, had been an Association member since 1951, and proceeded to involve him in its work; Schumacher served as President from 1971 until his sudden death in 1977. A refugee from Nazism and a brilliant economist at the National Coal Board, Schumacher was a socialist who, according to his close friend and colleague George McRobie, believed that his hand would drop off if ever he cast a vote for the Conservatives. He distrusted another major figure who emerged in the organic and environmental movement at this time, Edward Goldsmith, partly on account of his wealth, and – I speculate here – partly because of his politics. According to Allaby, Goldsmith dallied with the National Front at one point, seeing the far-Right party as a possible vehicle for organicist ideas. (The British National Party today continues what is sometimes called the ‘Brown/ Green’ alliance.)(21) We shall return to the Goldsmiths below.

There are one or two other indicators of the Soil Association’s political attitudes at this time which help to confuse the picture. On the Scottish Borders lived the influential figure of Cdr. Robert L. Stuart, who had been involved in various organic initiatives including the Soil and Health group based in Edinburgh. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Stuart ran Soil Association weeks at his estate at Chirnside. These were events which drew many of the chief figures in the Association, and featured some impressive lectures and demanding discussions. I have listened to many hours of recordings of these occasions, and the impression which emerges is of an implicitly pro-Conservative tone, with occasional jibes at Harold Wilson’s ‘socialist’ government, a rather precious concern about the nation’s moral decline and the suggestion that an organic diet would ensure that workers took fewer days off sick. Stuart’s son Moncrieff ‘Mick’ Stuart, also active in the organic movement, was at one time prominent in the Conservative Party on the Scottish Borders.(22)

Gregory Sams, a young Nebraskan living in the UK from the mid-1960s and dealing in wholefood goods, recalls the Soil Association as a club for gentleman farmers in which he felt out of place, but which was the only organisation he could find interested in his produce. The appearance on the organic scene of Sams and his older brother Craig, now a millionaire from his sale of Green & Black’s, and Soil Association treasurer, heralds changes which were to occur in the 1970s and early 80s.(23)

The 1970s to the 21st century: from self-sufficiency to consumerism

When my book The Origins of the Organic Movement (2001) appeared, I was subjected to an off-the-cuff verbal assault at the 2002 Soil Association conference by Lawrence Woodward, who told me that the figures who had featured in the book had little relevance to the organic movement as it is today, ‘which comes from somewhere quite different’. Woodward’s comments were followed in due course by a more considered response from West Wales organic growers David Frost and Carolyn Wacher. Ten years earlier, Tracey Clunies-Ross had attacked my anthology The Organic Tradition (1988) on similar lines. All four critics seemed uneasy about connecting the post-1970s organic movement with the various crypto-fascists, racists and paternalist squires who were involved in establishing the Soil Association. Instead, the argument went, the contemporary organic movement had been created by a group of radical, leftist, alternative anti-urbanites who had rebelled against Eve Balfour and her aristocratic cronies, established the more vigorous and practical organisations, the Organic Growers Association and British Organic Farmers; and staged a coup within the Soil Association which revitalised it and made it more relevant to the late-twentieth century. Some of the leading figures – Peter Segger and Dr. Nic Lampkin, for instance – were active in CND, and clashed with the Association President Lord O’Hagan, a Conservative MEP. Angela Bates, a Vice President of the Association, who resigned in protest at the aims of the younger generation, interpreted the behaviour of Segger in particular as ‘class war’. Woodward disagrees, arguing that the Tory farmer Barry Wookey worked with and was respected by the younger generation.(24)

Again, we find a complex history. Certain figures in this younger generation were from left-wing backgrounds: David Frost was an academic, and Lawrence Woodward came from a South Yorkshire mining community. Various factors – American ‘counterculture’, John Seymour’s self-sufficiency books and the 1973-74 oil crisis – led this generation to regard organic cultivation as a rational, far-sighted response to an unsustainable, oil-based, consumerist, technological society. Woodward married David Astor’s daughter Alice, and so became privy to the fears of Astor and Schumacher that the scarcity of fossil fuels could lead, via food and energy shortages, to the imposition of an extreme authoritarian government. Patrick Holden, now Director of the Soil Association, was influenced by Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, moved to West Wales and set up a commune on a bleak hill farm, to experiment with an alternative form of social living. (The experiment failed, but the farm survives.) David Frost also moved to West Wales, in order to escape The System and try to establish a more viable way of life than that which capitalism offered. One can imagine a Marxist objecting that he was in fact removing himself from the class struggle.

The position of this ‘younger’ generation is more clearly paradoxical in another respect, though. Those who went off to escape the system and live self-sufficiently found that they could not survive unless they were able to sell what they grew. It is not too cynical to suggest that one major reason for the assault launched on the old guard at the Soil Association was a desire to increase the market for organic produce; and so the radicals, who had imagined they were dropping out of the system, soon found themselves back in it again and, in effect, trying to change it from the inside. Some voices were doubtful about, or downright opposed to, cosying up to supermarkets and government bureaucracy, but they were ignored by those who felt that ‘the market’ could, through the power of the consumer, ensure that increased demand for organic goods led to increased acreage being cultivated organically rather than industrially. At one time the call was for ‘20 per cent by 2000’, but this proved impossibly optimistic.

Influential sections of the organic movement thus converted to the idea of the Market and became pragmatic, seeking alliances with whichever politicians might seem sympathetic to the cause of promoting it in the marketplace through legislation. In the 1980s the free-marketeer Conservative MP Sir Richard Body wrote powerfully against the evils of industrial agriculture and state subsidies, while John Selwyn Gummer was assiduously courted when Minister of Agriculture. (25) In the Labour Party, the not-yet-disgraced MP Ron Davies and later Michael Meacher were identified as potential supporters. (Ultimately, of course, the UK’s agricultural policy is subject to the requirements of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which means that the organic cause has to be fought for internationally.) The current Shadow spokesman on the environment, food and rural affairs, Peter Ainsworth, is the latest object of the Soil Association’s wooing, in anticipation of a Conservative government returning no later than 2010. The organic movement is once again ‘non-political’, in the sense that influential parts of it have swallowed the defeatist view that consumer capitalism is ‘the only game in town’ and seek to make it work for them. This requires publicity, which in turn requires celebrity interest, with the result that the organic case today is represented not, as once, by distinguished scientists, agriculturalists and doctors, but by the rich and famous.(26)

Current developments

If Tracey Clunies-Ross was encouraged that the organic movement 20 years ago was no longer dominated by the titled, the rich and the famous, then she must be despondent at current developments. The titled (the Prince of Wales, the Marchioness of Worcester, the Countess of March, Lord Melchett); the famous (John Humphrys, Jamie Oliver, Jonathan Dimbleby, Jonathon Porritt), and the rich (Peter Kindersley, Jody Schechter, the late Anita Roddick) have all been prominent in their support for organics in recent years. A new generation of Goldsmiths is evident, with Zac Goldsmith demonstrating a complete lack of joined-up thinking: having edited The Ecologist and chronicled the abuses and damage which inevitably follow in the wake of the unfettered free market, he now stands as a prospective Conservative MP. He introduced the topic of eugenics at the Soil Association’s conference in January 2007 by raising the spectre of falling sperm counts caused by chemicals in food: in contrast to his uncle Teddy, who has advocated a greatly reduced UK population. Part of the same network is the actress Donna Air, ‘the face of Organic Fortnight’ in 2006, who is the partner of Damien Aspinall, the son of gambler, misanthropist and zookeeper John Aspinall. Aspinall has followed his father into the gambling industry: such is the company the Soil Association currently keeps.(27)

But there is a strong groundswell of unease in the movement about the prominence given to Yummy Mummies, the close links with supermarkets and the increasing number of organic millionaires. The Labour MPs Alan Simpson and Michael Meacher seem genuinely committed, but are less glamorous than Zac Goldsmith. And the anarchist strain, stemming from Kropotkin and the Distributists, remains a potential alternative to the chaos that will ensue when the scarcity and expense of fossil fuels face us with the prospect of hunger and social breakdown. A recent book by Patrick Noble, who farms in North Wales, puts an eccentric but appealing case for small-scale local democracy – and for the need to start creating such networks while there is still time.(28) The Transition Towns initiative started by Rob Hopkins is a straw in this particular wind.

And it is here, perhaps, that we find at least one clearly identifiable thread in the confused political tapestry of the organic movement: the tendency towards the smaller scale, the regional, the local. It is found in Kropotkin, the Guild Socialists, the Distributists, the regional socialism of Dr. Kenneth Barlow, the estates envisaged by Rolf Gardiner, the rise of box schemes and farmers’ markets and local economies and Transition Towns. It resists Big Business, the ‘free market’, state socialism and, today, the EU – all forms of top-down management. Instead, it believes in an ‘emergent order’ that comes from nature itself. This is why the anarchist Colin Ward was so impressed by the work of the Pioneer Health Centre, where children were allowed to choose freely which activities they undertook, and the result was a degree of harmony far from the chaos which disciplinarians would have predicted. Similar ideas have been expressed by Gregory Sams.(29)

Conclusion: the politics of survival

In conclusion, it is worth considering the response which Eve Balfour and her colleagues made to the criticism of Mother Earth’s supposed bias to conservative politics. They pointed out that Soil Association membership embraced all classes and all political parties, Jew and Arab, ‘negroes and white extremists’, and that members were united by a belief in soil fertility as the basis of sound nutrition. Over the intervening four decades and more, the organic movement has attracted support from Tories, members of UKIP, the BNP, senior Labour politicians, supporters of CND, anarchists, members of the Socialist Alliance, Lib Dems, and, inevitably, Greens. All this is a matter of empirical fact, and, if the organic movement is identified with no more than a concern for the relationship between soil, nutrition and health, need not be puzzling. But there has always been present in the movement a more far-reaching desire to change society, whether by restoring the regional influence of landowners, or resisting the power of the centralised State, or opposing the power of finance capitalism and corporations, or encouraging localism, or trying to ensure a sustainable future in which democracy might survive the disappearance of cheap oil.(30)

Even such an apparently non-political body as the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now Garden Organic, based at Ryton, on the outskirts of Coventry), under its inspirational founder Lawrence Hills, found it necessary to be involved in campaigns which took it into the political arena: opposition to nuclear testing, for instance, and the need for stricter regulation of the labelling of pesticides. Demands for reform of the economic system are still made, as they were in the heyday of Social Credit, by supporters of the organic cause; and Frances Hutchinson and her colleagues, in particular, have made a powerful case for the continuing relevance of finance reform, Guild Socialism and Social Credit, decoupled from the anti-semitism which at times accompanied these policies in the 1930s.(31)

Those who enjoy the abstractions of political theory are welcome to deduce, from the voluminous writings and complex history of the organic movement, what its political implications ‘really’ are. But it is important to remember that the movement, despite its current liaison with consumerism, is really about practical issues of survival. During its 70 years’ existence, it has drawn attention to environmental degradation and soil erosion, exploitation of overseas producers, the damage inflicted on the natural world by a bellicose industrial agriculture, the mistreatment of animals and birds in factory farming, the increasing control of the food system by corporations and the potential value of preventive medicine. It has argued for a concept of agricultural efficiency based on output per acre rather than output per man, and has opposed to the conventional finance-based concept of economics one which is based on the original meaning of the word: care of home resources, the earth being our home. It has argued for localism in distribution systems and pointed out the sheer environmental wastefulness of the global free-market system. And, to return to our starting-point, Andrew Marr’s earth-free history of post-war Britain, it has always reminded those willing to listen that a thriving agriculture and horticulture are essential for national survival. As supplies of oil become increasingly difficult to access, Britain may find it more useful to look to the recent experience of Cuba than to put its faith in the free-market generosity of other countries. The political results of these exigencies remain to be seen – in practice.(32)

Philip Conford is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History, Reading University, and author of The Origins of the Organic Movement (2001).

Notes

1. On ‘operative ignorance’, see R. Waller, Prophet of the New Age, 1962, p. 276. For studies of UK agriculture since World War 2, see G. Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside, 1997; J. Martin, The Development of Modern Agriculture, 2000, and R. A. E. North, The Death of British Agriculture, 2001.
2. On the early philosophy of the organic movement, see P. Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement, 2001.
3. Interview with Mary Langman, 28 June 2000. On the Pioneer Health Centre, see A. Stallibrass, Being Me and Also Us, 1989.
4. On Jenks, see R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Towards Mother Earth: Jorian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History 39/3 (2004), pp. 353-71.
5. R. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right, 1983; P. Wright, The Village That Died for England, 2002; D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 1998; D. Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933-1939, 2003.
6. Lymington’s archives are held at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester. P. Conford, ‘Organic Society: Agriculture and Radical Politics in the Career of Gerard Wallop, Ninth Earl of Portsmouth (1898-1984)’, Agricultural History Review 53/1 (2005), pp. 78-96. On Ludovici, see D. Stone, Breeding Superman, 2002, pp. 33-61.
7. On Gardiner, see Wright, Village (see note 5), pp. 180-93, 211-40. On Northbourne, see footnote 54 to P. Conford, ‘Finance versus farming: Rural Reconstruction and Economic Reform, 1894-1955’, Rural History 13/2 (2002), p. 241. S. G. Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left, 1938, p. 251. Northbourne refers favourably to Hobson’s ideas in Look to the Land.
8. On the Kinship, see P. Conford and R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘A “Secret Society”? The Internal and External Relations of the Kinship in Husbandry, 1941-52’, Rural History 15/2 (2004), pp. 189-206. On The New English Weekly, see P. Conford, ‘A Forum for Organic Husbandry: The New English Weekly and Agricultural Policy, 1939-1949’, Agricultural History Review 46, pp. 197-210.
9. On Williamson, see his daughter-in-law Anne Williamson’s Henry Williamson: Tarka and the Last Romantic, 1997. Pages 195-97 deal with his Nazi sympathies. Tavistock’s autobiography, written in 1949, by which time he was Hastings, Duke of Bedford, is The Years of Transition.
10. G. Mak, In Europe: Travels through the Twentieth Century, 2008, p. 390. On Carrel, see Conford, Origins, (see note 2) pp. 137-38. On the matter of racial survival, see for instance L. J. Picton, Thoughts on Feeding, 1946, pp.160-69.
11. H. McCleery, ‘A Week in Germany’, Health and Life, November 1938, p. 374. E. J. Saxon, ‘A Real Standard of Living’, Health and Life, July 1941, p. 17, and ‘We Must Return to the Roots of Our Life’, August 1940, p. 74. Interview with Julia Byngham, 1 November 1996.
12. On Teviot and Sempill, see R. Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, 1998, pp. 83-86, 144-45 and 149-50. R. Duncan, Journal of a Husbandman, 1944, pp. 110-11. P. Loftus, The Creed of a Tory, 1926.
13. See Appendix A of Conford, Origins (see note 2), for brief biographies of most of the above figures. On Social Credit, see Conford, ‘Finance’ (see note 7).
14. On Balfour’s part in the Tithe War, see C. Twinch, Tithe War 1918-1939, (2001) pp. 153-56.
15. F. Bateson, Towards a Socialist Agriculture, 1946; C. S. Orwin, Speed the Plough, 1942; J. Jenks, From the Ground Up, 1950.
16. P. Conford, ‘The Myth of Neglect: Responses to the Early Organic Movement, 1930-1950’, Agricultural History Review 50 (2002), pp. 89-102.
17. Erin Gill, personal communication.
18. H. J. Massingham and E. Hyams, Prophecy of Famine, 1952, p .6. E. Hyams, ‘Soil and Socialism’, New Statesman, 8 December 1951, pp. 661-62.
19. Mother Earth, July 1964, pp. 250-51. The October 1964 issue featured a portrait of the Marxist Tony Stephenson, although his politics were not referred to; they were mentioned, though, in his obituary on p. 359 of the January 1967 issue of Mother Earth.
20. Michael Allaby, private communication, 1 October 2008. Interview with Robert Waller, 3 August 1987. Interviews with Michael Allaby, June 2000 and 2 February 2006.
21. Interview with George McRobie, 21 May 2008. Allaby, 28 February 2006. On the BNP, see David Aaronovitch, ‘Lunching with the Enemy’, The Independent, 2 May 2002.
22. Recordings of Soil Association Weeks’ lectures, in the author’s possession. Interview with M. Stuart, 5 October 2005.
23. Interviews with Craig Sams, 19 July 2005, and Gregory Sams, 4 November 2005.
24. See P. Conford, ‘“Somewhere Quite Different”: The Seventies Generation of Organic Activists and their Context’, Rural History 19/2 (2008), pp. 217-34. Interviews with Angela Bates, 3 March 2007, and Lawrence Woodward, 16 July 2008.
25. See Body’s books Agriculture: The Triumph and the Shame, 1982, and Our Food, Our Land, 1991
26. The apotheosis of this trend (at least one hopes that there will be no worse examples) was the £1,000-a-seat Feast of Albion held at London’s Guildhall in March 2008.
27. On the Goldsmiths, see the article by Simon Matthews in Lobster 55 (2008), pp. 32-36.
28. Noble’s book is Notes From the Old Blair and Bush, 2008, under the pseudonym Ernest Organic.
29. It perhaps has a psychological parallel in the work of Jung, where the potentially threatening dark confusion of the unconscious mind can, if faced and accepted, rather than being repressed, become a source of strength and energy, just as the apparently dead matter in the soil becomes, as humus, a source of fertility. Barlow put forward his ideas on regional socialism in the New English Weekly, 3 June 1943, pp. 57-58. See R. Gardiner, Water Springing from the Ground (1972), pp. 139-40. For more on the idea of ‘emergent order’ see the work of the biologist Prof. Brian Goodwin. Colin Ward, ‘Fringe Benefits’, New Statesman and Society, 29 September 1989, p. 33. G. Sams, Uncommon Sense, 1997.
30. Mother Earth, July 1964, p. 250. John Seymour’s novel Retrieved from the Future (1996) has few literary virtues, but deals with the very relevant topic of what forms of social life might emerge in a post-oil future.
31. F. Hutchinson and B. Burkitt, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism, 1997; F. Hutchinson, M. Mellor and W. Olsen, The Politics of Money, 2002.
32. On the day I write this (3 October 2008), a leading article in The Guardian notes that ‘food is gaining in political salience’ and urges reform of the food and farming industries, which ‘distort our choices in favour of food that is …. nutritionally nasty’. The organic movement has been urging this for decades.