my ear. The explanation they gave was that it was a method for inducing trance, something they had heard or read about somewhere. I also remember how there was a practice going around of hyperventilating and then having another boy pick you up by the torso and squeeze you. It was meant to be a means to enter into an altered state of consciousness. (As far as I know, neither of these peculiar techniques worked on me.) Lastly, and most curiously of all, I have a vague, seemingly inexplicable memory of running around in a field with all the boys from my dorm room, in the middle of the night, holding sheets over our heads. I have never been able to make sense out of this strange quasi-memory. One other thing, perhaps unrelated: A few years ago, I was reading a small collection of letters I wrote home from that period: in one of them I mention seeing a UFO from the window in my dorm.
Moving on…
Directly connected to this Fabian-Quaker-Theosophical-vegetarian-progressive-schooling-plan was a radical alternative educational movement started in England during the 1930s, called Grith Fyrd. Grith Fyrd (“Peace Army” in Old English) was founded (surprise surprise) by members of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, and began with two permanent work camps, one at Godshill, in Hampshire, the other at Shining Cliff in Derbyshire, five miles from Ripley. Grith Fyrd took in unemployed men and tried to use them as a basis for creating a land-based community. The movement's vision represented a mixture of socialism, co-operativism, eugenics, and anti-urbanism. It was strongly internationalist, but had particularly close contacts with the German youth movement. The Order's main practical aim was to create an outdoor movement that would allow boys, girls, men, and women to work and learn together (Field, 2000).
The Grith Fyrd campers—or Pioneers—were a mixture of young unemployed men (who were able to continue to draw benefit) and idealists who mostly came from middle-class backgrounds. The Pioneers built the camp buildings and furniture themselves, and produced their own food. Aldous Huxley wrote in the Sunday Chronicle that the Godshill camp was “almost a replica of an American backwoods settlement of a century ago” (Huxley, 2001, p. 150). For Huxley, the primitive conditions were an admirable counterblow against the standardization of modern urban, industrial society. (As well as Huxley, J. B. Priestley paid a visit to the camp.) Grith Fyrd was never a large movement (camps consisted of between thirty and fifty “inmates” apiece), and it had effectively died out as a living experiment by the late 1930s. A handful of veterans organized in the late 1940s to plan the Braziers Park community—bringing us full circle.
Before setting up the School of Integrative Social Research, Norman Glaister had been involved in the Grith Fyrd barter-for-work system. The School (which also functioned as a commune) aimed to explore the dynamics of people living in groups, to develop better methods of interpersonal communication and to find new ways of combining knowledge to make it more meaningful.
After 1937 [the year Northern Dairies was founded], Grith Fyrd members went on to found the Q Camp movement (Q stood for “quest”), which ran outdoor camp communities for troubled young men, and in turn influenced later outdoor education approaches to young offenders. It also had an influence on adult education, mainly through the Braziers community, where Glynn Faithfull and others ran what was effectively an adult residential college (and brought up his daughter, Marianne). It had an influence on psychoanalytic approaches to the management of therapeutic communities. Finally, it was part of a wider network of people and institutions who have tried to develop sustainable communities and peaceful living between the wars, and therefore has a place in the history of British environmentalism. (Field, 2012)
Just like many of the Fabian ideas about progressive education, free sexuality, and consciousness expansion, Grith Fyrd was very much an early expression of what would (thirty years later) become known as “the counterculture.” Its heyday was in the 1930s, before the idea of camping out became tainted by associations with fascism (and youth movements associated with Hitler Youth). During that period, its history was “littered with characters one might fairly describe as crackpots: sandal-wearing, fruit juice-drinking vegetarians with beards, curious medieval yearnings and unscientific theories on child rearing, sun worship and gymnosophy” (Clements, 2011).
And not just sun worship: In its first editorial, “Dion” Byngham's Pinecone made it explicit that the pinecone represented “not only the pine cones strewn about Sandy Balls but also the head of a penis” (ibid.).
CHAPTER VI
Sex, drugs, rock & roll, and Dandies: Marianne Faithfull, the Stones, Tom Driberg, and LSE
“From an evolutionary perspective, schools are the indoctrination phase of a gigantic breeding experiment. Working-class fantasies of ‘self-improvement’ were dismissed from the start as sentimentality that evolutionary theory had no place for.”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
This work began as an attempt to better understand my older brother's self-destructive path and uncover the poison-roots beneath it. Ironically—or perhaps not—Sebastian was as far from a hippy or a liberal as it's possible to get (though he did once call Jesus a dandy). He mocked granola-crunching hippies, political correctness, and New Age/neoliberal values, and was infinitely more likely to speak fondly of Hitler than to praise Gandhi or Mother Teresa. Does this imply that the Fabian indoctrination didn't take, or that he rebelled against paternal influences by adopting the very inverse values (as so many of us do)? Or does it imply something subtler and more obscure, namely, that the value-set apparently promoted by Fabians, Quakers, Grith Fyrdians, and progressive leftists concealed a very different set of values, and that there was a wolf lurking under the liberal fleece? In fact, dandyism is far more compatible with the “back to nature” aesthetics of the Order of Woodcraft and Grith Fyrd—and with fascism—than might at first be supposed.
The Men's Dress Reform Party was an outgrowth of the eugenics movement that, like the camping movement and progressive schools, began in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Its purported aim was to encourage men to dress in “more beautiful, flowing clothing reminiscent of what they wore during the Elizabethan era.” By dressing up, it was reasoned, middle class men would become more desirable to women as mates, and “thus reverse the perceived evolutionary decline of the middle classes.” Summer rallies of the MDRP were regular events during the 1930s, and an event of 1931, staged at the Suffolk Street Galleries, was attended by about 1,000 people, including H. G. Wells. The pine-cone-worshipping Dion Byngham even wrote about it for the New Health Journal, in 1932: “[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” (The Dish, 2013).
One of the prime influences on this mini-movement was Edward Carpenter, an early Fabian whom George Bernard Shaw called “a noble savage,” and whom The Guardian called one of “the founding fathers of socialism” (Hunt, 2009). Carpenter hung out at Millthorpe, a Derbyshire village not far from Sheffield and about forty miles from Abbotsholme School. There he was visited by Shaw, Bertrand Russell, D. H. Lawrence, and Cecil Reddie (founder of Abbotsholme). He corresponded with Walt Whitman, Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill (his lover), William Morris, and John Ruskin, and he probably knew the pedophile-artist Eric Gill too (they were both of what was called “the Bloomsbury set”). As The Guardian recalled: “Millthorpe emerged as a countercultural hub in the face of Victorian materialism, becoming an essential stopping-off point for all sorts of confused humanists…. Millthorpe was also renowned for its air of sexual liberation” (ibid.).
A question occurred to me while discovering all of this, regarding those royal bloodlines that fell on hard times: Was part of the reason they lost their wealth and social standing that they became lazy and spoiled, as aristocrats
