Wealth: “In 1941, during World War II, Sir Richard Acland founded a new political party, Common Wealth, which Norman Glaister joined” (Braziers Park, 2016). The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry had been proposed for affiliation with Common Wealth, but for whatever reason this did not happen. “Instead, another group had been set up, called ‘Our Struggle,’ in the late 1930s and it was this group that became part of Common Wealth” (ibid.). Nonetheless, Common Wealth adopted some of the same organizational/psychological principles and methods as the Order, including the meta-biological approach to human organization. (In 1940, Richard Acland's Unser Kampf (Our Struggle) was published by Penguin Books. Why the German title and the clear homage to Hitler's Mein Kampf? It seems especially curious in light of how Nazis and Fabians both advocated eugenics. And both were socialist movements.)
Common Wealth's first Sensory Committee meeting took place in April 1947. Olaf Stapleton the novelist and John MacMurray were to be invited to join later. The first Common Wealth Sensory Summer School took place only 4 months after that. That Sensory Summer School took place within three years of the founding of Braziers, which occurred as a result of this and two subsequent Summer Schools. (ibid.)
Olaf Stapleton is the well-known author of Last and First Men and Star Maker, science-fiction novels that map a two million year history of humanity. Stapleton went to Abbotsholme School, which I briefly attended along with both of my siblings, and which is considered one of the prototypes for “progressive” schooling in Britain. Stapleton's novels have influenced writers as diverse as H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, and Virginia Woolf (as well as Winston Churchill). They describe humanity's evolution via genetic engineering and space travel into a sort of galactic god-being. While generally regarded as progressive fiction, C. S. Lewis described the ending of Star Maker (in a letter to Arthur C. Clarke in 1943) as “sheer devil worship” (Edwards, 2007, p. 54).
CHAPTER V
Progressive schools: Abbotsholme, Theosophy, Wicca, Grith Fyrd
“Darwin made it possible to consider political affairs as a prime instrument of social evolution. Here was a pivotal moment in Western thought, a changing of the guard in which secular purpose replaced religious purpose, long before trashed by the Enlightenment. For the poor, the working classes, and middle classes in the American sense, this change in outlook, lauded by the most influential minds of the nineteenth century, was a catastrophe of titanic proportions, especially for government school children. Children could no longer simply be parents’ darlings. Many were (biologically) a racial menace. The rest had to be thought of as soldiers in genetic combat, the moral equivalent of war. For all but a relative handful of favored families, aspiration was off the board as a scientific proposition. For governments, children could no longer be considered individuals but were regarded as categories, rungs on a biological ladder. Evolutionary science pronounced the majority useless mouths waiting for nature to dispense with entirely. Nature (as expressed through her human agents) was to be understood not as cruel or oppressive but beautifully, functionally purposeful—a neo-pagan perspective to be reflected in the organization and administration of schools.”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
One of the things I'd been looking to find was some indication that any of my family (either my generation or my father's) had been sent to any “dodgy” schools where they might have suffered some sort of sexual interference. I knew that my father (and his siblings) had been sent to various Quaker boarding schools from a very early age (Fairhaven Home School in Goathland, in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors, Keswick Grammar School, Bootham School, and The Mount School). I had found almost nothing online suggesting that any of these schools, or the Quakers, were connected to any sort of organized abuse.1 And then there was Abbotsholme.
I went to Abbotsholme for two terms in 1978, when I was eleven. My brother and sister went there for several years. It is located in Derbyshire, thirty miles from Ripley, the town where Alec was born. There is a small town five miles from Ripley called Horsley, probably named after an aristocratic bloodline since there is a ruined castle there known as Horston Castle.2 At least one Horsley (a soldier killed in World War I) is buried in Horsley cemetery, also suggesting a family lineage. Is it possible my grandfather belonged to or was named after such a lineage, and for some reason concealed it?
As far as I know, we weren't sent to Abbotsholme on Alec's recommendation, but that of our stepfather, Michael Vodden. Michael taught English in India after the Second World War and I remember him speaking of meeting Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten is widely rumored to have been connected to the Kincora Boy's Home abuse scandal in Belfast, Ireland (UK Data Base, 2015), and of being the man who introduced Jimmy Savile to the royal family.3 In light of everything else, this can hardly be dismissed as coincidental, but nor does it imply any actual secret agenda. My family considered itself “progressive,” and there were only a few schools in the UK that fit that bill. In fact, Abbotsholme, founded by Cecil Reddie, was considered the original modern progressive school. No surprise then to learn that Reddie was influenced by the ideas of the Fellowship of the New Life, in other words, a Fabian. I visited the school around 2010 with my sister and niece (who was thinking about going there), and I was surprised to see that the school symbol was a pentagram.
A thesis essay called “The Vegetarian Movement in England, 1847–1981” (presented at the London School of Economics, again), describes how, in the early twentieth century, Quaker schools were introduced into this progressive schooling stream. The long tradition of Quaker boarding schools, the separateness of Quaker society, and their repudiation of the classical syllabus and the teaching of science, “marked these schools apart from the public schools. In the early twentieth century the differences became more pronounced with the spread among them of co-education.” For whatever reason, Quaker schools were drawn to the world of progressive education, as part of “the shift that occurs in Quakerism generally that takes it into the orbit of liberal progressive thought” (Twigg, 1981). The essay also mentions how, “In 1893, A. C. Badley, an ex-master at Abbotsholme, founded the co-educational Bedales.” My sister went to Bedales briefly before attending Abbotsholme.
And then there was this:
The second important influence was theosophy, which was in the early years of this century much involved in progressive social causes and had not yet adopted the social introversionism that came later. In 1915 a number of progressively minded theosophists led by Mrs. Ensor and George Arundale founded the Theosophical Fraternity in Education, and in the same year the Garden City Theosophical School was founded…. A number of these schools and other movements of the period aimed at bringing children into direct contact with nature, with particular stress put on the idea of the woodland, as a means of developing confidence and skills. The feeling is best expressed in Ernest Westlake's Order of Woodcraft Chivalry which was intended to be a more adventurous and libertarian version of the Boy Scouts, and with none of its militaristic tone…. In 1929 he founded the Forest School—a mixture of Freud and Red Indians, according to one master—and here the aim was to restore children to their “lost birthright of freedom.” In all these movements the paradise theme was strong, and Ernest Westlake speaks of the ultimate purpose as “to regain paradise.” (ibid.)
Fabianism, Quakers, Wicca, Theosophy, children's education, “a return to nature,” sexual freedom, all tied up together via the school which I and my siblings ended up at. Who knew? I left after two terms by mutual agreement. I was unhappy being away from home, at least that's how I remember it. I also got into a lot of trouble while I was there. I don't remember anything especially strange about the teachers or the education methods, but I do have a set of slightly anomalous memories from my short time
