The Vice of Kings. Jasun Horsley

      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 there. I recall being woken up in the middle of the night by two or more boys pouring water into 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.).