The Vice of Kings. Jasun Horsley
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 tend to, and their kingdom slipped away? If so, perhaps one way to address this problem was to send the children to “natural schools” where they would have to learn to live in nature and develop a “wild” edge—turning them not so much into noble savages as savage noblemen?
My brother might well have enjoyed such a description. He could not have cared less about eugenics or creating a more beautiful race (he would have insisted that ugly and poorly-dressed people were necessary for him to stand out). Nor did he have any time for camping or nature movements. And while he was certainly hell-bent on his own sexual “liberation” and self-beautification, using fine clothes as a way of standing out had nothing to do with attracting a mate, because according to his credo, “Dandies do not breed.” His interest in clothes was sourced in a particular blend of hedonism, narcissism, and materialism; yet it was not entirely uncoupled from a philosophy of living, far from it. Without wishing to oversimplify his choices, my brother's daily preoccupations were threefold: clothing, sex, and drugs. Art and self-expression (or self-worship) were equally essential, but it was as if the three “vices” were the means to this end, the paints on his easel. If we switch clothes for rock and roll (i.e., pop music, which my brother claimed to love more than all the other arts combined), then the chosen value set of the counterculture (and the imagined means of their social and spiritual liberation) is more or less intact.
Rock and roll (as well as dandyism) also overlapped with the “back to the roots” Fabian schooling movement (“a mixture of Freud and Red Indians”). An important member of the Braziers Park community, for example, was Glynn Faithfull, who met Glaister through the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. Faithfull had been an academic at the University of Liverpool, studied the Italian Renaissance, and worked for MI6 during World War II. He was married to Baroness Eva Erisso, a former ballerina, and their daughter was the singer and actress Marianne Faithfull. According to Marianne's second memoir (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, curiously the same title as Jung's autobiography), Glynn Faithfull was the person called in to interrogate Heinrich Himmler after Himmler surrendered himself to the US government on realizing that the Nazis would soon be defeated. Faithfull allegedly failed to search Himmler well enough to find a cyanide capsule on his person, thereby allowing Himmler to allegedly take his own life, allegedly to be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere. This is a curious enough little tale even before noting that all this happened during the same period in which, via Operation Paperclip, leading Nazis were being incorporated into the OSS, soon to become the CIA.
Marianne was born the following year, and by her own account she moved to Braziers Park when it first began, in 1950 (at age four), and lived there until she was seven. In her first memoir (Marianne: An Autobiography), she describes recurring nightmares of “frightening entities” who were “just like my father,” strange men with moustaches who would tickle her and pour hot tea over her. “Every year,” she writes, “we took deprived children on an annual camping holiday to the New Forest”—there to participate in “quasi-mystical” rituals (2000, pp. 6–7).
Faithfull reminisces in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
Things were madder, wilder, more eccentric, more randy, in the early years—some of the things that went on there were quite peculiar…. They appeared to be studying Dante and the Destiny of Man, but what they were also doing was fucking like rabbits—with what were technically the wrong people…. There was sex going on everywhere at Braziers. Not exactly an entirely happy and positive experience for a kid, I guess…. The mixture of high utopian thought and randy sex might seem incongruous but it was very much of its time—the 1950s—and an uncanny harbinger of the heady free-love, let's change the world vibe of the sixties. It was the fifties, the intellectual, Bertrand Russell-ish fifties, when Braziers began and there were all these ideas—grand, world-mending ideas, small groups of people isolating themselves from the big bad world to study Big Ideas, ideas about the Nature of Man, the foundations of civilization, the complexities of communicating ideas. Along with the metaphysical deliberations came experiments in group consciousness. This combo—shagging and Schopenhauer—was as rampant at Braziers as it is in the novels of Iris Murdoch. [My father] was a philosopher of the group mind, almost a technician of group dynamics—how to deal with ego within the group. (2007, pp. 135–136, 141–142)
Further along, in a chapter titled “The Girl Factory,” Faithfull describes meeting the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, “an archeologist of myths.” When Faithfull told Calasso about her childhood at Braziers, she recounts, Calasso compared it to a story by the playwright Frank Wedekind, called Mine-Haha: the Bodily Education of Young Girls. Mine-Haha is about a vast girls’ school located inside a castle where unwanted females are raised from infancy to the age of sixteen, “a sort of geisha finishing school where they are brought up to please others.” At the age of sixteen, these girls are either placed into show business or prostitution. Faithfull responds to Calasso by insisting, “Nobody forced me to go to London and become a pop singer. Tempted me, definitely, seduced me into it, but I wasn't actually compelled to become a pop singer, whereas the girls in the castle are made to become performers with whips and torture.” Calasso's response is to note how Faithfull “grew up in a similarly cloistered place…and at the age of seventeen…burst out into the world, trained, in a strange way, for all sorts of things—group politics, sex, books, dance, acting, singing—that were useful to you in your career.” Faithfull agrees that the “group mind concept my father taught at Braziers must have helped me a lot in fitting in. Probably why I fitted in so easily with the Stones.”
“Before the girls are sent out into the world,” Faithfull writes, “they're examined head to toe, internally, externally, the whole thing. It's really perverse. Anyway, none of that happened to me, obviously.” Why obviously, I wonder? Faithfull winds up the chapter by mentioning an Italian dance troupe (Gruppo Polline) who created a performance piece based on Mine-Haha, the themes of which were, “the persistence of memory, isolation, the