Rolf Gardiner

Henry Rolf Gardiner (5 November 1902 – 26 November 1971) was an English rural revivalist, helping to bring back folk dance styles including Morris dancing and sword dancing.

He founded groups significant in the British history of organic farming.

He sympathised with Nazism and participated in inter-war far right politics.

He organised summer camps with music, dance and community aims across class and cultures.

His forestry methods were far ahead of their time and he was a founder member of The Soil Association.

He was born in Fulham the son of Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner and his wife Hedwig, née Von Rosen.

He was educated at West Downs school from 1913, Rugby School, and then at Bedales School.

He was a student at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Kibbo Kift youth group.

Initially he was a youth leader, involved in exchanges with Germany.

He was heavily influenced in the 1920s by D. H. Lawrence; he visited Lawrence in Switzerland in 1928, and has been called his first genuine "disciple".

At this period he was also much concerned with English folk dance, and convinced morris dance revivalist Mary Neal that morris was an essentially masculine form.

It had been founded in 1920, and at that point was left-leaning and supported guild socialism.

In Gardiner's time it became internationally oriented and Germanophile, and his own political interests turned to Social Credit.

He also published articles by John Hargrave with whom he had associated in the Kibbo Kift.

After its split from the Woodcraft Folk, Kibbo Kift was in transition, en route for the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland ("Green Shirts").

It has been suggested that Gardiner moved from the ideas of guild socialism and social credit, current in the circle of A. R. Orage, towards a search for a masculine brotherhood, through his involvement in the "folk revival".

His views of folk music and dance have been called "fundamentalist".

In any case he took up with and formed small groups, rather than political organisations.

He expressly rejected overtures made to him by members of Mosley's party, which at the time was gaining ground in rural areas in response to the effects of the depression and tithe collection on farming.

Gardiner later broke with Hargrave, of whom Lawrence disapproved.

He was editor of the magazine Youth from 1923, when still a student.

He founded the Travelling Morrice in 1924, with Arthur Heffer, having taken a team of English dancers to Germany in 1922, and in 1923 met a few of the surviving dancers while walking in the Cotswolds with the poet Christopher Scaife.

He took over Gore Farm in Dorset, bought by Henry Balfour Gardiner in 1924, from 1927, and continued what became a large-scale forestation project, based on training he had received at Dartington Hall, with conifers and beech trees.

Here he set up a support group, the Gore Kinship.

In a series of publications from 1928 he articulated racial theories (Baltic peoples versus Mediterranean peoples) and the need for national reversals of "impoverishment" of the stock.

It has been said that he was an "ecocentric" looking for a united and pagan England and Germany, and a supporter of Nazi pro-ruralist policies.

In 1929 Gardiner was writing with approval in the Times Literary Supplement of the Jugendbewegung (German Youth Movement) and its anti-scientific outlook.

He had written about erosion in Nyasaland and Uganda already in the 1930s, in the New English Weekly.

He married Mariabella Honor Hodgkin in 1932; she was the daughter of the Irish fabric designer Florence Hodgkin.

In 1933 he and 'Marabel' bought the estate at Springhead, near Fontmell Magna, Dorset.

Gardiner was not, however, a founder of the Morris Ring, set up in 1934.

He debated the German Youth Movement in 1934 with Leslie Paul, in the pages of The Adelphi.

He became active in Dorset society becoming a member of Dorset County Council between 1937–1946, High Sheriff of Dorset 1967–68, President of the Dorset Federation of Young Farmers Clubs 1944–46, a Chairman and then President of the Dorset branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England between 1957-1972 as well as other rural and landscape committees and working parties.

He and his wife developed the Springhead Ring as a music, theatre and crafts network, as well as farming the estate and developing forestry operations.

It also hosted much musical activity.

The rural writer John Stewart Collis spent a year after the Second World War working for Gardiner, thinning a 14-acre ash wood on the estate; this formed the material for his 1947 book Down to Earth.

He was a founder member of The Soil Association and applied organic principles to both farm and forest.

The family owned tea-growing estates in Nyasaland (now in Thyolo District, Malawi), known as the Nchima Tea and Tung Estate, of which Gardiner became chairman.

Gardiner was active in the 1950s in dealing with colonial officials, with a view to conserving the underlying land.

The Estate became the Springhead Trust in 1962.