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Henry Rolf Gardiner (5 November 1902 – 26 November 1971) was an English rural revivalist who helped to bring back folk dance styles including Morris dancing and sword dancing. He also founded groups significant in the British history of organic farming; his forestry methods were far ahead of their time and he was a founder member of the Soil Association. He sympathised with Nazism, more specifically its pro-ruralist policies, and participated in inter-war far right politics. He organised summer camps with music, dance and community aims across class and cultures.
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".
In 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. 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. Gardiner was not, however, a founder of the Morris Ring, set up in 1934.
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. He became active in Dorset society, becoming a member of Dorset County Council between 1937 and 1946, High Sheriff of Dorset 1967–1968, President of the Dorset Federation of Young Farmers Clubs 1944–1946, Chairman and then President of the Dorset branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England 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.
Gardiner 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. He was active in the 1950s in dealing with colonial officials, with a view to conserving the underlying land. He had written about erosion in Nyasaland and Uganda already in the 1930s, in the New English Weekly. The Nchima estate became the Nchima Trust in 1962.
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 Oswald 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. In 1929, Gardiner was writing with approval in the Times Literary Supplement of the Jugendbewegung (German Youth Movement) and its anti-scientific outlook. He debated the German Youth Movement in 1934 with Leslie Paul, in the pages of The Adelphi.
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. He reportedly expressed anti-Semitic views from 1933, writing first in German. However, as his mother was half Austrian Jewish, this is unlikely, and in the late thirties he specifically repudiated this. His thinking moved from a belief in the honest value of work, to connection and belonging, and ultimately to a vision of the interplay between the health of soil, animals, crops and people.
He was a member of the English Mistery, and then of the English Array, formed in 1936. Writing in the Array's Quarterly Gazette, Gardiner was an apologist for German "leadership" in Central Europe, dictatorships, and "racial regeneration". He later wrote for the periodical New Pioneer, set up in December 1938 by Lord Lymington and John Beckett as a pro-German and anti-Semitic organ.
After World War II, he kept in touch with Richard Walther Darré, an SS leader and NSDAP food and agriculture minister of the Nazi era, who had been one of the chief proponents of the links between a people and the land.
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