*

‘The people you've written about in your book [The Origins of the Organic Movement] aren't relevant to the organic movement today. It comes from somewhere quite different.’ – Lawrence Woodward to the author: Soil Association conference, Harrogate, January 2002.

‘It is a fact that there has been complete continuity from Lady Eve [Balfour] starting the Soil Association in 1946 right to the present day.’ – Riccardo Ling, answerphone message to the author, 7th February 2006.

These contradictory views expressed by Woodward and Ling illustrate one of the difficulties faced by anyone wishing to investigate the organic movement's history since World War Two. Woodward, who has been Director of the Elm Farm Research Centre at Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire since 1980, can claim more than thirty years of active commitment to organic farming; Ling took over his father's farm in East Sussex in 1947, served on the Soil Association Council during the 1970s and was a member of its Standards Committee. Ling's greater experience perhaps lends more weight to his view, but Woodward was one of the most energetic propagandists for organics in the 1980s, helping interest both government and supermarkets in organic produce and putting the case for the environmental benefits of organic systems. Both perspectives carry authority, but, on the face of it, both cannot be valid.

This debate, about the connection, or lack of it, between the organic movement of the 1930s to1950s and its contemporary incarnation, pre-dates Woodward's comment by at least a decade. Responding to the present author's anthology The Organic Tradition (1988) in her doctoral thesis, Tracey Clunies-Ross argued that contemporary organic farming drew little on the work of the movement's founders:

The leaders of the movement in the 1980s, Clunies-Ross concluded, were ‘on the whole, not of the same ilk’.Footnote ¹

The publication in 2001 of The Origins of the Organic Movement provoked a similar desire, on the part of some prominent organic activists, to drive a wedge between the movement's early days and its late-twentieth-century philosophy and practice. Lawrence Woodward's off-the-cuff remarks were followed in due course by a considered response from David Frost, the West Wales smallholder and agricultural advisor, and Carolyn Wacher of Organic Centre Wales at Aberystwyth. Identifying ‘a number of scholars [who] argue that there is continuity in the development of the organic movement’, they challenge this view by suggesting that ‘Particular cultural and socio-demographic changes in the last three decades of the twentieth century produced a new ex-urban organic movement with a new organic discourse’: a ‘counter-urbanism’, as they term it. The assumption that the organic movement has exhibited a linear development and that ‘the ideals and values of the early organicists are the origin of the current organic farming discourse’ is therefore false. Frost and Wacher quote the present author's belief that ‘it seems inherently improbable that a well-organized group of . . . propagandists should fade away and have no impact on people concerned with the same issues less than two decades later’. Frost and Wacher implicitly disagree with this view, but they do not in fact refute it, and it still seems to me to be, prima facie, a reasonable position. This is not to deny that Frost and Wacher make a convincing case for the central role of the Organic Growers Association (OGA) in advancing the organic cause during the 1980s.Footnote ²

One aspect of the early organic movement which many supporters of the present movement would find disturbing is its ‘associations with nationalism, eugenics and fascist tendencies’, to which Frost and Wacher refer. Similarly, Clunies-Ross is uneasy with what she calls ‘the paternalist feeling’ of the early movement ‘and the emphasis on the past and the “traditional”, which marks the difference between the early history of the organic movement and its present day counterpart’. One might also guess that the strongly Christian strain of its spiritual philosophy would be less acceptable from the 1960s onwards. It is understandable, therefore, that the younger generation would want to distinguish between its own activities and those of an older generation which held such views. There may also have been an element of class warfare present: certainly that was how Soil Association Council member Angela Bates interpreted the verbal aggression that West Wales grower Peter Segger, the first of the younger generation to be elected to Council, directed at Eve Balfour during meetings in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote ³

While there is no doubt that the activists on whose behalf Frost, Wacher and Clunies-Ross speak played a crucial role in establishing the high-profile and commercially sophisticated organic movement that exists today, one might nevertheless discern more subjective reasons for them wanting to distance themselves from their predecessors. Unease with the social background and predominant ideological stance of their elders, allied to the desire of victors to downplay the significance of their defeated opponents, might also help explain why the suggestion of ‘linear continuity’ is unwelcome. It is wise, then, to remain wary of the suggestion that there exists a disjunction between two quite distinct phases of organic history, with its corollary that the older generation had no influence on the younger and the younger owed nothing to the older.

This article will argue that there were indeed relationships between the different generations and that the influx of ‘counter-urbanites’ found it necessary to make contact with older members of the organic movement and attach themselves to existing organisations. They brought with them attitudes and ideas not always acceptable to their elders; they significantly influenced the direction of the bodies they joined, and they established two major organisations of their own: the Organic Growers Association (OGA), founded in 1981, and British Organic Farmers (BOF), founded in 1982. All this is true, but it is equally true that certain members of the older generation came to act as mentors to them, and that one can discern a linear continuity running through the personal contacts which were made and the friendships which were established.

Generations do not suddenly disappear. People from the organic movement's earlier phase remained active well into the period during which the ‘sixties people’, as Frost and Wacher term them, appeared on the scene.Footnote ⁴ In this article, they will be referred to as the ‘seventies generation’, since almost all the people we shall consider became active in the organic movement during the 1970s. Some simple arithmetic is illuminating in this context: it is now sixty-two years since the Soil Association was founded, so the exodus to Wales of the counter-urbanites falls within the first half of that period. In other words, it is nearer to the Association's birth than it is to today. Or, to take another example, Frost and Wacher refer to the hippie movement as one of the influences on the counter-urbanites; but if you take 1967 as the apogee of that movement you find that it is twice as distant from us today as it is from the death of Sir Albert Howard in 1947 and the Agriculture Act of the same year. Life does not proceed in quantum leaps and people do not immediately cease activity when the first harbingers of a new generation emerge.

With this caveat in mind, I will look at why some now-prominent personalities in the organic movement originally became involved. First I shall consider several figures from the influential ‘West Wales mafia’ (to use Riccardo Ling's phrase), then some who were active in other initiatives.Footnote ⁵ I shall then place them all in a wider context and examine the significance of certain older organic activists who became mentors to the seventies generation. The article will conclude that the case for a complete break in continuity remains unproven.

*

The Soil Association's move in 1985 to Bristol from Haughley in Suffolk, where its founder Eve Balfour had started farming in 1919, was a testament to the recently-established influence of organic farmers and growers in West Wales, who found the journey to attend Council meetings too tiring and time-consuming. Among the key figures in this group, who did not know each other before they moved down there, were Patrick Holden, Peter Segger, Charles and Carolyn Wacher, David Frost and Nic Lampkin. Although West Wales is not the ideal place climatically or edaphically for vegetable growing, the cheapness of land there in the 1970s would have been a significant attraction.

Holden, Director of the Soil Association since 1996, is now such a prominent media figure that it is difficult to think of him once being a struggling member of a rural commune in the wilds near Tregaron. As a child he spent a year on a Hertfordshire farming estate and underwent what amounted to a mystical experience in a cow byre; but his early ambition to be a dairy farmer slipped into the background during adolescence. It re-emerged following a year in California, where his father, a psychiatrist, was a visiting Professor at Stanford University. Holden was particularly impressed by Charles Reich's The Greening of America (1970) and the counter-culture. He became aware of the destructive effects of agri-business and concerned about the need for sustainable methods of food-production. Returning to Britain in June 1971 he was determined to follow a path which would involve rural communal living. First, however, he needed to learn how to farm, and more precisely, how to farm organically, since his reading in the counter-culture had convinced him that organic methods were the most environmentally benign means of growing food. After a year on a Hampshire dairy unit he underwent a year's training at Emerson College, at Forest Row in East Sussex. This was a Steiner foundation which followed the bio-dynamic approach outlined in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner and developed by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. It was the only institution Holden could discover which taught some form of organic cultivation.

In June 1973, Holden and five others moved into a 135-acre farm near Tregaron in West Wales. One of Holden's fellow-communards was Stuart Donaldson, whose wealthy father bought the place and rented it to the group. According to Holden, ‘It was dog-and-stick farming’: fifty to sixty acres of undrained bog land, with inadequate buildings and no fences or made-up roads. His community was naïve and unskilled, and although they were deeply committed to an ideal of self-sufficient life, the strains proved too great and within two years the commune had disintegrated. Holden stayed on; his friend Nick Rebbeck inherited some money, bought the farm, let it to him and financed improvements, enabling him to concentrate on dairying (thirty Ayrshire cows) and carrots. Later in the 1970s, Holden gravitated towards the other organic cultivators in West Wales, forming a friendship with Peter Segger which was soon to be significant for the movement's future direction.Footnote ⁶

Segger had been a businessman in the frozen fish trade. While living in Oxfordshire in the early 1970s he had become concerned about methods of food production and the separation of rural and urban life. Victor Bonham-Carter's book The Survival of the English Countryside (1971) influenced his thinking. In 1974 he sold his business and looked for a small farm, eventually finding one not far from Cardigan Bay, at Cilcennin. With even less knowledge of farming than Holden, he decided that he wanted to produce wool, bought a flock of pedigree sheep and started growing vegetables. Through reading some of Steiner's Anthroposophical texts he was led to experiment with bio-dynamic methods. He relied heavily on books to teach him the practicalities of organic production: Lawrence Hills' Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables (1971) was particularly valuable. He describes his efforts as ‘very amateur’, since at first he knew of nowhere to go for help. But there was the Soil Association, and in 1975 he established its West Wales group in order to draw on its experience and to bring together any other farmers or growers in the same predicament. The group became ‘a vibrant social and agricultural organisation’, with a membership of around 140. Environmentalism was in the air and, according to Segger ‘All of us were influenced by Schumacher – his book [Small is Beautiful (1973)] was seminal’. The apostle of self-sufficiency, John Seymour, belonged to the group. Segger and others became active in the anti-nuclear movement and admired the campaigns undertaken by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.Footnote ⁷

Charles and Carolyn Wacher became involved with the West Wales group after moving to Aeron Parc near Tregaron in 1977. Carolyn describes herself and her late husband as a ‘very middle-class’ couple who lived in London and worked for charities in the early 1970s before spending four months in the United States looking at back-to-the-land communities. Like Holden, they were impressed by The Greening of America and returning to England, they joined Working Weekends on Organic Farms (WWoOF), of which more below. Charles worked as a volunteer on Holden's farm. His family had money, and he and Carolyn were able to buy Aeron Parc outright and provide themselves with good equipment for farming it. Carolyn is adamant that they were ‘not hippies’, nor did they aim to emulate John Seymour; although idealistic, they wanted to be more commercial than Seymour, and they managed to gain credibility in the eyes of the locals, selling their produce for several years at the local market. They also had some involvement with the Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Association, in particular with Katharine Castelliz, who farmed to the south of Cardigan.Footnote ⁸

Nearer to the coast, at Llanrhystud, David Frost had started farming in 1976. His background was academic and left-wing: he held a research post at Regent Street Polytechnic in the late 1960s, looking at housing and community issues. There was a lot of interest at Regent Street in environmental questions, and Frost cites Frank Fraser Darling's 1969 Reith Lectures, Wilderness and Plenty, as a formative influence. A keen gardener, he joined Lawrence Hills' organisation the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA), whose journal he studied closely, and in the early 1970s he transformed his suburban garden into an allotment and started considering the possibility of communal living. After an interlude in France, Frost moved to Wales in the mid-1970s and began growing vegetables; he then bought a local business with a delivery van and a market stall in Aberystwyth. Although to some extent influenced by John Seymour's writings, Frost, like the Wachers, had to be commercially successful to survive, and a mutual friend put him in touch with Peter Segger, who became a source of produce for Frost's business and drew him into the Soil Association's West Wales group. He met the Wachers and bought from them too. The business expanded, selling organic and very fresh produce.Footnote ⁹

The career of Nic Lampkin, one of the most important figures in the West Wales organic network, differs somewhat from those of the counter-urbanites. His connections with the organic movement were familial and educational. His mother was a Steinerian and sent him to a Steiner school; both parents were agricultural researchers and he had uncles who were conventional farmers, on whose holdings he undertook work experience. He also spent the year before university working on the farm of Gareth and Rachel Rowlands (founders of Rachel's Organic Dairy), near Borth, where, according to Rachel, her husband gave him a hard time because he was quiet and intellectual. Lampkin went on to study Agricultural Economics at Aberystwyth, as he felt it essential to demonstrate how organic farming could be made financially viable; otherwise, potential converts would not be persuaded to make the change. He lost his belief in the spiritual perspective of Steiner's esoteric philosophy, preferring to justify organic methods on ecological grounds by demonstrating how ecosystems can be made to work productively. Although he is wary of the term ‘holism’, he came to believe that showing the positive benefits of a holistic approach is more valuable than simply opposing chemical methods. Through his work on the Rowlands' farm, Lampkin met the Wachers, Patrick Holden and Peter Segger, working closely with Segger in CND and with all of them in establishing the OGA.Footnote ¹⁰

For Frost, Wacher and their colleagues in the OGA, this organisation was critically important in advancing the organic movement, revitalising the Soil Association and helping expand the organic market in the 1980s and 1990s. Organic growers in England and Wales responded positively to the forming of a growers' organisation because they felt that the Soil Association was failing to provide what the OGA offered; it was, they believed, primarily geared for farmers and did not address the technical and commercial problems faced by growers. Iain Tolhurst, now one of the top organic growers, saw the Soil Association as ‘stuck in a time warp’, its membership consisting predominantly of ‘ageing landed gentry with ample reserves of capital’. Carolyn Wacher similarly felt that there was an age divide, with the Association's Council at that time resistant to the demands of a younger generation. The first National Conference of Organic Growers was held at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester early in January 1980, following a meeting of growers the previous year to discuss their problems. These included isolation, lack of a specialist advisory service, and the absence of manuals to advise on conversion to organic methods. A demand for well-presented organic vegetables existed and was likely to increase, but growers were not well placed to respond.Footnote ¹¹

The 1980 conference attracted an impressive range of speakers, among them the newly-elected President of the Soil Association, Lord O'Hagan; Dr. Ken Gray of Birmingham University, an expert on scientific composting; Dr. Victor Stewart of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, a noted soil scientist; David Stickland of Organic Farmers and Growers, an authority on agricultural marketing; Dr. Hartmut Vogtmann, the Secretary General of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), and David Stokes of Lea Valley Experimental Horticultural Station. Commercial growers who spoke included Douglas Blair, a specialist in the glass-house cultivation of tomatoes, and Alastair Rennie, a mushroom grower. The conference was highly successful and was succeeded by the formal establishment of the OGA the following year, which in turn inspired the founding of British Organic Farmers (BOF) in 1982.

The OGA's activities accelerated the creation of a market for organic products grown to recognised standards and enabled growers to earn a premium. In addition, the Association contributed to the formulation of those standards by the United Kingdom Register of Organic Food Standards (UKROFS), established in 1987. There was a strong social element to OGA's activities: Iain Tolhurst recalls that it brought together ‘fresh and mostly fairly young people . . . who all shared a common aim’. This aim went further than developing methods of cultivation: the hope was that through a better method of farming social changes could be generated. Peter Segger, in the second OGA newsletter, went as far as to say that its members were revolutionaries, something that the establishment figures still at the helm of the Soil Association could not claim.Footnote ¹²

*

Having considered the part played by members of the Soil Association's West Wales group, and their key role in the OGA, we can now turn to some other figures who became leading lights of the organic movement's seventies generation: Sue Coppard, the inspiration for WWoOF; Alan and Jackie Gear, who transformed the HDRA into a high-profile centre for organic horticulture; Lawrence Woodward, Director of the Elm Farm Research Centre, and Gregory and Craig Sams, pioneers of wholefood and organic marketing. To what extent did they come from ‘somewhere quite different’?

Coppard, brought up in East Croydon and Hove, can be considered another of Frost and Wacher's counter-urbanites, although visits to her aunt and uncle's farm in Sussex had given her a love of the countryside. While employed in London as a secretary at the Royal College of Art in the early 1970s she found herself wishing she could do some part-time farm work, preferably in the company of like-minded people. She contacted the Soil Association, receiving a ‘patronising’ reply from its General Secretary Brigadier Bill Vickers, who suggested she join the Conservation Corps. A friend told her to approach instead Michael Allaby, editor of the Association's newspaper Span. He was more helpful and told her to contact John Davy, former science correspondent of The Observer and now Assistant Principal of Emerson College. She visited Davy, who liked her idea and arranged for the farm managers to give her, and other possible volunteers, a trial weekend. Through an advertisement in Time Out she raised some interest from fifteen other people, but in the end only two made the trip with her to Forest Row. The trial was successful and enjoyable, and the idea began to grow. Allaby wrote in Span about Coppard's initiative, as a result of which she was interviewed in Seed magazine, of which more below. Things rapidly gathered momentum and Coppard found herself dealing with farmers who wanted help from volunteers, or who, ideally, were willing to offer training, as well as with potential volunteers who wanted to learn how to farm organically or simply to have a break from urban life.Footnote ¹³

After eighteen months or so Coppard went abroad for a while and WWoOF's administration passed into the hands of four members while she was away. The newsletter expanded and a ‘fix-it-yourself’ list came into being so that more experienced members could make their own arrangements directly with farmers, often for longer periods than weekends. By 1990 about 120 farms and smallholdings were participating, and there were around 1,000 members. Like the OGA, WWoOF saw organic farming as having potentially much wider, if somewhat vague, implications, aiming ‘to help bring about a happier, more ecological society’. Today called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, it has links in forty-three different countries.Footnote ¹⁴

Another successful organic organisation, indeed one of the most successful if measured purely by membership, is the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now blandly re-named Garden Organic), founded in 1958 by the horticulturalist Lawrence D. Hills. The HDRA raised its profile dramatically in the late 1980s thanks to the husband-and-wife team of Alan and Jackie Gear. Both were from urban backgrounds: Alan from Nottingham and Jackie from Swansea. Both were affected by the ugliness that industrialism had generated (the Lower Swansea Valley in the 1960s was notoriously scarred and polluted), and both found solace in the beauties of the natural world: Alan in the Peak District and Jackie on the Gower peninsula. Alan met Jackie at Swansea University in the late 1960s, where he studied civil engineering and she studied zoology. They were involved in the student radicalism of the time but settled, albeit uneasily, into professional, suburban life in Swansea after graduating. Their first direct contact with the organic movement resulted from Jackie's responsibility, as a laboratory analyst with the Gower Rural District Council, for the sewage stations on the Gower peninsula; Lawrence Hills had produced a ‘good sludge’ guide and they corresponded.Footnote ¹⁵

The Gears continued to be environmentally concerned, particularly as a result of the oil crisis in the autumn and winter of 1973 to 1974, and felt that they would like to work together for an environmental cause. So when Hills advertised in The Times for a young couple to live and work (full board but no pay) on the HDRA's plot at Bocking, in Essex, they felt that it was ‘meant to be’. They even managed to negotiate a weekly wage of five pounds each. For more than a decade they worked for Hills, living in a caravan, growing what they ate, producing their own flour, keeping bees and hens, and bringing some scientific rigour to Hills's horticultural experiments. They erected a laboratory, improved the processing sheets and introduced effective budgeting. There was an ever-changing population of students and WWoOFers, among them Charles Wacher, and, as with the OGA and WWoOF, an optimism about the organic approach's potential to increase social well-being and sustainability. John Seymour was a major influence, particularly on Jackie Gear.

But after ten years, they began to feel frustrated. There was a sense of a clique preaching to the converted; the image created was the cliché of simple-lifers knitting their own muesli. If the world was to be changed, the HDRA needed to change itself first, persuading people of the benefits of organic methods through example. Once the move to Ryton, outside Coventry, had taken place, in 1985, the stage was set for an expansion of the HDRA's work which is not our concern here.

Like the founders of the OGA, the Gears were dissatisfied with the Soil Association. Although Hills was an active member, and belonged to a much older generation than Holden, Segger and their colleagues, he evidently found the Association insufficiently interested in the grass roots of the organic movement, a view which the Gears shared. They felt it had lost its way and that its administrators lacked passion; they admired Segger for moving it on to a new phase. Hills, on the other hand, thought the Soil Association Council a waste of time, preferring to go his own way.Footnote ¹⁶

Of particular interest to our argument here is the career of Lawrence Woodward, whose introductory quotation uncompromisingly denies any connection between the organic pioneers and the seventies generation. Certainly, Woodward's background in a South Yorkshire mining community is unusual for an organic activist, but his grandfather grew vegetables and kept hens, a fact which became increasingly significant for him. Crucial to the development of his views was the time he spent at Dartington Hall, in the late 1960s, the result of an exchange between Dartington and his own, very good, secondary school. He met Alice Astor there, who became his wife; her father David was editor of The Observer and a friend and disciple of E. F. Schumacher, whom he had known since the 1930s. Schumacher aroused Astor's interest in environmentalism and his concern about how the West would feed itself as finite resources, especially oil, grew scarcer. He found the political implications of the likely social unrest deeply disturbing, conveying his anxiety to his son-in-law.

Influenced by Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, Woodward came to see organic farming as the key to creating a sustainable and secure food supply. He took a basic agriculture course, joined the Soil Association and began farming in 1976, on the estate at Fontmell Magna in Dorset which had once belonged to the organic pioneer Rolf Gardiner, in itself a small instance of organic continuity. With the help of David Stickland of Organic Farmers and Growers, he reconverted the land to organic, concentrating on dairy products and cereals. For further study, he went to Switzerland and met Dr. Hartmut Vogtmann, who made him aware of the importance of biological systems and cycles. But in Britain no research into organic methods was being undertaken, and Woodward gleaned from David Astor's brother Jacob, who was Chairman of the Agricultural Research Council from 1968 to 1978, that it was highly improbable it would be. Only private funding could support it, so the Woodwards sold the Dorset farm and, with David Astor's help, established the Elm Farm Research Centre in 1980.

Woodward met Schumacher through his father-in-law, but although Schumacher was Soil Association President at that time, Woodward did not gain much from the Association, becoming more actively involved only when the OGA was founded. He attended the first OGA conference and was encouraged by finding there other young, left-leaning people, who were linking organics to their social and political ideas. He maintains that none of ‘the Segger generation’ read the works of Sir Albert Howard and company. He himself read the 1975 edition of Eve Balfour's The Living Soil quite early on, but did not understand it or the purpose of the Haughley Experiment, which he considered to have been badly managed. He found his visits to other European countries more illuminating than anything the Soil Association offered. Elm Farm supported the OGA and helped initiate BOF. Using the link to the Astors to gain some establishment credibility, Elm Farm became a bridge between the radical element of agriculture and the mainstream.Footnote ¹⁷

Finally in this section, we can consider the brothers Craig and Gregory Sams, who, as Nebraskans, indeed come from ‘somewhere quite different’ and who, although not farmers or growers, have played a major part in the organic movement's commercial success. They were aware of the relationship between food and health from an early age, as their father had been cured of serious illness by adopting a macrobiotic diet; he had suffered from post-traumatic stress and intestinal bleeding after serving in the forces during World War Two, and was restored to health by a Japanese doctor in Hollywood. Having come to Britain in the mid-1960s, they started Seed Restaurant in West London in 1967. This ‘legendary hip’ watering-hole, with its ‘groovy clientele’ was, Gregory Sams believes, the first restaurant in the UK knowingly to promote organic foods. It offered ‘a mostly vegetarian diet based on wholegrain and organic foods and free of additives’, believing such fare to be ‘the essential foundation for a sustainable future in a world running out of resources, with a growing population and increasing degenerative disease’.Footnote ¹⁸ The restaurant's success led to the establishment of what is claimed as Britain's first natural foods store, Ceres Grain Shop. As other retailers joined the growing market, they formed the customer base for Harmony Foods, who imported wholegrain rice during the 1970s and made peanut butter and no-sugar-added jams. They were first with a whole range of foods, among them wholemeal sourdough bread, organic baked beans and brewed soya sauces, and they gained commercial success with Gregory's Real Eat company, producing Vegeburgers, and with Craig's Whole Earth empire and Green and Black's chocolate and ice cream.

The Sams' brothers interest in organic and whole foods brought them into contact with the Soil Asociation, which Gregory joined as early as February 1968. It seemed to him like a club for gentleman farmers, but it was the only body which had any interest in wholefoods and organic produce, and it could offer advice and experience. Moreover, it had in 1960 set up a shop in Baker Street actually called Wholefood, and a colleague of Sams went there to see if it would stock any Harmony Foods products. Bill Vickers told the manager Lilian Schofield to have nothing to do with these hippies, as Wholefood was a mainstream business; but the Sams brothers overcame the obstacles and got their products into the shop. In the early 1970s, Gregory Sams was invited to sit on the Soil Association's Standards Committee, but he found the farming knowledge way above his head and did not stay long. Nevertheless, he came to know Lilian Schofield, whom he much admired, her business partner Mary Langman, and David Stickland. Also around this time, he and Craig, with their father's support, founded Seed magazine. Its survival was aided by advertisements for Jordans products (muesli in particular) and Aspalls (apple juice, cider and vinegar). The Lincolnshire grower John Butler contributed a regular column to it. Gregory Sams believes it to have been prescient about various health and environmental issues, but once his father withdrew his support it ran into debt and was unable to benefit from the interest in organics which increased markedly during the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁹

*

We can now consider some implications of what the brief biographies in the previous sections reveal, and provide further contextual details to shed light on the question of continuity or its lack.

Firstly, it should be evident that all the people discussed found themselves making contact sooner or later, and often sooner, with established organisations or senior figures in the organic movement. Holden, Segger, Coppard and Lampkin all felt the influence of the bio-dynamic movement, which has a longer British history than the Soil Asociation, the Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Association having been established in 1928. The Gears spent many years in the company of Lawrence Hills, whose horticultural experience went back to the 1920s, who had corresponded with Sir Albert Howard during World War Two, and who had been a publisher's reader for Richard de la Mare, the editor who developed Faber and Faber's impressive organic agriculture and horticulture list. They also attended one of the courses on organic husbandry run by Dr. Anthony Deavin at Ewell Technical College in Surrey during the 1970s. These were evidently not always comfortable occasions, as the more establishment representatives of the Soil Association, such as Brigadier Vickers and the Shropshire farmer Sam Mayall, came into contact with younger enquirers of different mores. The fact remains, though, that these courses brought a new generation into contact with some of the movement's pioneers, Eve Balfour among them, while Nic Lampkin's studies at Aberystwyth led to him being supervised by Victor Stewart, a close associate of Balfour.Footnote ²⁰

It is interesting to study the WWoOF newsletters in this context, for they reveal that the organisation led the counter-urbanites to some senior figures in the organic movement: the Dorset farmer Ralph Coward, for instance, whose involvement dated back to the 1930s, Dick Kitto, and Robert L. Stuart. One also finds references to books by H. J. Massingham and Friend Sykes, and to the veteran forester Richard St. Barbe Baker, who was still active in the environmental movement in the early 1970s.Footnote ²¹

Lawrence Woodward came into contact with E. F. Schumacher, who was enormously influential on the seventies generation and tends therefore to be associated with the 1970s. But he joined the Soil Association in March 1951 and can with equal justice be seen as a figure from the organic movement's early period. His religious philosophy is remarkably similar to that of Philip Mairet, who had encouraged the organic movement's growth in his paper the New English Weekly. Both developed a commitment later in life to Catholicism (Anglo-, in Mairet's case, Roman in Schumacher's); both had a knowledge of Eastern spirituality, and an interest in esoteric forms of Christianity. Schumacher's book A Guide for the Perplexed (1977) reveals the influence both of Thomism and of the ideas of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. John Seymour, another guru for the seventies generation, was similarly rooted in the early period of the organic movement. He admired the work of H. J. Massingham and L. T. C. Rolt, and wrote an introduction to the latter's proto-environmentalist book High Horse Riderless (1947) on its re-issue in 1988.Footnote ²²

Two other figures who embodied continuity deserve some detailed discussion. When the West Wales group of the Soil Association held its first meeting, it was at the home of Mrs. Dinah Williams, near Borth. Mrs. Williams, born in 1911 and still very much alive at the time of writing (December 2007), the daughter of Professor Abel Jones of Aberystwyth and the mother of Rachel Rowlands, had known the agriculturalists Moses Griffith and R. G. (later Sir George) Stapledon in the 1930s, and made a tour of Stalin's collective farms with Sir John Russell, Director of Rothamstead Research Station, in 1938. She and her husband Stanley farmed organically from the 1940s onwards. Dinah Williams became a member of the Soil Association Council in 1971, and when the counter-urbanites moved into West Wales she found herself acting as something of a maternal mentor to them, watching their struggles, both agricultural and marital, with a bemused but tolerant eye. She felt that they were ‘clueless’ about how to farm, but she admired their energy and commitment and watched them as they learned their craft. In her view, the best organic farmer was likely to have been a good conventional farmer, that is, someone who already had plenty of agricultural experience. She travelled with them to Council meetings and got to know them well. Given that the West Wales group exercised a key influence on the organic movement's direction in the 1980s, Dinah Williams can be seen to represent in her own person a continuity in organic history.Footnote ²³

The same can be said for Mary Langman, who had worked at the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham in the 1930s, was a founder member of the Soil Association, farmed in Kent, ran the Wholefood shop in London, was active in IFOAM, and continued to offer advice and help to the seventies generation once they had become the new organic establishment, right into the new millennium. Langman was a link between the generations in the early 1980s, when the tensions were at their most serious and threatened to pull the Soil Association apart. Although a close friend of Eve Balfour, Langman had sympathy for what her opponents were trying to achieve. Langman's own retail experience at Wholefood would presumably have made her aware of the problems farmers and growers faced in selling their produce, and Wholefood had been the first outlet to which Patrick Holden sold his carrots. Langman perceived no necessary incompatibility between the principles and philosophy of the organic movement and the desire to market organic produce, whereas Eve Balfour was wary of introducing commercial values into the Soil Association. She was on the losing side of the argument. With skilful diplomacy, Mary Langman lent her support to those seeking to make the Association more responsive to the needs of growers and the demands of a market economy. Nevertheless, she later became concerned that the Association was neglecting its research commitments, and to ensure that research into organic methods would still be pursued she generously supported Lawrence Woodward's work at Elm Farm.Footnote ²⁴

Dinah Williams and Mary Langman provide perhaps the most convincing instances of continuity, but it is worth mentioning briefly other figures whose lives linked the early movement to its later period. Sam Mayall, who went organic in the late 1940s, was prominent in the Soil Association until his death in 1980. He influenced both Julian Rose, a landowner near Pangbourne, and Richard Young, farming in the Cotswolds, while his grand-daughter Ginny Mayall worked closely in the 1980s with Holden, Segger and their colleagues. Dr. Kenneth Barlow, whose 1942 book The Discipline of Peace is a major work of biological philosophy, was a Soil Association founder member who remained active in the organic movement until around 1990, editing a book in 1981 with Peter Bunyard, one of the leading British environmentalists. We have already noted the long-term involvement of Riccardo Ling and Ralph Coward, while in Scotland Dr. Walter Yellowlees was a powerful organic voice for more than fifty years.Footnote ²⁵

The case for continuity is not confined, however, to the influence of long-lived members of the organic movement; some of it is provided by members of the seventies generation themselves. Here, for instance, is Peter Segger writing in the July 1982 issue of the OGA newsletter: ‘Finally, it should be clearly stated that there is absolutely no contradiction whatsoever between developing the practical and efficient aspects of organic growing and marketing and the underlying philosophy and values which initiated the movement’. In contrast with Lawrence Woodward, whose approach is predominantly secular, Segger sees the organic philosophy as essentially spiritual, and thinks that there are many in the contemporary organic movement with ideals and views similar to those of the founders. Unlike many in the OGA, Segger got on well with Brigadier Vickers, and recalls that the West Wales group was established with active help from the headquarters at Haughley. He approached Victor Stewart, who worked with him on various tests and trials, and felt goodwill towards the Soil Association – after all, it had Schumacher as its President. Segger was less impressed by Lord O'Hagan, whom he found ‘dull’, and began to feel that the Association was failing to connect with its members. He maintains that the OGA always intended to go back into the Soil Association (as it eventually did in the early 1990s).Footnote ²⁶

Patrick Holden is even more explicit, stating that it is ‘absolutely not the case’ that there is a gulf between the newer generation and the pioneers. Different generations overlapped on the Soil Association Council and he became close to Mary Langman. But he had been linked to the pioneers right from the start of his involvement in the organic movement, having come into contact in 1972 with the esoteric philosophies of Steiner and Gurdjieff: ‘My interest in matters green and agricultural were linked with an interest in the spiritual dimension’. Holden feels that the forces of consumerism which he and his fellow counter-urbanites did so much to encourage now risk obscuring the original impulse of the founders.Footnote ²⁷

One might hypothesise, tentatively, that those of a more secular bent, like Frost, Woodward and Carolyn Wacher, are less willing to see continuity in the organic movement, while those with a stronger spiritual awareness, like Holden, Segger and Ling, see the movement as part of a ‘perennial philosophy’ in which care for the natural world is inseparable from, or even a metaphor for, inner spiritual development. Dr. Anthony Deavin, the scientist who organised organic husbandry courses at Ewell Technical College, takes a similar view, seeing in the Soil Association's journal in the 1960s an expression of what he terms ‘the Natural Law tradition’, and finding it a source of spiritual, as well as intellectual, nourishment. Such a perspective links him with the organic pioneers, for whom the idea of a Natural Order was central. In Deavin's view, those who deny their debt to the past lack depth. When generations clashed on the Ewell courses and Brigadier Vickers found it hard to relate to the appearance of the young, Deavin experienced no such problems, for he sensed that they were spiritual seekers who had understood what the organic movement might offer them.Footnote ²⁸

*

After this journey through some of the complexities of the organic movement, it is time to reassess the positions of those who prefer to see the post-1980 organic movement as quite distinct from what had gone before, and see if I can draw any clear conclusions on the issue of continuity.

As indicated above, Tracey Clunies-Ross suggests that the organic movement's leadership by 1990 was substantially different from that which dominated it from the 1940s: ‘the famous, the titled, the rich; eminent scientists, agriculturalists, doctors and professors – people who were interested in the reconstruction of society, and other wide ranging, holistic concepts’. The new leaders were ‘on the whole, not of the same ilk’.Footnote ²⁹ Even if one accepts the truth of this qualified statement in relation to the situation twenty years ago, one must nevertheless point out that the change was only temporary. The famous (Jamie Oliver, Jonathon Porritt, John Humphrys, Jonathan Dimbleby), the titled (the Prince of Wales, the Marchioness of Worcester, the Countess of March, Lord Melchett) and the rich (Peter Kindersley, Jody Schechter, Zac Goldsmith, the late Anita Roddick) have all been prominent in their support for organics in recent years. Clunies-Ross is right, however, that since the 1980s the movement has not produced eminent scientists of the calibre of Sir Albert Howard (agricultural botanist), Sir Robert McCarrison (nutritionist), Lord Bledisloe (agriculturalist), Sir George Stapledon (agronomist), Professor R. Lindsay Robb (agriculturalist/environmentalist), Sir Norman Bennett (dental scientist) or Kenneth Mellanby (ecologist). Rather, it has increasingly preferred to use celebrities to spread its message, as the Soil Association's ‘Feast of Albion’, a £1,000-per-seat fund-raising beano held at London's Guildhall in March 2008 and featuring members of the glitterati such as Jemima Khan and Sophie Dahl, amply demonstrated.

Clunies-Ross also maintains that ‘there are very important ways in which the ideas and preoccupations of organic groups in the 1980s are not descended from the philosophy of the early advocates of the organic approach’, and that organic farmers have a much narrower view of their craft than did their predecessors.Footnote ³⁰ Again, whatever may have been the case in the late 1980s, one can argue that this change was only temporary. Lawrence Woodward and Patrick Holden speak for many in their belief that organic farming has a central role to play in creating a viable food-supply chain and therefore a stable social system in an oil-scarce world. The fact that The Ecologist and Resurgence magazine have always been closely associated with the organic movement indicates the continued link between organics and a broader environmental and spiritual programme.

David Frost and Carolyn Wacher emphasise the cultural differences dividing their generation (whose values ‘were formed in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s’ [capital letters sic]) from the conservative elitism of Viscount Lymington, H. J. Massingham and company. Now, putting aside the fact that Lymington was a self-confessed sower of wild oats who participated in Parisian orgies and was involved in a messy divorce, and that Massingham caused a scandal by eloping with a woman twenty years his junior, one has to question whether the ‘cosmopolitan values’ of the seventies generation were really so distinct from those of the pioneers. As examples of these values, Frost and Wacher cite vegetarianism, environmentalism, and concern for animal rights, loss of wildlife habitats and exploitation of Third World food producers. In fact, all these issues appear in the writings of Massingham's generation, and one can add to them a desire to change the economic system in order to benefit agriculture, and support for small producers and family farms in order to revitalise rural life. By referring to the inspiration of Hills and Seymour, Frost and Wacher demonstrate that the older generation did indeed influence the younger.Footnote ³¹

In the late 1940s Frank Newman Turner, the Somerset farmer, set up the Whole Food Co-Operative in order to provide organic food for customers and a market for farmers; for ten years he also ran the journal The Farmer, incorporating The Gardener, which contained much practical advice. Newman Turner was too early, as there was little demand for organic produce at that time. Although the Soil Association gave its blessing to his project, it did not want to be involved, preferring to concentrate on education and research. More than thirty years later, the Association found itself unable to continue its policy of commercial detachment. The seventies generation succeeded where Turner had failed, but their approach was not without precedent. Only a few years before the OGA and BOF were established, David Stickland had left his post as editor of the Soil Association journal to set up Organic Farmers and Growers, which still flourishes today. Angela Bates, who encouraged him, finds it odd that the seventies generation ended up at loggerheads with Stickland, since, like them, he had fallen out with Brigadier Vickers and had set out to establish a marketing structure for organic produce. In Bates' view, they should have been allies, but Stickland found them too purist for his own more pragmatic approach, which they saw as a dangerous dilution of standards.Footnote ³²

To make such points is in no way to deny the importance of the OGA or its substantial impact on the organic movement since 1980. Among the achievements Frost and Wacher list are the national infrastructure for the developing organic market, and the current level of organic production; the development of modern organic horticultural standards; vegetable box schemes; novel approaches to problems; farm walks programmes, and the establishment of the journal New Farmer and Grower. They could have added to the list the transformation of the Soil Association journal in the mid-1980s, which by 1980 had shrunk to an unattractive brown-print news-sheet. When the seventies generation gained control they improved its appearance and, more importantly, greatly expanded its content. Frost and Wacher place at the head of the items in the OGA's legacy ‘the modern Soil Association’, but there is an irony here.Footnote ³³ The Soil Association is now so much geared to consumer interests that in December 2006 the growers found it necessary once more to form a breakaway organisation, the Organic Growers Alliance, and to establish their own journal. History was repeating itself, with many of the same people involved, and a paradox is perhaps discernible in the fact that members of the counter-culture helped make organics part of the mainstream of the capitalist market system from which they once tried to escape.

How, then, can one decide between the contrasting views of Lawrence Woodward and Riccardo Ling? Does the modern organic movement come from ‘somewhere quite different’, or is there the continuity for which Ling argues? The evidence presented in this article indicates that the thread of continuity is considerably more substantial than Woodward et al. suggest. Hills, Seymour and Schumacher, whom the seventies generation cite as key influences, were all part of the mainstream of organic history. Ideas were drawn from the United States, but those who read Charles Reich and Rachel Carson nevertheless made their way into existing British organic groups before establishing their own. The Sams brothers present the clearest example of an input from elsewhere, but even in this case we find Gregory Sams soon joining the Soil Association and becoming involved with Wholefood. In building up the organic market, the seventies generation were rediscovering, albeit unwittingly, a neglected element of organic history and proceeded to give it a prominence which has had some ambiguous results.

Given the complex nature of organic history, one must be cautious in reaching conclusions. Research into the personal biographies of others who played a part in the OGA and BOF might perhaps reveal different sources of inspiration from those identified here. On the other hand, one might challenge the assumption that the ‘cultural maelstrom’ of the 1960s marks a clean break with the past, or that the American counter-culture owes nothing to writers and environmentalists of an earlier period. We know, for instance, that the counter-cultural icons Henry Miller and Alan Watts had links in the 1930s with, respectively, the pro-organic group who ran Purpose and the New English Weekly, and with Dmitri Mitrinovic. We know, too, that Faber had published works by American environmentalists in the 1940s and 1950s and that Jerome Rodale, himself influenced by Howard and McCarrison, was an important voice in world of organic food.Footnote ³⁴ Social movements are not like Athena springing fully armed from the head of Zeus, and it would be useful to research what the counter-culture itself owed to earlier environmentalists and nutritionists.

That the seventies generation brought great energy and purpose to the organic movement and affected its development cannot be disputed. That it was something quite distinct from what had gone before is a more doubtful proposition. Such a conclusion lacks the uncompromising certainty of our opening statements by Woodward and Ling, while giving more credence to the latter. But it is truth, rather than simplification, that we seek.