The Hangman's Ancient Sunlight:
the strange story of the romantic left and the agrarian right
by Robin Carmody
Did you ever see a spokesman for the National Farmers' Union on television
in the 1970s, perhaps on a news bulletin or on one of the regional farming
programmes which were a cornerstone of the long-defunct federal ITV structure?
If so, there's a strong chance it was a former member of Oswald Mosley's British
Union of Fascists, and a leader of the Blackshirt movement.
Bob Saunders, the "Blackshirt Farmer", became TV spokesman for the
NFU after he had only missed election as Vice-President of the union by one
vote, after he had announced that he had been against the Second World War.
He was even awarded an OBE for his services to farming, and he worked with
Jorian Jenks - founder member of the Soil Association, editor of its journal
"Mother Earth" and regarded as one of the fathers of the organic
movement, but also a confirmed Mosleyite - on the Agricultural Council of
Mosley's post-war Union Movement.
A paradox instantly displays itself. The NFU is, like all good modern Tories,
concerned with little more than instant profitability and the quick buck,
and for this reason it has been generally hostile to the organic movement
for most of the post-war period. But that is a relatively mild and unimportant
paradox compared to all the astonishing contradictions and bizarre analogies
that can be drawn when one studies the differences and similarities between
the romantic-ruralist left and the agrarian right, the radical green movement
and the neo-pagan, back-to-the-land fringe of conservative thought.
It
is a regrettably neglected area of study in mainstream journalism, presumably
because most of the UK press is still stuck on linear, old-fashioned ideas
of Left and Right, and blind to anything more intriguing and unexpected. It
often seems that the romantic-ruralist fringes of the left and right hate
and oppose each other *all the more passionately* precisely because they can't
believe - or, perhaps, they *can* privately sort of believe, but they don't
want to publicly admit - that people on the other political "side"
could possibly have so much in common with them.
As a movement of the left, romantic ruralism has had a bad time since the
late 1970s. The kneejerk rejection of anything that could be associated with
Conservatism (although, ironically, the Thatcher and Major years were really
all about the Tory party definitively abandoning the countryside in favour
of suburbia, in a way it could never have psychologically done under Baldwin
or Macmillan, however much suburbanisation was under way then), the emphasis
on multiculturalism (and hence dismissal of those areas that still have an
almost entirely white population), the tribalistic clinging to heavy industry
even as it was being eroded, followed by the fashionable "newness"
and "modernity" of New Labour ... all have created a situation where
"the left" is widely identified almost entirely with urban and cosmopolitan
life (the make-up of the House of Commons actually tells a rather different
story - some of the more radical Labour MPs represent rural seats gained only
in 1997, while many Blairites sit for the safer urban constituencies). In
the late 1960s and early 1970s - the era of E.F. Schumacher, John Michell,
John Seymour, Edward Goldsmith's "Blueprint for Survival" and suchlike,
by no means all exclusively on the Left but all championed strongly by the
Left-leaning radical axis of the generation born in the aftermath of the Second
World War - it was a different story.
On the afternoon of 2nd May 1997 Neil Kinnock said on BBC Television that
the sense of excitement and renewal that young people must have been feeling
at Blair's victory reminded him of how he had felt as a young man at the time
of Harold Wilson's two election victories in the mid-1960s. The Wilson era
was indeed the precursor to Blairite New Labour in many ways, but its obsessive
techno-modernism produced not only the expected reaction from the purists
of Old Labour - essentially an urban, industrial phenomenon - but a counter-movement
from what would initially have seemed like a most unlikely source, the pop-cultural
left itself.
British folk-rock and aspects of hippiedom and psychedelia clearly had more
to do with their own take on ancient mysticism and timeless source material
than they had to do with much of what was being promoted around them. "Getting
it together in the country" rapidly became almost as much of a cliche
as "the white heat of technology" had already become (it was, however,
very much an urban/bohemian middle-class movement: rural working-class bands
of the 60s and 70s, such as The Troggs or Mott The Hoople, were fully immersed
in American trash culture).
A close friend of mine - who, ironically, grew up in Peterborough, which Labour
failed to gain in 1966 by three votes - travelled to the Wye Valley and the
Black Mountains in 1971, a voyage chronicled at http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/wordsworth.htm.
On the surface, it seems like an extension of the counterculture and student
radicalism at the time. The man who made the journey draws links between his
liking for Jimi Hendrix and his Romanticism, and even claims that Hendrix
was influenced by John Clare and Emily Bronte, but it is hard to trace direct
parallels between such a journey and the music of, say, The Who or The Rolling
Stones. One can, however, trace clear cultural links between such a journey
and the old Official British Culture that had existed a decade or more previously.
Look
at the Radio Times from 9-15 September 1961 and you'll find a live church
service was being broadcast from Grasmere (where Wordsworth lived, as somewhat
mockingly alluded to in The Smiths' "Panic", and in an area where
the capitalist rush of commercial TV had just arrived), and just half an hour
later there was a broadcast - one of several on the Home Service in this era
- by the very same John Seymour who would become such a hero for the left-leaning
self-sufficiency boom of a decade later. In the same week, the national Home
Service was repeating a Welsh Home Service programme from two months earlier
chronicling a journey down - yes, you've guessed it - the Wye Valley. Head
even further back to the Radio Times for 19-25 June 1955, and there was a
live TV outside broadcast of midsummer twilight at Tintern Abbey (which, significantly,
gave its name to a short-lived British psychedelic band from 1967/68, with
a decent cult following today) and a schools radio programme on Wordsworth.
In the summer of 1958, the schools radio music programme
"Singing Together" featured a folk song called "The Cuckoo",
which may well be the same song recorded by the Pentangle on their 1969 album
"Basket of Light". In 1959, the late Antonia Forest - a children's
writer so ultra-conservative that she thought the arch-Tory 1940s Church of
England was full of "Red Deans" - used the ancient plainsong "Lyke
Wake Dirge" prominently in her book "End of Term"; a decade
later this piece of music would also be recorded by the Pentangle on the same
album.
In a Girl magazine annual published in 1959 which contained features on hedgerows
and bell-ringing without a single mention of any popular singer apart from
the very middle-of-the-road Dennis Lotis (it should be remembered that Girl,
which merged into another publication in the month of the 1964 Labour election
victory, was a sister publication of the Eagle, which was famously founded
on an English Methodist opposition to "trashy American horror comics")
considerable space was given over to recounting a favoured New Age belief
of later years - that Jesus and his disciples visited Glastonbury (the "Isle
of Avalon").
As for the "radical antiquarian" John Michell, he was an Old Etonian
and Cambridge graduate already in his mid-30s by the time he was really "discovered"
by the new generation. Although he would blend into the Ladbroke Grove scene,
smoking weed and listening to reggae, he had some deeply conservative instincts
- he notably led anti-metrication campaigns, which set him firmly against
both the Wilson and Heath governments - and his interest in what has been
called "The Matter of Britain" would have been just as strong had
60s music and its attendant subculture never moved beyond the Beatles' "Revolver"
and the Stones' "Aftermath", although it might not have gone in
quite the same direction - it would probably have been more clearly in a line
of descent from the Official British Culture of the 50s.
Neither side would ever have admitted how strong the connections were, but
it really was as if the new generation were taking the loose cultural backdrop
to their already distant childhood and totally reanimating it, choosing it
as a preferable option to the bright and shiny New Britain promoted so obsessively
in the mid to late 60s, and crucially stripping it of its conservative and
restraining elements. Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band probably defined
it best when, explaining the title of their epochal 1968 album "The Hangman's
Beautiful Daughter", he said that "the hangman is the last 20 years
of our lives and the beautiful daughter is now". It was as if a whole
generation was consigning mainstream British conservatism *and* Mosleyite
eco-fascism all the more effectively to the status of the hangman by taking
some of the territory which the hangman might have had a claim to.
I often think that they succeeded in this partially because the agrarian right
was largely in abeyance at this time - the Mosleyite agrarians had largely
faded from view due to old age and political changes, while the Third Positionist
axis (the direct descendent of 1920s/30s eco-fascism, and one of many far-right
groups that the British National Party leader Nick Griffin was part of before
he began his current involvement with aggressive, in-yer-face urban populism)
had yet to emerge. However, there are some intriguing family links.
Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was one of the most prominent exponents of the
inter-war Agrarian Right - he was most famous for "Tarka the Otter"
(1927) and a number of other books based around a mystical, eloquent worship
of the nature and landscape of the area of North Devon where he settled in
1921. Williamson's literary reputation has suffered in later years because
of his support for Mosley and his membership of the British Union of Fascists
- he believed in the "awakening" of all the white European peoples
living in harmony with each other, and regarded his restoration of a derelict
Norfolk farm in the late 1930s as part of the same spiritual journey as Hitler's
"awakening" of the German people.
He opposed the Second World War, partially because he related to the "cleanliness"
of Nazi Germany and to its neo-pagan belief in agrarianism, and partially
because he had felt an affinity with the German soldiers while in the trenches
during the First World War, and believed that the British and German peoples
were natural spiritual allies and should never fight each other (this belief
in unity between Britain and continental Europe would also inspire Mosley's
post-war Union Movement, and would find a bizarre echo in Enoch Powell's prediction
that Britain would end up as an ally of the Soviet Union in a war against
the USA).
But
there are aspects of Henry Williamson's life and work that intriguingly anticipate
the Romantic Left as later defined by the ruralist wing of the hippie movement.
His official website at http://www.henrywilliamson.org
comments that, when he first moved to the North Devon village of Georgeham
in 1921, Williamson "must have presented an extraordinary sight to the
villagers ... dressed so casually that he often wore no shoes, sleeping out
in the summer, swimming naked, throwing apples at passers-by ... his 'strangeness'
was compounded by the friends that he had, particularly his equally wild companion
who shared his cottage to begin with ... and also the succession of young
ladies with whom he had intense relationships. He tried to join the activities
of the established social circle, joining the tennis and sailing clubs, but
they could not understand his eccentric behaviour and wild manner and tended
to ostracise him, whilst the village people did not understand him either.
He was regarded with suspicion, considered an outsider and a very strange
young man, being called 'funny' or even 'mazed' by the locals." This
would be a remarkably accurate description of the reaction to the Incredible
String Band and the other urban middle-class bohemians who left the cities
in search of utopia half a century later.
While recently struggling to remember the phrase Williamson used to evoke
"authenticity" and connection with the land and one's ancestors
- the phrase was in fact "Ancient Sunlight", the name of the semi-autobiographical
chronicle of novels which Williamson wrote in his later years - I initially
thought of "The Inner Light", the title of a George Harrison song
from the late 1960s. There isn't much difference between "barleybright",
the term Williamson used to describe his vision of a perfect, almost mythical
human being, and "sparklebright", a compound word that Dave Cousins
of the early 1970s band The Strawbs claims to have made up while writing the
song "A Glimpse Of Heaven" (also inspired by a Devonian setting).
Most fascinatingly of all, Henry Williamson's youngest son Harry Williamson,
born in 1950, immersed himself in the subcultural scene in the late 60s and
early 70s, working at the London Roundhouse, becoming involved with the early
Glastonbury festivals, linking up with the quintessential hippie band Gong
and, remarkably, co-writing with Anthony Phillips (an early member of Genesis)
an orchestral suite based around his father's most famous book, "Tarka
the Otter". While other people from profoundly un-pop backgrounds to
have lost themselves in pop music *had* to break all ties with everything
their family had previously stood for before they could begin their new careers
(the outstanding example of this is, of course, the hip-hop DJ Tim Westwood,
who has always refused to talk about his childhood as the son of the Anglican
bishop William Westwood, and who at one point totally falsified his background),
Harry Williamson found a subcultural niche for himself and, within it, he
could *still* invoke the work of his father, an agrarian Mosleyite. There
is absolutely no way that he could have done so had he been involved in any
of the other youth subcultures of the last half-century, from rock'n'roll
to punk, early reggae to current hip-hop.
There
are so many intriguing parallels to be drawn between the twin tributaries
of romantic ruralism. In an earlier essay of mine, known as "The world
has changed" on this site and published elsewhere under the title "Why
the hunting fraternity may be turning violent", I suggested that John
Peel's professional name gained new significance in the light of his acceptance
into the Radio 4 that the hunting fraternity still believe should be theirs
and theirs alone ("John Peel" derives, of course, from an old hunting
song - the broadcaster's real name is John Ravenscroft).
I have since discovered another irony in Peel's name, having come across a
book from 1970 called "Country Talk" by one J.H.B. Peel, the first
of several volumes of extracts from his Daily Telegraph columns which pretty
much define the gentle paternalism of the old romantic ruralist right (this,
remember, was the era when the Telegraph was still run as a sort of upper-middle-class
cottage industry by Lord Hartwell's family, well before it was taken over
by Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel with their hysterical support for the aggressive
hawkishness of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, which now drowns any remaining
traces of old Tory romanticism that may survive within that paper).
Around 1970 the other J. Peel, then in his unkempt-beard-and-dungarees phase,
was championing the eccentricity and spirituality of the romantic ruralist
left, writing sleevenotes for the first Pentangle album and running the Dandelion
Records label (which, like EMI's Harvest imprint, could only have been so
named in that era - the entire pop-cultural left would have recoiled at the
very word "dandelion" a decade before, and a decade later they would
do so again). Of course, there is another historical Peel of relevance to
this story - the Tory-turned-Liberal prime minister Sir Robert Peel was the
first Tory to seriously unsettle the romantic ruralist right with his campaign
against the protectionism for the sake of landowners and farmers embodied
in the Corn Laws, which led to a split in the Tory party never equalled until
the 1990s and 2000s.
Also
of great historical interest is the Soil Association. The pro-organic group
was set up in 1946 under the influence of Lady Eve Balfour, and in its early
days it was dominated by people like Jorian Jenks and Rolf Gardiner, linking
it to the Agrarian Right and to the suspicion that it extended "care
for the soil" over the edge into the idea of "blood and soil"
(Prince Charles would surely fit in with that axis much better than he does
with the predominately left-leaning environmentalist movement we have today).
Between 1967 and 1973 it went through a number of tumultous changes - the
new green-left generation led by Edward Goldsmith initially took control,
before they overreached themselves financially and almost dragged the whole
organisation under. Lady Eve Balfour, who had retired disillusioned with the
new drift, returned to hold it together, and the Association existed at a
relatively low profile through the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s, with
much of the energy of the growing organic movement redirected to new, smaller
organisations..
In 1983, in a deeply necessary counter-movement to the Thatcherite tide of
the day, the new generation returned and definitively took control of the
Soil Association, making it a far more visible, campaigning group than it
had been before, finally establishing a high profile for the association and
for the organic movement more generally. But looking back to the dramatic
divisions within the Soul Association in the early 70s, swinging first one
way then the other, and seemingly capturing the spirit of the moment one day
and almost going bankrupt the next, one has a striking mental picture of the
radio listings pages in a Radio Times of the era, with a picture of Bridget
St John doing a Peel session on one side of the spread, and the gentle journeys
of Radio 4's "The Countryside In ..." series on the other. Progressives
and conservatives fighting for control of a certain territory, opposing each
other all the more *because* they knew they had shared interests. The important
thing, as ever, was the perspective from which they came at those interests.
The intriguing crossovers *and* the strong divisions between radical left
and authenticist right are among the most fascinating political details of
our time. It is why Edward Heath's claim in 1973, when he was Tory Prime Minister,
that "the alternative to (economic) expansion is not an England of quiet
market towns linked only by trains puffing slowly and peacefully through green
meadows. The alternative is slums, dangerous roads, old factories, cramped
schools, and stunted lives" is probably the most effective statement
ever by any politician as a challenge both to an axis of his own party (in
this case romantic Tories of the Richard Body ilk) *and* the radical fringes
of the "other side". It is literally impossible to imagine Tony
Blair making a statement that would have equal effect as a challenge both
to hardline socialists *and* to whatever radical opposition he might face
from the Tory benches (although there is, admittedly, very little of that
at the moment - what the Tories still call radicalism most of us call "rehashed
free-market ideas from 20 years ago").
It
is also the best explanation for the downfall of Crispian Mills, whose much-discussed
family background had faint hints of first-generation British pop about it
- his mother Hayley Mills sang the jaunty 1961 hit "Let's Get Together"
("we can have a swinging time!") but really had much stronger resonance
in an earlier British cultural lineage; being the son of Hayley Mills and
Roy Boulting, and the grandson of Sir John Mills, his family line went back
to such films as "In Which We Serve", David Lean's version of "Great
Expectations", "I'm Alright Jack", "Heavens Above!",
and "Whistle Down The Wind". As frontman of the briefly successful
band Kula Shaker, Crispian Mills enjoyed great success in 1996/97 peddling
retro, 60s-based psychedelic pop-rock heavily inspired by George Harrison
- the music was pallid and weak, and an extremely pale shadow of all its influences,
but no more so than much other mid-1990s Britpop and retro-rock was. The personal
peccadilloes which would destroy his career came from a familiar territory
- the unwitting crossover between left-leaning mystics, especially when they
slip over into conspiracy theories against dominant (often characterised as
"Zionist") figures in the Western world such as the Bilderberg group,
and neo-Nazis.
In January 1997 Mills told Melody Maker that Prince William could be a "great
leader for the people" if he was informed by "Arthurian symbolism",
and that he was being kept down by "world leaders" who were "demons"
and "baby-eaters", going on to say that Prince Charles was promoting
"forward-thinking" ideas and was being held back by "too many
people who don't want him to be powerful", before asserting that "we
know that democracy doesn't work" and that we should have a "non-elected
body that set the right standards". Astonishingly, these remarks - at
best, feudalism, at worst, fascism - were not remarked upon at the time, but
they should have set alarm bells ringing at least as much as Mills' claim
in the New Musical Express in March 1997 that "Hitler knew a lot more
than he let on", that the Nazis "weren't just a bunch of fucking
psychos", and that the swastika - an old Indian symbol, yes, but now
inexorably associated with the Nazis - was "a brilliant image" which
symbolised "peace and the sun and illumination". Worst of all, Mills
argued that he'd like to have a "great big flaming swastika on stage".
After
these remarks it was open season on Crispian Mills - in the spring of 1997
the British political magazine Open Eye denounced Mills as one of Britain's
"New Age Nazis", revealing that Mills' unsuccessful previous band,
the Objects of Desire, had used the motto "England will rise again",
and had performed at a 1993 conference at Wembley called "Global Deception"
where speakers included the anti-semitic propagandist Eustace Mullins and
the American writer and conspiracy theorist William Cooper. Cooper had reprinted
the anti-Semitic work "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion",
and was thanked on the sleeve of Kula Shaker's album "K". After
the journalist Matthew Kalman received a fax from Mills in which the singer
attempted to explain himself but bizarrely claimed that Cooper's reprinting
of "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" was an attempt
to show how there was a conspiracy *against* the Jews (the opposite of its
true meaning), the Independent on Sunday of 20th April 1997 ran a front-page
story by Kalman arguing that Mills was a fellow traveller with neo-Nazis,
quoting the anti-democratic remarks from his Melody Maker interview of three
months earlier.
Similar stories started to get around - one claimed that another member of
Mills' previous band had been in the National Front, while an NME journalist
suggested that even as he wrote the attempt to explain himself Mills was still
praising William Cooper's book "Behold, A Pale Horse" at an NME
party. Once an unrepentant Mills told the NME in the spring of 1998 that there
was a conspiracy against him and that he had not changed his mind about having
"flaming swastikas on stage" he was effectively beyond redemption,
and after declining sales Kula Shaker split up in September 1999 (other mid-90s
retro-rock bands, such as Cast, Ocean Colour Scene and even Oasis, had suffered
a commercial decline by then, but in their case it was a relatively graceful
process). If the Crispian Mills Affair confirmed one thing, it is just how
easy it is to be sucked into the anti-Semitic Right if you're immersed in
the hippie-left when you're young, naive and you're not careful where you
look.
And the great hidden connections, together with their attendant polarisations,
surely explain why someone posting to the alt.politics.nationalism.white newsgroup
in 2000 could reproduce the songs of Robin Williamson (no relation to Henry
and Harry, incidentally), both solo and with the Incredible String Band, amid
the usual BNP newsletters and anti-Semitic sneers. While there is absolutely
nothing inherently right-wing or racially "pure" or separatist about
the soaring mysticism of the lyrics - I love them at the same time as loving
what is often called "urban" music - it is *possible*, and in fact
comparatively easy, to imagine someone liking them and putting their own spin
on them as a justification for eco-fascism and the forced return of the whole
of humanity to their "authentic" roots ***whether they want it or
not*** (you could call it "Tolkienisation" - J.R.R. Tolkien is to
this sort of mysticism what his fellow Worcestershire native Edward Elgar
is to the more straightforward Middle England type of cultural Toryism, the
most frequently-invoked figure, and the one whose true sympathies are most
regularly discussed).
Songs like "Waltz of the New Moon", "Job's Tears" and
"The Iron Stone" are not works of racial separatism or white supremacy,
but I don't think they are actually threatening to such dogmas ***by their
very existence*** in the way that much other pop and rock music is (this idea
of the ISB and the subculture they embodied might well have taken root with
many people in 1994 when Rose Simpson, a former member of the group, became
mayor of Aberystwyth in West Wales, an event reported in the Daily Mail and
other newspapers which would never normally mention any 60s band who weren't
played constantly, both at the time and since, by Tony Blackburn).
Compared
to much of what came before and has come since, the songs are blank canvasses
on which you can easily place whichever "meaning" suits your own
priorities. What, for example, are we to make of the fact that the current
Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has recently written the foreword
to a book of the Incredible String Band's lyrics, which can be read at www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1049088,00.html
?
It seems reasonable to argue that it proves the late Ian MacDonald's point
- that the specificially British-traditionalist spiritual wing of the hippie
subculture was not in fact the force which has done most to change society
over the last 40 years, and in reality it was "less an agent of chaos
than a marginal commentary", a reaction to the forces of consumerism
and individualism which have eaten away at the more communal, Christian-based
society of earlier times (the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, like Christianity
and the Church as a whole, carried far more weight and kudos in society as
a whole before everything we think of as "the 1960s" happened).
But does the appointment of an Incredible String Band afficionado to one of
the key positions in the British Establishment - close to the monarchy, appointed
by the state, carrying a vast weight of history going back to Chaucer via
Powell and Pressburger - also prove that, despite impressions, that wing of
British hippiedom never stood out in absolute, total opposition to older Establishment
ideas of Britain in the way that the sheer lack of restraint and global cosmopolitanism
of the black pop continuum - represented in the 60s by Tamla Motown, Atlantic
and Stax, music often despised by the self-proclaimed radicals - has always
done? Would it even be possible for someone whose first love was Motown, or
Northern Soul, or even early reggae, to take such a senior Church/Establishment
position as Archbishop of Canterbury, or is there something in black pop and
its defining qualities which makes it irreconcilable with such religious and
state-related duties in a way that the ISB's music is not? Is this divide
on some levels as racial as it is cultural in the wider sense?
Does Williams' appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury underline the view
that the "Canterbury school" of early 1970s music - Kevin Ayers,
Soft Machine et al - has very little in common with the ethos of the early
Beatles or Tamla Motown compared to its position in a wider cultural lineage
which takes in ancient British history, its conservative appropriators in
the earlier part of the 20th Century, and younger, left-leaning people alike?
Does it prove that the Christian institutions are panicking at the rise of
neo-Paganism and trying to build some bridges (the ISB had strong influences
of pre-Christian British spirituality - arguably *the* greatest recurring
tendency in both a certain axis of the hippie-left and one particular wing
of the far-right - and Williams courted controversy in August 2002 when he
was inducted into the Gorsedd of Bards, an ancient Welsh order of Druids,
in an hour-long ceremony at sunrise within a circle of standing stones similar
to those at Stonehenge)?
I'm
not sure whether I even want to know the answers - or, at least, if I ever
do come to definitive conclusions, I want a while longer to think about them.
Like the ideological crossover which enables extremist white supremacists
to quote songs associated with the radical left in the first place, all the
issues at stake here are uncertain, and they do not make their meaning clear
instantly. I know it alienates me from most of the media, but I would rather
feel that way than feel certain about anything. It is, after all, the nature
of the desperately confused era we live in, and it is the key to the mystery
of the left-right interzone of the Hangman's Ancient Sunlight.
[Dedicated to the memory of the author Ian MacDonald]
RPC March 2003 - February 2004
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