Rolf Gardiner

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

Rolf took over the farm in 1927 and continued what became a large-scale forestation project, based on training he had received at Dartington Hall, with conifers and beech trees.

[17] 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.

[24] 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").

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.

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.

Writing in the Array's Quarterly Gazette, Gardiner was an apologist for German "leadership" in Central Europe, dictatorships, and "racial regeneration".

[34] 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.

[35] In 1941 he formed with H. J. Massingham and Gerald Wallop, Lord Lymington the Kinship in Husbandry, a group of a dozen men with an interest in rural revival.

[36][37] Original members were: Adrian Bell, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Bryant, J. E. Hosking, Douglas Kennedy, Philip Mairet, Lord Northbourne, Robert Payne and C. Henry Warren.

[40] Gardiner published in his maiden issue of Youth in June 1923, a first-hand account of The Cult of Nakedness in Germany by Harold Barlow.

In terms of the influence he had on giving Britain's young people a sense of identity, there's no doubt [Gardiner] is just as important as Mick Jagger".

[49] The estate hosts children and young people on day trips or longer stays, and is also a venue for weddings and other events.