Distributist Perspectives (Vol 2)

Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of an Anglican cleric and was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford University, whence she graduated in 1915. She then joined Blackwells, the publishers, as a copywriter. Her first novel, Whose Body?, published in 1923, created the now celebrated figure of Lord Peter Wimsey, who was to appear in another 14 volumes of short and full-length stories. In her day she became the doyen of crime writers, though she had an unfailing admiration for the work of E. C. Bentley and G. K. Chesterton.

In 1936, however, she changed direction and moved into playwriting, producing The Busman's Holiday. A complete success, it led to her being inundated with offers of work. This included The Zeal of Thy House, produced for the 1937 Canterbury Festival, and The Emperor Constantine for the Colchester Festival in 1951. She penned the now famous The Man Born to be King in 1942, and it was broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour to great effect.

She also produced a popular translation of Dante's Divine Comedy in English, and was an accomplished poet, theologian, and apologist. Her numerous works also include Creed or Chaos?: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster and The Lost Tools of Learning. She enjoyed the friendship of T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, and C. S. Lewis. She was also a popular circuit lecturer, whose motto was: "The only Christian work is good work - well done."

Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was an engraver, sculptor, typographer, and writer. He was trained as an architect in London and also took classes in writing and illumination at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Inspired by well-known calligrapher Edward Johnston, who was himself an admirer of William Morris and later a member of the Ditchling community, Gill acquired a passion for lettering that remained with him for life.

His professional career thus began with carving letterforms in stone for numerous tombstones and memorials in and around London. This work further led to a series of stone sculptures exhibited in galleries, as well as others executed for the BBC Headquarters (such as Prospero and Ariel), the London Underground, numerous churches, and various war memorials, among which is the WWI memorial at the University of Leeds which depicts a powerful Christ driving modern-day money lenders from the Temple. He also produced the magnificent Stations of the Cross that are still to be seen in Westminster Cathedral in London, and designed St. Peter the Apostle (Catholic) Church, located in Gorleston-on-Sea, Great Yarmouth.

As a type designer Gill produced Perpetua and the companion italic Felicity, Gill Sans, and Joanna, the latter named after his daughter. The majority of his type designs were done for Monotype Typography, a company still in existence. In 1931 Gill produced his influential Essay on Typography.

As an engraver and illustrator, much of Gill’s notable work was produced for the Golden Cockerel Press, established in 1920 and owned and directed from 1924 to 1933 by engraver Robert Gibbings. The Press was one of the most renowned English private presses of the early 20th century, and its books served as outlets for the wood engravings of numerous well-known engravers, including Gill, Gibbings, David Jones, and John Buckland Wright. The most famous work to result from the Gibbings-Gill collaboration is the 1931 book, The Four Gospels. Along with Gibbings, Gill was a founding member of the Society of Wood Engravers, which was formed in 1920.

Among the many engravings and illustrations that he produced are The Song of Songs, The Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ, and Troilus and Criseyde. He also produced numerous wood engravings for bookplates and posters.

Even after Gill left Ditchling for Pigott’s farm, he continued to train pupils and assistants, and his legacy inspired a generation of stone carvers and letter cutters. His apprentice remained at Ditchling, taking over the stone carver’s workshop, and the Guild numbered among its members in the 1920s craftsmen such as carpenter George Maxwell, weavers Valentine KilBride and Bernard Brocklehurst, and wood-engraver Philip Hagreen. In 1932 the silversmith Dunstan Pruden (who taught Capt. Herbert Shove the trade) joined, followed by artist and engraver Edgar Holloway. The affairs of the Guild were not wound up until 1989.

As a thinker, social critic, and art philosopher, Gill expressed the life that he had attempted to lead at Ditchling and thereafter. His ideas on art and philosophy were influenced by the work of French Thomist Jacques Maritain, whose work Art and Scholasticism was published by Gill in 1923 as the first-ever translation of Maritain in England. Gill’s works of philosophy and social criticism include Art and Love, Art and Prudence, Art and Manufacture, Clothes, Money and Morals, Beauty Looks After Itself, Work and Leisure, Work and Property, Christianity and the Machine Age, and It All Goes Together. His faithfulness to the Catholic social vision is best illustrated by noting a remark that Pope Pius XII made when he happened upon one of Gill’s books: “This man has understood our encyclicals.”

Gill was a remarkable man, himself a convert to the Catholic Faith in 1913, who combined theoretical erudition with manual dexterity to a high degree, thereby influencing an enormous range of people that included Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Not a few of his contemporaries considered him to be remarkable for his holiness; Fr. Brocard Sewell, the English Carmelite, in fact remarked of him that “he represents my ideal of the holy man. . . . [For] the saint. . . is the man who loves God and his neighbor with all his heart, and Eric did that to a degree I have seldom encountered.”

George Maxwell was a Catholic layman, Third Order Dominican, Distributist, peasant proprietor, and carpenter who embodied in his lifestyle the ideals and attitudes that the Distributist League and the Catholic land movement were attempting to propagate. Originally a coach-builder from Birmingham, England, he was induced by Fr. Vincent McNabb to join the community of craftsmen and Distributists in Ditchling, a village in Sussex, England, in 1922. Ditchling was “founded” by Eric Gill, Hilary Pepler, and Edward Johnston, originally from Hammersmith, who moved to the village from 1913 to 1916 for various reasons, but soon found themselves united in an effort of rural craftsmanship and communal life. Maxwell was a handy man, skilled as a carpenter, wheelwright, and loom-builder. When he came to Ditchling, he became a member of the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, established by Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler to foster Catholic craftsmanship in theory and especially in pratice; for the Guild, “the principle of individual human responsibility being a fundamental of Catholic doctrine, and this principle involving the principles of ownership, workmen should own their tools, their workshops, and the product of their work.” As one of the village’s most skilled carpenters, Maxwell built his own carpenter’s shop, in order to provide furniture and other objects for the community, as well as his own furniture for his home, the Ferrers.

During the 1930s he built his first loom, and in the aftermath of WWII he expanded this craft immensely, supplying art schools and workshops throughout England with looms. As an accomplished amateur builder, Maxwell built his own home at Ditchling and, along with the workshop for St. Dominic’s Press, several houses that belonged either to the Guild – incorporated for business purposes as the Spoil Bank Association, Ltd. – or members or supporters living at Ditchling. A good friend of Harold Robbins, whom he had known since 1919, he lived the Distributist ideal, working in his company while managing the land and livestock on his smallholding.

Guildsmen such as Maxwell were required to be Third Order Dominicans; guild members met twice a day to recite the psalms and hymns of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the Dominican rite, in the small chapel built near the workshops on the commons.

Maxwell was an extremely knowledgeable Thomist, and he knew many other major philosophers well, both ancient and modern. He was therefore considered to be Ditchling’s “resident philosopher” and one of the deepest thinkers among the Distributists. His house was in fact the “principal port of call” for the men of the Guild to argue and talk over their ideas. He held rigidly to what Michael Sewell (later Fr. Brocard Sewell) calls the “stricter” school of Distributism, thinking even Belloc and Chesterton heterodox on certain points. As an illustration of his intransigence it may be pointed out that later in his life he began to disapprove of some of Maritain’s philosophies, though the bulk of Distributist League members saw Maritain in the light in which St. Thomas saw Aristotle: as the philosopher.

Fr. Sewell relates in his memoirs that many of the younger Distributists who were faced with conscription for World War II consulted Maxwell for his assessment on a book on just war doctrine – which effectively implied the injustice of England’s participation in the war – by the well-known German Thomist, Fr. Francis Stratmann. Maxwell’s verdict was that he found Stratmann’s position unimpeachable; as an illustration of Maxwell’s sound grasp of the philosophy, others who shared his assessment of Stratmann’s work were the English Dominican Fr. Gerald Vann, O.P., Fr. Francis Drinkwater, and the well-known English Catholic writers Donald Attwater, E. I. Watkin, and Eric Gill.

Maxwell contributed frequently to G.K.’s Weekly and Cross and Plough, the English Catholic Land Association journal. As a supporter of the land movement he contributed an essay on craftsmanship to the important anthology Flee to the Fields. He died in 1957, leaving his son, John, to continue the work at his shop.

Son of the well-known newspaper editor, H. W. Massingham (1860–1924), H. J. was a journalist, author, and one of England’s leading natural historians and ruralists. During a rich life of activity, he contributed to papers such as The Field, The Spectator, Country Life, The New Age, The Adelphi, The New English Review, and The Weekly Review. In addition, he wrote some 40 books which covered the cultural, agricultural, and religious patrimony of England and made him the “Englishman’s Englishman.”

Beginning his career as an agnostic, working for his father on The Nation and for the guild-socialist New Age, he eventually came to affiliate with the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, probably under the influence of Philip Mairet and Maurice Reckitt. This move towards a specifically Christian view of life and society became evermore accentuated in his later writings, and eventually led to his conversion to Catholicism ca. 1940. For a time he was on the staff of the anthropology department at the University of London, working with its professor, Grafton Elliot Smith. In his later work on the craftsmanship of the English countryside, he accumulated an impressive collection of rural tools, now held by the Rural History Centre at the University of Reading.

A declared Distributist, he was involved in a number of bodies which propounded his view of the world: the Right Book Club, founded by Captain Jock Ramsey, MP; the Council for Church and Countryside; and the Soil Association, of which he was a Founding Member. He was also heavily involved in the Kinship in Husbandry group, which was active from 1941 to 1950, and was composed of agriculturalists and writers who together attempted to both formulate and propagate a vision of organic farming and a philosophy of husbandry. Its first clerk was Lord Northbourne, the author of Look to the Land; other members included the poet Edmund Blunden, the journalist Philip Mairet, the soil expert Sir Alfred Howard, the nutritionist Sir Robert McCarrison, and the historian Arthur Bryant.

Apart from his autobiography, Remembrance, written in 1941, Massingham’s important works include A Treasury of Seventeenth Century English Verse, Cotswold Country, Rural England, The Tree of Life, Wisdom of the Fields, Where Man Belongs, and Faith of a Fieldsman. In writing the Tree of Life, he enjoyed the assistance of M. B. Reckitt, whom Massingham met through their mutual association with the Council for Church and Countryside. His leadership of the field in which he labored is illustrated by his having edited several volumes of essays, such as England and the Farmer and The Natural Order, which included contributions from important figures such as Viscount Lymington and Sir Albert Howard.

The significance of Massingham’s love for English agriculture and its fine traditions of husbandry and craftsmanship are happily becoming more and more appreciated. Dr. Hilda Kean of Ruskin College at the University of Oxford has referred to Massingham as “the forerunner of the modern ecological movement, who looked to organic farming and the benign treatment of animals to create a new way of life.” And Richard Moore-Colyer, a leading researcher of English Ruralism and Professor at the Rural Studies Institute of the University of Wales, wrote recently that &ldquotaken overall, the Massingham œuvre is characterised by a profound sincerity, a deep love of England and Englishness, and an omnipresent fear that the traditions which lay at the root of all he believed to be good about the English were under threat from a mechanistic economo-centric world in which the individual played but a minor role. Lyrical in description and pungent in criticism, Massingham’s writing is refreshingly free of pedantry; the considerable learning is worn lightly and he manages to enthuse profusely without resorting to overindulgence. At his best he bears comparison with the very finest ruralist writers, and in the literary celebration of the English countryside and its culture he probably has no twentieth-century rival. As a polemicist, meanwhile, he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Cobbett (many of whose ideals he shared) although as a mild-tempered and gentle man he was entirely without the former’s trenchancy and bombast.”

A Distributist, Catholic land movement activist, journalist, and editor, Harold Robbins (1888-1954) was born in Birmingham to a Protestant family, and converted to Catholicism in the early 1900s, after briefly declaring himself a socialist, as many non-Catholic social thinkers did who were attempting to find a way to distance themselves from the prevailing Manchester liberalism. His conversion is most likely due to, among other things, his having discovered the two most prominent English Catholic writers of his time – Belloc and Chesterton – and their appealing critique of both socialism, about which he was having doubts, and capitalism.

Robbins jumped into the Distributist movement early, attempting unsuccessfully to write for the two weeklies then espousing it, the Eye Witness and its successor the New Witness. After military service in the first world war he became involved in the “New Witness League,” founded in 1918 around the weekly for opposing corruption in politics. Robbins was made Chairman of the Birmingham branch, the most active branch of the league. The group’s work focused ideologically on Distributism and the opposition to the eugenicist policies then being pursued by the British Ministry of Health. Some of Robbins’s thinking on this topic is found in his An Examination of Eugenics (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd., 1930). In the spring of 1921 the league wound up its activities, and two years later the paper of the same name ceased publication.

In 1925 those collaborating on the New Witness gathered around a new paper, G.K.’s Weekly (to which Robbins contributed), begun in order to “promote and ensure the discussion of the real economic forces of the age under their real names,” as Chesterton put it. Partly as a natural outgrowth and partly due to its financial straits (which it was in until the demise of its founder in 1936), and the need for subscribers, a league was also formed around this weekly, “for the restoration of liberty by the distribution of property”; or, the Distributist League. Robbins led, as Chairman, the Birmingham Branch of the league from 1926 to 1933, the most active and aggressive branch among some two dozen extant around 1927. He was chiefly instrumental in founding, with Msgr. James Dey, Rector of Oscott College and later Ordinary to the British Armed Forces, the Midlands Catholic Land Association; Robbins was its Honorary Secretary during the years that it was active, 1931 to 1936. This effort translated into practice what Robbins felt was somewhat of an overemphasis on mere talk: it was, he said, a “working model of practical distributism.” He also edited the journal of the Catholic Land Associations of England and Wales, The Cross and the Plough, from 1934 to 1946, published by the Catholic Land Federation of England and Wales.

He co-authored with K. L. Kenrick in 1928 what came to be known as “the Birmingham Scheme,” a pamphlet entitled Unemployment: A Distributist Solution; his friendship with Kenrick, who was the other chief mover of the Birmingham branch of the league, spanned many years. Kenrick called Robbins the “real power house” of the movement in their area. In 1946 he wrote a short biography of GKC – and also a history of Distributist activism from 1920 to 1940 – dedicated to Kenrick and entitled The Last of the Realists, though it was not published until 1948, and then only serialized in The Cross and the Plough because of wartime restrictions on paper.

Robbins’s short but powerful magnum opus was published in 1938 as The Sun of Justice: An Essay on the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church; he expressed its thesis thus: “Social Justice is crucial to the future of the Faith. There are many ways to the Faith, but it is certain that the concept of Our Lord as the Sun of Justice is not only valid, but is the only way by which our disillusioned and despairing world will return to Him” (pp. 10–11). Dorothy Day (1897–1980) noted in a 1954 issue of her paper, The Catholic Worker, that Robbins’s Sun of Justice “contains the best thinking ever done on Distributism.”

A printer, puppeteer, journalist, and Distributist, Hilary Douglas Clarke Pepler was born of a Quaker farming family in Eastbourne, Sussex; in 1905 he settled in Hammersmith, beside the Thames, with his wife Clare, where he was surrounded with arts and crafts history, such as William Morris's Kelmscott House (May, his daughter, lived nearby). The calligrapher Edward Johnston was a close friend and neighbor; Eric and Mary Gill were also in town until 1907, when they left for Ditchling village, in Sussex. Pepler was employed by the London County Council from about 1907 to 1915, working in child care; during this time he wrote The Care Committee: the Child and the Parent and Justice and the Child. Through the Fabian Society in London he saw much of G.K. and Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. In pursuit of interests in hand-crafts and publishing, he co-founded the Hampshire House Workshops with the others of like mind in Hammersmith, providing Belgian refugee craftsmen with an opportunity to work at carpentry, embroidery, and shoemaking. The endeavor sprang from the Hampshire House Club for working men which he founded in 1907; the house was bought with help from Chesterton, Belloc, and others. Pepler's first publication was the 1915 The Devil's Devices (on machinery, and subtitled "Control versus Service") over the Hampshire House imprint, illustrated with woodcuts by Gill and calligraphically dedicated to G.K. Chesterton by Johnston. This collaboration with Gill resulted in Pepler's 1915 move to Ditchling village with his wife and three sons who were born in Hammersmith (Pepler's three daughters were born later in Ditchling): David, who would look after the family farm at Ditchling and marry Elizabeth Gill; Stephen, later Dominican priest (as Fr. Conrad) and author of Riches Despised, on the tension between industrialized man and the peasant faith of Christianity; and Mark, who was to take over Pepler's later publishing imprint in 1936.

The family moved into Gill's original house in Ditchling - Sopers - the Gills having by then moved into Hopkin's Crank on Ditchling Common. Pepler was baptized a Catholic by Fr. Vincent McNabb in 1916, after meeting the Dominican while visiting Hawkesyard Priory with Gill. Pepler then set up St. Dominic's Press, which, as a hand-press operation, incarnated for him the Distributist ideal which saw, with a primary attachment to the land, the art, economics, and philosophy united in primary hand-crafts. The Press produced some of the "liveliest and least pretentious pieces of hand-printing produced since the end of the fifteenth century" (Walters); his type was "worthy of ranking with William Morris' Kelmscott Gothic" (Hoehn). St. Dominic's produced over 200 books or pamphlets, including works by Fr. McNabb, Jacques Maritain, Raïssa Maritain, many illustrated by Gill and the other wood engravers and calligraphers at Ditchling such as David Jones, Desmond Chute, and Philip Hagreen.

In 1918 Pepler moved from Ditchling village into Hallets on the common, where carpenters, weavers, and sculptors soon joined the original contingent - Gill, Pepler, and Johnston -to pursue the life of rural craftsmanship that the "founders" considered to be the Catholic temporal and social ideal; officially the group incorporated as the Guild of Ss. Joseph and Dominic in 1921. Most were Dominican tertiaries who recited the office together at fixed times daily; Fr. McNabb acted as spiritual director. During these years Gill and Pepler collaborated in editing an occasional journal called The Game: A Magazine, which appeared from 1916 to 1923. It carried many illustrations from then- or future members of the Ditchling community, including Philip Hagreen and Desmond Chute.

Later the Pepler's moved into Fragbarrow farm, still on the common, and Pepler's son David managed the small family farming operation there until he suffered an untimely death from tuberculosis in 1934. In 1924 Eric Gill left the guild and Ditchling due to a rupture with Pepler over various issues. The break grieved Pepler for a lifetime, but it was healed eventually through the efforts of Clare Pepler and Mary Gill who kept up correspondence and mutual understanding between the families; the marriage of Betty Gill to David before his death also helped resolve the breach. After the Gill's departure from Ditchling, Pepler and his family moved into their home on the commons.

Until 1936 Pepler continued his work with St. Dominic's Press; later he devoted himself to drama, as an author of mimes and an accomplished puppeteer. His mimed stations of the cross were performed in St. Paul, Minn., Santa Fe, N.M., and Pittsburgh, Penn.; his The Field Is Won, a mime of the life of St. Thomas More, was produced at a London theatre for celebrations of the canonizations of St. Thomas and St. John Fisher; he produced mimed versions of well-known plays for the BBC; and he took puppets from his own theater to the international marionette show in Liége in 1930.

His other works include Plays for Puppets (1928), Pilate: A Passion Play (1928), In Petra (1923), Concerning Dragons (1921), Bethlehem: A Tableau of the Nativity for Presentation to Children (1927) and The Three Wise Men: A Nativity Play (1927).

Upon Chesterton's 1936 death, he secured directorship and co-editorship, with Reginald Jebb (Belloc's son-in-law), of the Weekly Review (published thenceforth by the Ditchling Press, successor to St. Dominic's and managed by Pepler's son Mark and Michael Sewell), in all but name the successor to G.K.'s Weekly, organ of the Distributist League, which Pepler supported in the '30s as its honorary secretary. When the Weekly Review came to an end in 1949, Pepler established a small journal, The Register, which he published until his death.

Others of his works of commentary and social and art criticism are The Hand Press and Pertinent and Impertinent. Towards the end of his life, he wrote the invaluable A Letter from Sussex: About My Friend Eric Gill (1950), giving an insider's view of what it was like to work with the talented, if difficult, artist. Pepler's last public activity was his production of his mime, The Passion of Our Lord, performed in London, at Albert Hall. Following Pepler's death, his requiem was offered in the guild chapel at Ditchling, and he was buried there in the ancient parish churchyard, near his son, David.

Stanley B. James wrote of Pepler's writing that its "austere beauty" cannot be denied. "It is entirely free, he continued, "from superfluous ornament and sentimentalism. The intellectual quality is high; the lines are packed almost too closely with thought."

Jorian Edward Forwood Jenks was born in Oxford in 1899. He was the son of a solicitor and prominent academic and constitutional-history writer. Jenks was educated at Haileybury and Harper Adams Agricultural College in Shropshire, where he graduated with a National Diploma in Agriculture in 1920. Prior to further education at Oxford’s Institute of Agricultural Economics, which granted him a B.Litt., he had experience as a farm manager in Berkshire and traveled to New Zealand, Canada, and Australia working, studying and lecturing. Following his time at Oxford, he spent a year as an agricultural lecturer in Devon, during which he married and took over the tenancy of Ecclesden Farm in Angmering, West Sussex, England.

Politically, Jenks was attracted to the only party at the time that supported his vision of home agriculture and national self-sufficiency in food, and joined the British Union of Fascists. (As John Phillips points out, writing for the Angmering villiage website (angmeringvillage.co.uk), “West Sussex was seemingly a hotbed of BUF activity and it probably drew the greatest support and sources of finance from the county.... These people were not the skin-head followers that today we rightly or wrongly associate with the BUF’s successor, but respectable men, women and knights of the realm, many having become disaffected with the Conservative Party. They were not necessarily disloyal people – many had fought during WWI and others were to fight for their country against Hitler and his policies during WW2.”) Jenks’s knowledge and aptitude led to him being appointed the Union’s agricultural advisor, in which capacity he developed its agricultural policy and became a prolific writer on agricultural subjects in its publications; he had a weekly column in Action, for instance, until 1940. He advocated farming by organic methods and was convinced that many of the modern diseases, including the rise of cancer, were the result of the use of chemical fertilizers.

He was put forward by his party as the prospective MP for Worthing and Horsham, but no election took place due to the outbreak of war. Again according to Phillips, Jenks “was essentially a studious man and occasionally wrote to the local press answering criticisms of the BUF and insisting that they were a party advocating freedom and peace. [He] seems to have been a low-key candidate and appeared happy farming at Ecclesden and continuing his writing.”

In May 1940 he was rounded up and detained along with some 800 members of the Union under Defence Regulation 18b (1A), following the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in England. No records are available that indicate the reason for his detention. During his detention, Prof. Moore-Colyer believes, Jenks was subjected to uncompromising methods of interrogation at the hands of Britain’s MI5 at its “notorious’ Latchmere House. Later he was interred at Walton Gaol near Liverpool, where, as the subject of a 23-hour lock-in regime, he became deeply depressed by the conditions at Walton, “where sanitation was primitive..., medical facilities vestigial, and food largely inedible.” After his release in July 1941, Jenks moved back to his mother’s house near Banstable, Devon, for the rest of the war. He became deeply involved with the Kinship in Husbandry, and in 1943 accepted editorship of the Agricultural Bulletin, produced by the Agricultural Section of the Economic Reform Club and Institute, founded seven years earlier and led initially by Kinship in Husbandry member Lord Northbourne. By 1946, when the Bulletin was renamed Rural Economy (its masthead read: “A non-party Commentary devoted to the development of a Sound National Economy rooted in the Soil”) and circulated to members of Fordham’s Rural Reconstruction Association (RRA), Jenks had also accepted appointments with the RRA, the Council for Church and Countryside (he served as secretary from 1945 to 1948), and the Soil Association. Of this latter he became the editorial secretary, and edited its serious journal, Mother Earth, from 1946 until his death. He wrote prolifically, contributing frequently to journals such as Reckitt’s Christendom and Mairet’s New English Weekly, and actively promoting his beliefs in organic farming and his view that Britain should be self-supporting in the production of basic foods.

When former BUF leader Sir Oswald Mosley formed his new Party, the “Union Movement” in 1948, it advocated European union and development of Africa by the principal European countries. Jenks did not favor this policy and did not join the new party. He wrote numerous books and pamphlets between 1950 and 1959, most of them advocating organic husbandry and better land use and decrying the exhaustion of non-renewable natural resources. He also returned to his earlier theme of health and nutrition and the dangers of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. His works include Farming and Money (with J. Taylor Peddie), The Country Year, The Stuff Man’s Made Of, and From the Ground Up. Prof. Moore-Colyer notes illustratively that Jenks’s books “Seem to cross the corporatist/organic divide” (Agricultural History Review, 49 (II), p. 196).

He died of a heart attack on August 20, 1963. According to Phillips, he has been described as a latter-day William Cobbett, while Prof. Richard Moore-Colyer noted that he, “together with others of the interwar Right, demand[s] our attention as [guardian] of the flamma sacra against what seemed at the time to be insurmountable odds.”

Distributist, journalist, and Catholic Land Association collaborator, Kenrick was born in Denbighshire, Wales, in the early 1880s and became a schoolmaster, teaching in Birmingham. He was active in the circle around the New Witness and its corresponding league, and was one of the earliest thinkers and writers who worked out the doctrine of Distributism in the early 1920s, along with Fr. Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill, and Fr. John McQuillan. He succeeded Brian Harley as Honorary Secretary of the Birmingham branch of the New Witness League – which had Harold Robbins, his chief collaborator, as its secretary – and served in the same post for the local branch of the Distributist League as well, which also numbered within its ranks others such as Father Austen Barker, O.P., along with Harley and Robbins.

With Robbins, Kenrick drafted in 1928 the pamphlet, Unemployment: A Distributist Solution, which ultimately became known as the “Birmingham Scheme.” It was a visionary and practical document, explaining how the massive unemployment of the late 1920s could be resolved by the training and settlement of unemployed folk on the land as smallholders. This proposal became a milestone for the Distributist movement insofar as it represented a coherent and clearly articulated proposal, bringing Distributist ideas into practical realization. Altogether some 20,000 copies of the pamphlet were distributed. Its cost figures were updated in 1932, and a copy was distributed to every Member of Parliament and selected members of the House of Lords, though it had no influence on government policies. It continued to be updated through at least 1935.

Kennrick was a regular contributor to G.K.’s Weekly, as he was to the New Witness earlier on; he was, according to Fr. Brocard Sewell, held in “very high regard” by G. K. Chesterton. The works he produced for the Distributist League include What is Distributism? which was published in 1926 by the Distributist League in London in a pamphlet which included Chesterton’s The Purpose of the League; and The War on the Weak, published in 1930. The latter was central to the League’s anti-eugenics campaign. Kenrick also contributed a chapter – “The Case for the Peasant” – to the important anthology Flee to the Fields, which served as a manifesto for the Catholic Land Associations in England and Wales, which Kenrick supported with fellow Distributists Herbert Shove, Fr. McNabb, and Robbins. The book’s importance can best be illustrated by comparing it to I’ll Take My Stand, the manifesto of the American Southern Agrarians, and Rural Roads to Security and the Manifesto on Rural Life, the equivalent works for the Catholic “land movement” – i.e., the National Catholic Rural Life Conference – in the United States.

In 1958 the Birmingham Natural History and Philosophical Society published a short work Kenrick wrote for the centenary of the Society, subtitled “The records of the society and the story they tell.” Robbins records Chesterton summarizing Kenrick’s character and action thus in 1928: “Ah, Mr. Robbins, you have a great man at Birmingham.”

Noted Catholic wood engraver, illustrator, artist, and social critic. Hagreen studied as a painter in Cornwall and London. After trying a number of trades after World War I, he discovered wood engraving, and became, in 1920, a founding member of the Society of Wood Engravers. By 1922 he had moved to Ditchling and was learning letter cutting. He followed Eric Gill and his family to Capel-y-ffin, but stayed only for 18 months. He returned to Ditchling by 1932 and became a member of the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic there, which was founded by Eric Gill and H. D. C. Pepler.

He focused thereafter on lettering, wood engraving, and satirical cartoons. He considered himself in debt to Eric Gill for "showing him the way," and remained active with the Ditchling community until being forced to retire by poor health in 1957. He produced most of his work to order, and no editions of his prints were made during his lifetime.

Hagreen's work was very wide-ranging, ranging from such small items as the bookplate for the "Eric Gill Collection" of his friend, George Bernard Shaw, to the illustrations used in the literary series, The Best Poems Of, published in 1922, 1923 and 1924, and selected by Thomas Moult.

Other Hagreen illustrations appeared in William Adlington's The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius (1924), René Le Sage's The Devil on Two Sticks (1927), W.A. Woodward's The Countryman's Jewel (1934), Lady Strachey's Nursery Lyrics and Other Verses for Children (1922) and Fr. Casimir Kucharek's The Byzantine Slav Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (1974). In 1933, he illustrated and introduced Silversmithing: Its Principles and Practice in Small Workshops, by fellow Guild member, Dunstan Pruden. Still more of his work can be found in The Devil on Two Sticks, Meditations on Our Lady, Apostles' Calendar, and The Countryman's Jewel: Days in the Life of a Sixteenth Century Squire; collections of his work include Philip Hagreen: The Artist and His Work and The Ex-Libris of Philip Hagreen, among other places.

Hagreen was also a pithy and penetrating writer, who contributed regularly to The Cross and the Plough, the journal of the English Catholic Land Movement, edited by Harold Robbins from 1934 to 1946. He also wrote frequently for The Sign. Towards the end of his rather long life, he wrote The Artist and His Work (1975), where he sought to sum up his artistic experiences. Following his death, his reputation faded, but it is wonderful to note that a new appreciation of his work has arisen in recent years with the publication of Lottie Hoare's Philip Hagreen: Sceptic and Craftsman.

"S." Sagar is one of the great "mystery men" of the second generation of Distributists, who followed in the footsteps of Chesterton, Belloc, McNabb, and others. Those few still alive who knew him, such as Aidan Mackey, only ever knew him as "Mr. Sagar." Hailing from Lancashire, he was an extremely prolific writer whose interests were wide: Distributism, religion, culture, politics and agriculture. All of these were subjects which he wrote upon regularly and with zest.

In the 1930s, Sagar wrote regularly for the New English Weekly (NEW), set up in 1932 by A. R. Orage and edited, following his death, by Anglo-Catholic Philip Mairet, who had lived for a time at the Ditchling of Gill and Pepler, and was also a member of the Kinship in Husbandry and (thanks to the encouragement of T. S. Eliot) Maurice Reckitt's Christian Social Movement. Sagar's work for the NEW revealed his sympathy for the organic and ruralist ideas of both H. J. Massingham and Viscount Lymington.

Towards the end of the 1930s, Sagar appears to have begun writing exclusively for The Weekly Review under Hilary Pepler and Reginald Jebb. His articles were often a page or less in length, but they were meaty in content and pithy in style.

Sagar's six-part Weekly Review series, "Distributism," was reprinted as Distributism in the 1940's and again in 1990 by Distributist Books. The series was widely read; Dorothy Day, for instance, quoted from it for her Catholic Worker newspaper. He also wrote Round by Repentance Tower, a 1930 book published by Sheed & Ward of London, subtitled "A Study of Carlyle."

Gerard Vernon Wallop, the Viscount Lymington, became the 9^th Earl of Portsmouth early in 1943, upon the death of his father, Oliver. He was born in Chicago and raised in the United States, where his parents had a farm near Sheridan, Wyoming. He was educated in England at Farnborough, Winchester College, and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1923 he took over a 150-acre farm on a family estate. As a farmer and landowner he was, according to Dr. Philip Conford, he was "successful and progressive."

He served as Conservative MP for Basingstoke (1929-34) and was a leading member of the English Mistery, founded in 1931 by William Sanderson, before splitting with him in 1937 to form the back-to-the-land "English Array." The Array's journal was the Quarterly Gazette, and the movement was dedicated to, as Lymington, put it, the regeneration of the English stock and soil; opposition to alien corruption, internationalism, and usury; craftsmanship and domestic responsibility; and the employment of organic agricultural methods to replenish the soil and produce healthy food. While leading the Array, he founded an additional journal, the New Pioneer, whereupon he collaborated with John Warburton Beckett (an ex-socialist MP), A. K. Chesterton, Anthony Ludovici, Philip Mairet and others; he was also its editor from 1938 to 1940.

In the face of the increasing likelihood of war in Europe, he founded (also in 1938) the British Council Against European Commitments, while Array activities ceased in 1940. He also joined the British People's Party, and collaborated in the foundation, with Rolf Gardiner, of the Kinship in Husbandry - of which he was, with Gardiner, effectively the heart. It was an informal but influential alliance of ruralists, whose aim was, according to Drs. Richard Moore-Colyer and Conford, to restore the English yeomanry, establish local and regional self-sufficiency, resurrect the craft tradition, and repopulate the English countryside. The group included as members other figures such as H. J. Massingham, Phillip Mairet, and Adrian Bell, and it influenced other organicist and ruralist organizations such as the Rural Reconstruction Association of A. J. Penty and Montague Fordham and the well-known Soil Association. He was also a member of the Council for Church and Countryside, founded by David Peck and Reverend Patrick McLaughlin.

His books include Horn, Hoof and Corn, Ich Dien: The Tory Path, Famine in England (at the time a Sunday Times "book of the month"), Alternative to Death, and A Knot of Roots, his 1965 autobiography. He contributed to Massingham's 1945 anthology The Natural Order and wrote for John Middleton Murry's paper, The Adelphi, After the war he settled in Kenya, where he was eventually to own about ten thousand acres of land, and where he would remain for about 25 years. He served there as member of the Board of Agriculture, chairman and later president of the Electors' Union, and member for agriculture of the Legislative Assembly, which latter post he maintained for three and a half years, beginning in 1957. In 1965 he was invited by Jomo Kenyatta to become a special advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. He held the post until 1976, when he suffered a stroke and returned to England. Speaking of the Lymington legacy, Conford notes that he was "crucially important in development of the organic movement."

Dr. Carlson holds his Ph.D. in modern European history from The Ohio University. He has been an NEH Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, president of The Rockford Institute, and publisher of Chronicles, The Family in America, and the Religion & Society Report. He was a presidential appointee to the National Commission on Children, an expert witness before U.S. Congressional and executive panels on the family, and general secretary of the 1997 and 1999 World Congresses of Families. He is director of the Family in America Studies Center and editor of its monthly, and Distinguished Fellow for Family Policy Studies at the Family Research Council. His books include Family Questions, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics, From Cottage to Work Station, The New Agrarian Mind, and The “American Way”. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, International Herald-Tribune, Journal of Social Issues, Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, Small Farmers’ Journal, and elsewhere. He has lectured at two dozen universities and institutes in both the U.S. and abroad.