Viscount Lymington
Gerard Vernon Wallop, the Viscount Lymington, became the 9th 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."
