 | This article has multiple issues. Please helpimprove it or discuss these issues on thetalk page.(Learn how and when to remove these messages) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
|
Grith Fyrd was a radical alternative educational movement inEngland during the 1930s. It created two permanent work camps, one at Godshill inHampshire and the other atShining Cliff inDerbyshire, which took in unemployed men and tried to use them as a basis for creating a land-based community.
Grith Fyrd (the name means 'Peace Army' inOld English) was launched after a series of lectures in 1931. Its founders belonged to the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, an English group influenced by the thinking ofErnest Thompson Seton'sWoodcraft Indians (later renamed the Woodcraft League of America), whose most lasting creation wasthe Woodcraft Folk. The movement's outlook represented a mixture ofsocialism,co-operativism andanti-urbanism, and was stronglyinternationalist. The Order's main practical aim was to create an outdoor movement that would allow boys, girls, men and women to work and learn together.
In the early 1930s, the Order launched Grith Fyrd to combat the "three evils of the day: monstrous labour, with its occasional relief by quick, aimless excitement; the state of passivity and absorption; the loss of the incentive of self-expression and creativeness". Two Grith Fyrd camps were opened in 1932 at Godshill in Hampshire, and in 1933 at Shining Cliff in Derbyshire. The camps were intended to form part of a self-sufficient community that would exchange goods and services with one another, and combat the decadence of contemporary society by training young men for self-reliance, communal living and service.
The Grith Fyrd campers - or Pioneers - were a mixture of young unemployed men, who were able to continue to draw benefit, and idealists who mostly came from middle-class backgrounds. The Pioneers built the camp buildings and furniture themselves, and produced their own food.Aldous Huxley wrote in theSunday Chronicle that the Godshill camp was "almost a replica of an American backwoods settlement of a century ago". For Huxley, the primitive conditions were an admirable counterblow against the standardisation of modern urban, industrial society. He also admired the leisure activities of the men -Morris dancing,wood-carving,folk-singing and adult education.
Grith Fyrd was never a large movement. The camps were relatively small in scale, with between 30 and 50 inmates apiece. It had effectively died out as a living experiment by the late 1930s, though a handful of veterans gathered in the late 1940s to plan theBraziers Park community - essentially a residential adult college which functioned on communitarian lines, and was the childhood home of the singerMarianne Faithfull.[1]
The present-day Grith pioneers provide an environment, through woodland camping and similar means, which gives those people taking part scope for self-realisation and the development of personal and social responsibility, wider educational opportunities, and a sense of responsibility towards the protection of the natural environment.
John Field, "Alternative Living, Alternative Learning: the Grith Fyrd Movement in England in the 1930s", in Anthony Cooke and Ann MacSween (editors)The Rise and Fall of Adult Education Institutions and Social Movements, Peter Lang, 2000.
John Field,Working Men's Bodies: work camps in Britain, 1880-1940, Manchester University Press, 2013
