Rolf Gardiner

Henry Rolf Gardiner (5 November 1902 – 26 November 1971) was an English rural revivalist, helping to bring back folk dance styles including Morris dancing and sword dancing. He founded groups significant in the British history of organic farming. He was said to have sympathised with Nazism and participated in inter-war far right politics, but this was speculation based on his approval of the German Youth Movement's aims of involving townspeople in country community life, such as helping with the harvest. He organised summer camps with music, dance and community aims across class and cultures. 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, nee Von Rosen. He was educated at West Downs school from 1913,Rugby School, and then at Bedales School. He was a student at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Kibbo Kift youth group.

Initially he was a youth leader, involved in exchanges with Germany. He was heavily influenced in the 1920s by D. H. Lawrence; he visited Lawrence in Switzerland in 1928, and has been called his first genuine "disciple".

At this period he was also much concerned with English folk dance, and convinced morris dance revivalist Mary Neal that morris was an essentially masculine form. He founded the Travelling Morrice in 1924, with Arthur Heffer, having taken a team of English dancers to Germany in 1922, and in 1923 met a few of the surviving dancers while walking in the Cotswolds with the poet Christopher Scaife. Gardiner was not, however, a founder of the Morris Ring, set up in 1934.

He took over Gore Farm in Dorset, bought by Henry Balfour Gardiner in 1924, from 1927, and continued what became a large-scale forestation project, based on training he had received at Dartington Hall, with conifers and beech trees. Here he set up a support group, the Gore Kinship.

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