Jorian Jenks

Jorian Edward Forwood Jenks (1899 – 20 August 1963) was an English farmer, environmentalism pioneer and fascist. He has been described as "one of the most dominant figures in the development of the organic movement".

Early life Born in Oxford, Jenks was the son of Edward Jenks, a leading expert on jurisprudence, and his second wife. A farmer, Jenks was educated at the Harper Adams Agricultural College and Balliol College, Oxford, whilst he also served in the First World War. After emigrating to New Zealand during the 1920s, Jenks returned to England. After lecturing for a spell Jenks took over his own farm in Angmering, West Sussex. However he was forced to give up his farm due to the slump in agricultural prices and his own chronic asthma. From this point on Jenks was forced to rely on writing as his source of income, penning articles for such journals as Philip Mairet's New English Weekly and Maurice Reckitt's Christendom.

Pre-war fascism A member of the British Union of Fascists, he was the agricultural advisor to the party. A self-styled 'critic of modern economy', he wrote for the BUF journal Action under the pseudonym 'Vergillius'. He also wrote articles on animal husbandry for the non-BUF journal New Pioneer, an anti-Semitic work founded in late 1938 by John Beckett and Lord Lymington. In 1936 Jenks was picked as candidate for the forthcoming general election for Horsham and Worthing. He called for import controls and the establishment of an Agricultural Land Bank in order to make farm debt more manageable as well as an Agricultural Corporation to fix prices and fit in with the BUF corporatist economic policy. Landowners who were seen to be misusing their land would also be subject to compulsory purchase, with a Volunteer Land Army established to restore the reclaimed territory. Whilst Jenks' ideas were never put into practice it has been argued that they did affect government policy, as moves towards agricultural self-sufficiency became the cornerstone of policy in the late 1940s whilst earlier initiatives such as the British Empire Economic Conference and Import Duties Act 1932 also borrowed from Jenks' protectionist vision. Similarly the Defence Regulations included DR49 which allowed for compulsory land purchase, whilst the Agriculture Act 1947 allowed for price-fixing as Jenks had suggested.

Although an important member of the BUF Jenks was something of a maverick who disagreed with leader Oswald Mosley on a number of issues. Unlike Mosley, who felt that British society was in rapid decline, Jenks felt that the country was in a slow Spenglerian decay. He remained a BUF member and in common with most of the leading figures in the group was detained under Defence Regulation 18B in 1940. He was released in 1941 and became a tenant farmer in Seaford, East Sussex.

Post-war activism After the war he sought to build a 'spiritual ecologism' that would bond man and soil. He also joined Rolf Gardiner's Kinship in Husbandry and H. J. Massingham's Council for the Church and Countryside, two other traditionalist rural groups. He felt that the key to health was Bergsonian vitalism, but added to this the belief that the decline in food standards would directly precipitate the fall of Western civilisation.

It was with the Soil Association that he reached the widest audience as he edited the group's Mother Earth journal. Jenks served as press secretary for the RRA and edited their journal Rural Economy whilst building up a coterie of former fascists or fascist sympathisers within the group in the shape of ex-BUF members Derek Stuckey and Robert Saunders as well as some former members of the English Mistery. Although the organic movement has in general moved away from the politics espoused by Jenks, his influence has been felt as his themes of sustainability, small farming, opposition to the over-reliance on mechanised farming and mistrust of international food trade over local produce remain central. At the suggestion of Rolf Gardiner he sent his work to the former Nazi Agriculture Minister Richard Walther Darré who continued to write on the themes of blood and soil after the war.