or from Fabianism, we haven't. The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry was directly affiliated with Richard Acland's party, Common Wealth, of which Alec was a member. Common Wealth also incorporated Trotter's and Glaister's philosophy of human dichotomy (resistives and sensitives) into its programs for social reform, with its peculiar emphasis on the “sensory”:
It is the opening gambit in Norman's ambitious drive towards instituting a Sensory Committee in Common Wealth and it was to be five years before the first Sensory Committee meeting proper took place…. It points out the need for men of ideas (as opposed to men of action) who could function as a “sensory body” rather than an “advisory committee” since the word “advisory” might suggest claims to superior wisdom for its members. The Sensory Committee “might be a nervous system for the Governing Body. The sensory system constantly brings to the brain up-to-the-minute information of the local conditions in every part of the body so that the motor action may be perfectly coordinated.” (Braziers Park, 2016)
Regarding the emphasis on human dichotomy:
[F]or the first time as far as our records suggest, the full panoply of Trotter's ideas, the gregarious habit and the Resistive/Sensitive concept were covered extensively as if laying down the framework for future development. There is a new sense of confidence, determination and an ambition to make progress from first principles—and to many, much of this would be new. I think 44 people passed through the Summer School during the fortnight. Reference was made to the Resistive/Sensory team to stress the idea that it was the creative balance of the two functions that would improve action. Their main task was to increase the positive and reduce the negative element in all situations, to try to see issues not in dualistic terms but to find a unitary approach. (Braziers Park, 2016)
The overlap is surprisingly clear, then, not only between leftist politics and social psychology, but between social psychology and “witchcraft.” Nor does this overlap need to be inferred: Wilfred Bion's research into group psychology included what would now be classified as a distinctly “parapsychological” angle:
Bion's description of group phenomenology is vivid and is suggestive of what might be called ESP (extrasensory perception) elements. He states that there is such a thing as the psychology of the group but that the origins of this psychology lie solely within the individuals comprising the group, but he also seems to believe that the potential group-relating aspect within the individuals is activated by the group, i.e., the existence of the group evokes what we call “group psychology.” How does this happen? Bion describes how individuals become caught up in different strands of the group process as if they were puppets being controlled and manipulated by an invisible puppeteer. Yet Bion did not believe that the group itself had an independent agency. Agency in the group became prime cause but remained ineffable and inscrutable—as a mysterious, potentiating, synergistic summation and transformation of the combined agencies of the individuals in the group. (Grotstein, 2003, p. 14)
Returning to Common Wealth: “In 1941, during World War II, Sir Richard Acland founded a new political party, Common Wealth, which Norman Glaister joined” (Braziers Park, 2016). The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry had been proposed for affiliation with Common Wealth, but for whatever reason this did not happen. “Instead, another group had been set up, called ‘Our Struggle,’ in the late 1930s and it was this group that became part of Common Wealth” (ibid.). Nonetheless, Common Wealth adopted some of the same organizational/psychological principles and methods as the Order, including the meta-biological approach to human organization. (In 1940, Richard Acland's Unser Kampf (Our Struggle) was published by Penguin Books. Why the German title and the clear homage to Hitler's Mein Kampf? It seems especially curious in light of how Nazis and Fabians both advocated eugenics. And both were socialist movements.)
Common Wealth's first Sensory Committee meeting took place in April 1947. Olaf Stapleton the novelist and John MacMurray were to be invited to join later. The first Common Wealth Sensory Summer School took place only 4 months after that. That Sensory Summer School took place within three years of the founding of Braziers, which occurred as a result of this and two subsequent Summer Schools. (ibid.)
Olaf Stapleton is the well-known author of Last and First Men and Star Maker, science-fiction novels that map a two million year history of humanity. Stapleton went to Abbotsholme School, which I briefly attended along with both of my siblings, and which is considered one of the prototypes for “progressive” schooling in Britain. Stapleton's novels have influenced writers as diverse as H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, and Virginia Woolf (as well as Winston Churchill). They describe humanity's evolution via genetic engineering and space travel into a sort of galactic god-being. While generally regarded as progressive fiction, C. S. Lewis described the ending of Star Maker (in a letter to Arthur C. Clarke in 1943) as “sheer devil worship” (Edwards, 2007, p. 54).
CHAPTER V
Progressive schools: Abbotsholme, Theosophy, Wicca, Grith Fyrd
“Darwin made it possible to consider political affairs as a prime instrument of social evolution. Here was a pivotal moment in Western thought, a changing of the guard in which secular purpose replaced religious purpose, long before trashed by the Enlightenment. For the poor, the working classes, and middle classes in the American sense, this change in outlook, lauded by the most influential minds of the nineteenth century, was a catastrophe of titanic proportions, especially for government school children. Children could no longer simply be parents’ darlings. Many were (biologically) a racial menace. The rest had to be thought of as soldiers in genetic combat, the moral equivalent of war. For all but a relative handful of favored families, aspiration was off the board as a scientific proposition. For governments, children could no longer be considered individuals but were regarded as categories, rungs on a biological ladder. Evolutionary science pronounced the majority useless mouths waiting for nature to dispense with entirely. Nature (as expressed through her human agents) was to be understood not as cruel or oppressive but beautifully, functionally purposeful—a neo-pagan perspective to be reflected in the organization and administration of schools.”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
One of the things I'd been looking to find was some indication that any of my family (either my generation or my father's) had been sent to any “dodgy” schools where they might have suffered some sort of sexual interference. I knew that my father (and his siblings) had been sent to various Quaker boarding schools from a very early age (Fairhaven Home School in Goathland, in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors, Keswick Grammar School, Bootham School, and The Mount School). I had found almost nothing online suggesting that any of these schools, or the Quakers, were connected to any sort of organized abuse.1 And then there was Abbotsholme.
I went to Abbotsholme for two terms in 1978, when I was eleven. My brother and sister went there for several years. It is located in Derbyshire, thirty miles from Ripley, the town where Alec was born. There is a small town five miles from Ripley called Horsley, probably named after an aristocratic bloodline since there is a ruined castle there known as Horston Castle.2 At least one Horsley (a soldier killed in World War I) is buried in Horsley cemetery, also suggesting a family lineage. Is it possible my grandfather belonged to or was named after such a lineage, and for some reason concealed it?
As far as I know, we weren't sent to Abbotsholme on Alec's recommendation, but that of our stepfather, Michael Vodden. Michael taught English in India after the Second World War and I remember him speaking of meeting Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten is widely rumored to have been connected to the Kincora Boy's Home abuse scandal in Belfast, Ireland (UK Data Base, 2015), and of being the man who introduced Jimmy Savile to the royal family.3 In light of everything else, this can hardly be dismissed as coincidental, but nor does it imply any actual secret agenda. My family considered itself “progressive,” and there were only a few schools in the UK that fit that bill. In fact, Abbotsholme, founded by Cecil Reddie, was considered the original modern progressive school. No surprise then to learn that Reddie was influenced by the ideas of the Fellowship of the