H. J. Massingham - Life

Life

He was brought up in London, and educated at Westminster School and Queen's College, Oxford. He failed to graduate from Oxford, because of bad health. He then became a journalist in London. He worked for the Morning Leader, Athenaeum, and the Nation, and knew D. H. Lawrence.

He was strongly influenced by the writings of Gilbert White and edited selections of White's writings. He was one of a group of 'ruralist' British writers of the period; Massingham's friend Adrian Bell, a farmer in Suffolk, was another prominent writer. They have attracted subsequent attention both as precursors to later developments, such as organic farming, and because of their political entanglements in the context of the 1930s (with the example of Henry Williamson as a supporter of Oswald Mosley). Massingham himself wrote in a vein compatible with the Social Credit and distributist ideas current at the time (The Tree of Life from 1943 is still cited).

He was one of the twelve members of the Kinship in Husbandry, set up in 1941 by Rolf Gardiner, a society dedicated to countryside revival in a post-war world. According to academics Richard Moore-Colyer and Philip Conford, Massingham was uncomfortable with what he felt was a pro-German tendency in this group. When the Kinship later merged with two other bodies to form the Soil Association, Massingham with Gardiner, the landowner Lord Portsmouth and the agricultural journalist Lawrence Easterbrook came onto the Soil Association's Council.