Early Life
He was born in Fulham, London and brought up when young mostly in Berlin. 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.
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.
Read more about this topic: Rolf Gardiner
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