THE VEGETARIAN MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND,
1847-1981 :
A STUDY IN THE STRUCTURE OF ITS IDEOLOGY

A thesis presented to the London School of Economics, University of London,
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, by Julia Twigg
©AUTUMN 1981 - Thesis Index

The author is now Professor of Social Policy and Sociology at Kent University, England, and has given permission for this previously unpublished thesis to be published on the IVU website. The ownership and copyright remain hers and no part of this thesis may be used elsewhere without her express permission.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE GREAT WAR AND THE INTERWAR PERIOD

[Numerical links are to the author's footnotes, use your back button to return to the same point in the text. Text links are to relevant items on the IVU website, all open in new windows]

SUNLIGHT & NATURE

In terms of the general cultural movements of the period, these favoured the health aspects of vegetarianism more than the moral and humanitarian. The interwar years were not notable ones for the animal welfare cause; (1) and in so far as vegetarianism gained ground in public consciousness, it was through the growing concern with health and exercise. Not all vegetarians were happy with these developments and in the early 1930s voices were raised in the magazines insisting that the humanitarian aspect must not be lost sight of in the rising tide of food reform.(2)

The thirties in Britain saw a general cult of fresh air and physical exercise; (3) the emphasis was on fitness, health and vigour, with the focus not so much on organised games as on individual physical exercise, albeit in a collective and often social setting. It was a phenomenon that occurred across Europe, and the German influence of the romantic cult of the Wandervögel was felt in Britain in developments like the Youth Hostel movement, founded in 1930. (4)

The German influence on progressivist movements in Britain generally from the 1890s through the first three decades of the twentieth century was profound, surviving even the anti-German feeling of the First World War. We find it in the arts and crafts movement, in dress reform, naturism, health ideas, in progressive education, in the popularisation of Freud, in philosophical developments, in music, and it was clearly reflected in vegetarianism. These connections were only ended and subsequently played down by the rise of Hitler. (5)

These concerns with health and exercise went also with a drive to get out into the countryside, so that rambling, cycling and hiking became widely popular. Though walking was still particularly associated with intellectuals, the enthusiasm gained a wider social base, and particularly through socialist groups reached into the working class. (6) The emphasis was on the energetic and free experience of life in nature, rather than the older more passive contemplation of its beauties. The vegetarians had earlier been the pioneers of such experiences, with their enthusiasm for sunlight and air baths, cycling and huts in the pinewoods; now in the thirties, such enthusiasms were no longer regarded as eccentric but were widely shared. Dugald Semple could recommend caravaning, and a holiday life in the open. Without the oddity that such would have suggested before the war. (7) Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of these changes was the rise of naturism and of the sunlight movement.

The first real signs of an indigenous naturist movement in Britain occurred in the 1920s with the founding of groups like the English Gymnosophist Society in 1922. By the late 1920s the first naturist park had been set up, and in the early 1930s the legal position established. (8) The early thirties saw at last some popular expansion with the emergence of local groups, and with the parallel, and in many senses more significant, development of popular sunbathing. N.P. Barford founded the Sunbathing Society in 1928 to encourage family and group sunbathing in brief clothing. (9) Barford himself favoured full naturism, but felt that semi-nudism was the way to influence the wider public. Though naturism has always remained a minority interest, the cult of sunbathing, once so eccentric, has, of course, become established aspect of modern life and the basis of a major leisure industry. It is in the thirties that this change occurred.

The cosmetic aspects of a suntan were not originally much to the fore; during the 1920s tanning was regarded as only a side effect and not spoken of with special favour. By the 1930s, however, the naturist magazines were praising the look of bronzed skin. The fashion spread beyond these circles, to the cosmopolitan and wealthy. By the 1930s the Riviera season had reversed from being winter to summer. The seaside, from being a place for bathing and for sea air became somewhere for taking off your clothes and lying in the sun; the resorts began to publish their sunshine figures; and by the mid 1930s the major cosmetic houses were producing suntan creams. A suntan became associated with youth, health and vigour, qualities that the thirties found particularly attractive sexually. One factor encouraging this change in perception was the growth, over a long period, of indoor factory and office work. Paleness of skin in the past had given status, but now it reversed its meaning, and a suntan became an emblem of leisurely hours or the wealth to travel south. It is significant that the favouring of a suntan emerges first not just among those, like many vegetarians, with an ideology of nature and the open air, hut among the rich, and among certain intellectuals, often at odds with industrial society, and sometimes with a romanticised ideal of the manual worker. The conspicuous expense and leisure involved in the acquisition of a suntan was of central importance in its wide popularisation in the 1950s und sixties.

A series of important medical discoveries before and after the First World War laid the basis for the sunshine movement. Dr Rollier on the continent and Sir Henry Gauvain in Britain had discovered the uses of sunlight in the treatment of TB in the early years of the century. Rollier's Heliotherapy was not published in Britain until 1923 when its publication was encouraged by Dr C.W. Saleeby, who founded the Sunlight League in 1924. In 1919 it had been demonstrated that rickets in children could be cured by exposure to the sun. (10) By the late 1920s, the therapeutic qualities of sunlight were widely recognised, and its use was extended in sunshine schools and open-air clinics to the more general treatment of sickly, TB-prone and crippled children, many of them drawn from the slums. (11) Progressive schools like Bedales early encouraged sunbathing; (12) St Christopher School, Letchworth, installed vita glass; and pictures of Pinehurst School show the children running about naked. (13) These benefits were urged more widely than just in the progressive private sector; Lt Col G.S. Hutchinson reported the benefits of his experiments with artificial sunlight on colliery boys in Mansfield. (14) The Merrils in their account of continental nudism reported how sunbaths stimulated the depressed and combated insomnia and lassitude. (15) Sunlight - in a very characteristic word of the period - was a 'tonic', and as such was part of the increased concern with positive health that marks the twenties and especially the thirties.

But the pursuit of sunlight in the interwar period had expressive qualities that went beyond just the therapeutic. Sunlight stood for the new society of light. Houses in the garden cities were oriented towards the sun. Architecture in the interwar years pursued light to an almost obsessive degree. It came to be the emblem of a cluster of reforms in the 1920s aimed at making Britain a better, healthier, cleaner place to live. Health and Efficiency in the period well represents this strain of social progressivism, and it advocated, as well as sunlight and exercise, vegetarian and diet-reform food, nature cure and body building, in addition to clean air, slum clearance, new housing, practical psychology – frequently of the self-manipulationary kind like Couéism and Pelmanism - and it vigorously attacked the vaccinators, the BMA and the traditionalist and Roman-Catholic opponents of birth control. (16)

Sunlight also had connotations of youth’s rebellion. It was a movement for the young. Alec Craig, a well-known naturist, describes how it was through reading Nietzsche as a young man that he came to see that modesty was a virtue imposed by the old and ugly on the young and beautiful. (17) The widely held idea of the interwar period that it was the old men who had caused the Great War and sent the flower of youth to their deaths, is echoed in this context also in the attacks on the humbugs who opposed nudism: 'the relics of the Naughty Nineties, the puritanical prudes, the war mongers who sit in high places and delude the people'. (18)

Just as the antiseptic qualities of sunlight had been observed through its action on mouldy, damp objects, so the sunlight for this post-Victorian generation could be made to shine on the dank, rotten and hidden aspects of the Victorian world. (The thirties saw the full flood of anti-Victorianism) This could mean the slum houses and sick children, but it also, very frequently, meant sexuality. There is a strong theme of erotic freedom in the interwar celebration of sunlight. In Lawrence's short story 'Sun', a woman from the north travels to Sicily, where day after day, bathing naked, she becomes totally absorbed in the sun which she experiences as a ravishing lover. For Lawrence, the sun was the elemental force at the centre of a pagan celebration of life and sexuality, in contrast to what he called the white core of fear in the clothed bodies of men.

Lawrence was, of course, tubercular, but this vision of the sun was a widespread preoccupation in literary and intellectual circles of the time. (19) There is in this a sense of the sun as uncategorised energy, as some prior life-force beyond and before notions of good and. evil - Craig's reference to Nietzsche was significant - and lying in the baking sun became an experience of return to some primal state of total experience.

In its sense of amorality and erotic freedom, the attitude to nature of the thirties contrasts with the late-nineteenth-century pantheism with its softer, more mystical image of the natural world. Nature however does not altogether lose its paradigmatic quality, for it now comes to stand for the 'drive of the life force', for 'frank and open freedoms' as against stuffy and superficial social conventions. Nature, even in its new amorality, still carried messages for society.

In England, however, this tendency was curtailed. Pantheism of the Wordsworthian type continued to exert its power and the erotic freedom of the sun was qualified. This is clear in attitudes to sexuality in naturist literature. One of the recurrent themes in this material is that social nudity is of inestimable benefit in removing the evils of a 'vicarage' atmosphere in upbringing and shame about the body and sex. Dr Haydn Brown saw organised social nudism as: 'an expression of freedom to see, to know, and to expose for the purpose of dispelling fear and ignorance'. (20) The Merrills noted that in 'destroying, the secrecy and mystery of sex, it does away with unhealthy desires and perversions, and makes easier the task of giving the young a rational attitude towards sexual matters'. (21) It was frequently argued that clothes intensified erotic feeling and that the naked and natural body aroused no such 'lascivious emotions'. (22) At times the approach moves into the frankly anti-septic; nudism: 'cleans out your whole ideas about sex, and does not leave a single cobweb anywhere'. (23) There is an impulse in naturism to defuse the power of sexuality, to make it normal and rational. In part this supra-sexual attitude was necessary to meet accusations of indecency and immorality, but it represents also a preoccupation in this milieu. Craig noted the prevalence of Puritanism in English sunbathing: 'Teetotallers, vegetarians, non-smokers and abstainers of all sorts seem to find the sunbathing camp a happy hunting ground'. (24)

Going naked in the world is part of an older tradition than naturism and one that shares the same broad cultural context as vegetarianism. The Adamites and early Quakers both cast off their clothes, and Harrison places nakedness well within the tradition of popular millenarianism. (25) Clothes epitomise social rules and relations, and to go naked is to assert innocence and divine humanity, it is to divest oneself of the Old Order and Old Adam, breaking the bondage of the law and the political realm, and asserting instead the boundlessness of grace. (26) Nakedness restores you to a direct contact with the earth, and places mankind as it was at the dawn of civilisation, asserting the essential.

We have already noted the vegetarian connection with the imagery of light, and particularly with the transfiguring version of Romanticism. Both nakedness and sunshine pick up also aspects of an older spiritual tradition. Solar imagery has run through vegetarian spiritual connections from at least the late eighteenth century, ultimately looking back to the gnosticism that emerges from the tradition of Hermes Trismegistus. Clowes was writing in 1814 of the Spiritual Sun, (27) and it turns up in the context of Kingsford and Maitland in their book, Clothed with the Sun. (28) Carpenter's image of the cosmic self is heavy with solar imagery, and he recounts how:

Consciousness is continually radiant from the self, filling the body and overflowing upon external Nature. Thus the Sun in the physical world is the allegory of the true self. The worshipper must adore the Sun, he must saturate himself with sunlight, and take the physical sun into him. (29)

Both the Order of the Cross, as we shall see, and Mazdaznan pick up this solar theme; and Ha'nish, the founder of Mazdaznan, explicitly links the spiritual significance of the sun with the physical benefits of sunbathing. (30) Lastly, there are links at the level of food in their language of sun-fired food.

1. 33. In the field of anti-vivisection, for example, though some private attempts were made to change the law between 1910, the date of the Second Commission on Vivisection, and 1930, they met with no success. The anti-vivisectionists had hoped that the advent of the 1929 Labour Government would help them, since four of its members - Macdonald, Henderson, Snowden and Clynes – had been privately pledged to anti-vivisection, but public policy remained untouched. After 1930 no serious attempts were made to change the law, and in 1933 the Vegetarian Messenger reported that in the present parliament (ie, after the 1931 Labour collapse), it had proved impossible to keep in being the animal welfare group. (See Judith Hampson, Animal Experimentation PhD thesis, Leicester, 1978, for the Second Royal Commission; John Vyvyan's popular The Dark Face of Science, 1971, p127 for 1929 hopes; VM, March 1933, p74).
2. 34, For example, see a series of letters in VM, in 1933 attacking what was felt to be a growing imbalance in the movement.
3. 35. See the popular development of Healthy Life Societies, for example the Huddersfield and District Healthy Life Society, founded in 1926; it was affiliated to the VS and ran four shops locally selling diet-reform food. It had a flourishing rambling section and attracted many young people. Its social base can perhaps be inferred from their making a point of mentioning that among its eighty-eight members, were no doctors, clergy or other distinguished citizens of the town. Account in VM, May 1932, p149.
4. 36. See Stevenson and Cook, The Slump, p26 for such movements as the Women's League of Health and Beauty which by the end of the decade had some 166,000 members.
5. 37. See VM, Sept 1934, for a comment on Hitler's vegetarianism and a hope that he would come to see its wider message concerning the oppression of the weak; see also regrets over his actions in Health and Efficiency, Feb 1934, p39; 1934 is early for disapproving comments in the British press. During the Second World War, however, many in the Society denied that Hitler was a vegetarian, and his example has remained a slight embarrassment.
6. 38. See Greenwood's account in Love on the Dole, 1933; also David Sharp, Walking in the Countryside, Newton Abbot, 1978; Ronald W. Clark & Edward Pyatt, Mountaineering in Britain: A History from the Earliest Times to Today, 1957, p213, for growing appreciation of mountain scenery in the thirties, also for the mass trespasses of the period.
7. 39. See Semple writing on this in VM, Feb 1929, p72.
8. 40. For these early developments see 'The Story of Nudism', Ancton Tuquor (psd. Rex Wellbye) in Verity, the Journal of the Sunbathing Association, June 1949-March 1950.
9. 41, See the The Sun Bathing Review, 1933-1935. It carried a wide range of articles in favour of sunlight and. exercise in the fresh air. The societies always had difficulty in attracting women: for every ten men applying they had one woman.
10. 42. Saleeby gives an account of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century pioneers of sunlight in Sun Bathing Review, Spring 1934, p4. Saleeby was also a eugenicist and later member of the New Health Society. See his Sunlight and Health, 1923, and reprinted five times by 1929. Gauvain's lecture on sunlight and his work at Hayling Island given before the BMA is reprinted in Sun Bathing Review, Spring 1933, p5.
11. 43, For vegetarian accounts of the beneficial action of sunbathing, see, for example, VM, July 1923, p115 and VN, June 1928, p186. See also account of visit to sunlight clinic in Health and Efficiency, Oct 1927, p497.
12. 44. See Badley on sunbathing in Sun Bathing Review, Summer 1933, p12.
13. 45. Sun Bathing Review, Summer 1933, p11. See also p
14. 46. Both medical experts and psychoanalysts are agreeing that frequent sun-bathing confers immense advantages upon those participating in it, both in health and psychologically. Jan, 1928, p14, Aug 1928, p418.
15. 47. Frances and Mason Merrill, Among the Nudists, 1931, p201.
16. 48. Health and Efficiency had started in 1902 as a physical culture magazine under the title Vim: an illustrated monthly devoted to promoting Health and Vigour in Body and Mind, but by the twenties it had broadened its interests to include a range of social and health issue. For their social reforms see their open letter to Ramsey Macdonald, Feb 1931, p182. It was not until the early thirties that it becomes more narrowly a naturist magazine and female nudes come to predominate. Vegetarian writers like Eustace Miles, B. Allinson, Milton Powell, Edgar Saxon feature regularly.
17. 49. Sun Bathing Review, Aug 1935, p86.
18. 50. Health and Efficiency, Feb 1934, p39.
19. 51. See John Weigtman, 'The Solar Revolution: Reflections on a Theme in French Literature', Encounter, Dec 1970, for this and for the pioneering development of the summer Riviera in the twenties by intellectuals and bohemians like Huxley, Isadora Duncan, Scott Fitzgerald and Lawrence. The twentieth century has seen a major impulse among northern intellectuals and literary people towards the southern sun, though the image of life there as one of bohemian openness and freedom from social convention is in many senses in contrast to the realities of the indigenous social world of southern Europe.
20. 52. Sun Bathing Review, Aut 1934, p77 and 78.
21. 53. Among the Nudists, p9.
22. 54. Health and Efficiency, Aug 1932, p6, report of visit to Sanos Sunray Club.
23. 55. Health and Efficiency, Feb 1934, p39.
24. 56. Sun Bathing Review, Aug 1935, p88.
25. 57. J.P.C. Harrison, The Second Coming, p18.
26. 58. David Martin, 'The Delicate Streak', The Listener, 25.4.75
27. 59. The Spiritual Sun, its Existence and Operation proved incontestably, both from Scripture and from Reason..., by a Clergyman of the Church of England, [W. Clowes], Manchester, 1814.
28. 60. Clothed with the Sun: Being the Book of Illuminations of Anna Kingsford, edited Edward Maitland, 18.
29. 61. Civilisation, its Cause and Cure, p44
30. 62. Dr O.Z. Ha'nish., Inner Studies, 1902 (no place of publication, probably USA), p71-5.

Previous: Vegetarianism Between the Wars | Thesis Index | Next: Medicine and Nature Cure