Kitchen Garden Forum

Whilst I may have been known to offer some ctitism of the present Soil Association I still grow the potato named after Lady Balfour (complicated by the fact there are two types Eve Balfour and Lady Balfour) and wonder what other members make of this prominent person of the organic movement ?

Any thoughts JB?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Eve_Balfour

Barney

Hi Barney

All I can say is that the one time I grew Lady Balfour, marketed as blight resistant, they all went down with late foliage blight and tuber blight worse than any others that year. Lost the whole crop

You obviously should have been growing them fully organically Alan as they would then be vigorous enough to withstand blight, I bet you planted them at the wrong phase of the moon as well.

Hi Barney,
Plenty of thoughts regret none of them printable!
JB.

Though Lady Eve remains one of the early pillars of The Soil Association

http://www.soilassociation.org/Aboutus/ ... fault.aspx

this dubious character has been airbrushed out of its history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorian_Jenks

Hi Alan,
Whereas I look upon Lady Eva Balfour decidedly as a crank she was a most gracious lady.
For the SA to print something of their history and leave her out completely is almost unbelievable. The Peckham group might well have been in being but I have no doubts that Eva Balfour was the prime mover
of the inception of the association.
Their history begins in 1946 yet Jenks joined Eva Balfour in 1945
and quotes people I have never heard of before.

Jenks. Extract from Wikipedia.
"To this end he joined Lady Eve Balfour's Soil Association, a pro-organic farming group, in 1945."

It seems that the plot thickens as the SA goes along! This simply does not surprise me in the least. It just shows how devious they are.
JB.
PS. Good news! Patrick Holden is retiring shortly. Bad news! What sort of fanatic will replace him!

For the SA to print something of their history and leave her out completely is almost unbelievable... It seems that the plot thickens as the SA goes along! This simply does not surprise me in the least. It just shows how devious they are.

This seems a curious and ill-informed comment. What have the SA 'printed' that has 'left her out'? Please specify your source. The comment is rather at odds with the fact that the SA themselves republished The Living Soil, by Lady Eve Balfour, in 2006, which is available either from themselves, or from booksellers such as Amazon.

This is a quote from the Amazon web site's 'product description':

Eve Balfour's "The Living Soil" made an international impact during the Second World War, and inspired the founding of the Soil Association in 1946. Her skilful synthesis of evidence from other disciplines commanded respect even from opponents, some of whom considered "The Living Soil" a distinct threat to the new fertiliser industry. It is regarded as one of the great classics of organic literature. Originally published in 1943, this new edition features a foreword by Jonathan Dimbleby and an introduction by Lawrence Woodward OBE, Elm Farm Research Centre.
The organic movement is a contemporary success story but the seeds of its success were sown as early as the 1930s and 1940s, when a group of scientists, farmers and doctors raised challenging questions about the relationship between farming methods and human health. Their concerns about the impact of intensive agriculture on food quality and the environment challenged the prevailing orthodoxy and remain as relevant now as they were then. The Soil Association is marking its 60th birthday year by paying tribute to some of those organic pioneers, republishing their inspirational work in a series of Organic Classics. Eve Balfour's The Living Soil made an international impact during the Second World War and inspired the founding of the Soil Association in 1946.

She would hardly seem to have been 'left out'.

John Walker wrote:This seems a curious and ill-informed comment. What have the SA 'printed' that has 'left her out'? Please specify your source.

To be fair to Johnboy, I suspect he was looking at this web page entitled "Our history"

http://www.soilassociation.org/Aboutus/ ... fault.aspx

rather than the link from that entitled "Our achievements"

http://www.soilassociation.org/Aboutus/ ... fault.aspx

In my post I was trying to point to the difference between the inclusion (quite properly) of Eve Balfour and the exclusion (wisely) of Jorian Edward Forwood Jenks.

Hi Alan,
You are perfectly correct and had John Walker bothered to look at your posted website even he might have noticed the omission.
For goodness sake this is the HISTORY of the Soil Association and she, who paid a vital part in the setting up of the the association, is MISSING!
The trouble with people like John Walker is that they are not old enough to have had the experience of attending one or more of her lectures.
I write having had that experience a couple of times and on both occasions I was totally unimpressed.
JB.

Let's be clear. To cook up the idea that the Soil Association (SA) has somehow deviously 'airbrushed' Lady Eve Balfour out of their history because she is mentioned on one page of their web site, but not on the one that accompanies it, would be risible if it weren't so sad.

As I've pointed out, the SA have re-published her book. The annual Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture is perhaps another wee clue that no such devious conspiracy exists.

I will readily admit to my biological failing of not actually being alive when Eve Balfour was giving her lectures. That must be "the trouble with" a lot of people my age. Thank goodness she left us all with plenty to ponder, whether we warm to it or not.

Johnboy and John Walker

Before you two argue any further, let me make it clear that my original post was intended to draw a comparison between Eve Balfour and Jorian Jenks, the latter never mentioned. The origins of the Soil Association are quite intimately tied up with a right-wing, elitist clique, as well as with the anti-scientific mysticism of Rudolf Steiner. I mention this solely as a matter of historical interest.

http://www.oswaldmosley.com/jorian-jenks.htm

Alan, I understand completely what you are saying about Jenks. I am not seeking to argue with anyone. My intention was merely to correct a distortion suggesting that Lady Eve Balfour has been edited out of SA history (which appears to have arisen from a misreading of earlier posts in this thread). She has not. That needed to be made clear. Whether others wish to fuel their own fantasies as to why Jenks was apparently 'airbushed' from SA history is up to them, but they should stick to the facts concerning Balfour.