By Jorian Jenks Born in Oxford in 1899 Jorian Edward Forwood Jenks was the son of a solicitor and later prominent academic and writer. He was educated at Haileybury, and gained experience as a farm manager in Berkshire and had travelled to New Zealand, Canada and Australia working, studying and lecturing, and gaining valuable experience in land management and soil erosion.
He spent a year as an agricultural lecturer in Devon and during this time married and had two children. Jenks then realised his life’s desire which was to farm for himself.
Jenks was attracted to the only Party which supported the cause of home agriculture and therefore joined the BUF. Jenks was soon appointed the BUF’s agricultural adviser. He developed the Party’s agricultural policy and became a prolific writer in BUF publications often writing under the pen-name Virgilius. Jenks was convinced that many of the modern diseases and the increase in cancer was the result of the use of chemical fertilisers.
Jorian Jenks was one of the founders of theSoil Association. He was a friend of the German Food Estate Minister, Walter Darre who has been described as the Father of theGreen Movement. Both Jenks and Darre were passionate advocates of organic farming and healthy food for the masses. He continued his work for Mosley after the war. (See his other work None Need Starve in the Union Movement category)
In this booklet which was published in 1938 by The British Union of Fascists the author begins by saying that food imports had increased dramatically since they first become significant in 1870. He goes on to say that this had led to the decline of British agriculture and was caused by persistent and deliberate neglect.
He points out that part of the problem was that the City of London and the great finance houses had invested money overseas. As a result they took their interest payments in cheap foodstuffs with which the British farmer could not compete. One of his proposals is for the setting up a state guaranteed Agricultural Bank with special credit terms for farmers. The structure of a fascist corporation in which agriculture was to be represented is described which would have included producers and consumers. The importance of attracting a large population back to the land is advocated, as is the desire to have plenty of small family farms and smallholdings for horticulture.
Jenks as always, emphasises the importance of good naturally produced food, at a price everyone could afford. He says that cheap food for cheap labour was the current policy, and that Mosley stood for raising the lowest wages to meet a fair level of prices.
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