Gymnosophy

Victor Hugo joined in English customs are opposed to bathers wearing drawers": wrote Mademoiselle Drouet.
"Frenchmen having persisted in wearing this brief costume were jeered and almost stoned by men and women": It is peop1e like these early English holidaymakers in Guernsey who have become the bane of the nudist creed: they enjoy nudity without joining a nudist club.
Nowadays there are millions who enjoy swimming naked but don't regard themselves as nudists.
Fortunately for the nudist movement there have always been more serious-minded people. In 1891, the Fellowship ofthe Naked Trust was formed in British India, almost certainly triggered by Heinrich Pudor's book, The Cult ofthe Nude, which had just been published in Germany.
The members were very few, all male, and the Fellowship was short-lived. In England the first signs of organised nudists did not appear until the 1920's. The Reverend Francis Kilvert had written of his naked bathing at Seaton in Devon during 1873, and there was a good deal of single-sex nude bathing to be found.
On the island of Guernsey in the 1880's, Victor Hugo and his mistress, juliette Drouet, discovered that the English were in the habit of mixed naked bathing. Victor Hugo joined in. "'English customs are opposed to bathers wearing drawers": wrote Mademoiselle Drouet. "Frenchmen having persisted in wearing this brief costume were jeered and almost stoned by men and women": It is peop1e like these early English holidaymakers in Guernsey who have become the bane of the nudist creed: they enjoy nudity without joining a nudist club.
Nowadays there are millions who enjoy swimming naked but don't regard themselves as nudists. Fortunately for the nudist movement there have always been more serious-minded people. In 1891, the Fellowship ofthe Naked Trust was formed in British India, almost certainly triggered by Heinrich Pudor's book, The Cult ofthe Nude, which had just been published in Germany. The members were very few, all male, and the Fellowship was short-lived. It was not until the long hot summer of 1921 that the philosophers of English nudity really started to be heard.
On September 24, the New Statesman began running a series of artic1es written under the pseudonym 'Lens: promoting the value of exposing the whole body to sun and air. Harold Booth followed up the articles by 'Lens' with one describing his own experiences. He had been inspired to visit Germany after the Great War by Marguerite le Fur's 1912 account of the Freya Bund. On his trip he discovered Freilichtpark. The letters he received in response to his artic1e put him in contact with a score of would-be nudists.
In October of the same year, Health & Efficiency, a magazine at that time devoted to physical culture, printed a 1etter demanding more facilities for men to bathe naked in public swimming baths. The letter was signed with the pseudonym "Purity not Prudery": I t aroused a good deal of interest and the following June, Health & Efficiency ran an editorial calling on all those interested in nude culture to get in touch. In July Mr. H. D. Byngham wrote a letter to the magazine under the heading, "Nude Life Culture": He had already been in touch with Harold Booth through the New Statesman correspondence and he asked other people interested in forming a group to contact him.
He signed his letter with the pen-name 'Elan VitaI: (Outlandish pseudonyms are a hallmark of the early nudists, seeming to over-compensate for the needs of anonymity. As recently as 1950 Rex Wellbye wrote a brief history of the movement under the name 'Ancton Tuqvor' and, as early as 1729, a pamphlet was published called 'Nakedness Consider'd... or reasons for not wearing clothes' whose author signed himself "A Gentleman of Great Parts":.) "Elan Vital": H. D. Byngham, decided that the response was encouraging enough to form the English Gymnosophist Society. Harold Booth was one of the ftrst to join and, in August 1923, announced the existence of the Society in Health & Efficiency.
To begin with the English Gymnosophist Society was only a tinygroup, includingno morethan three or four women members. One o fthem was tenant of a house at Wickford in Essex and she made the garden available for naked air bathing to members of the Society. During the winter months, the English Gymnosophist Society held social gatherings in London.
To one of these Booth invited a Captain H. C. Vincent BA, B.Sc, who wasa forceful protagonistforthe movement. His talk to theSociety did not go down too well: The generaI impression created among the members was not favourable, and there was something like a feeling of 'Save us from our friends' for, as soon became publicly apparent, Capto Vincent was a believer in militancy. His repeated statement in the course of his talk, that ali those in authority who opposed nudism would, if they had their deserts, be 'lined up against a wali and shot' did not evoke much support, while his view that by shock tactics nudists could repeat the successes ofthe sufragettes and break down public resistance seemed to most more likely, if tried out, to lead to drastic suppression of the movement beyond the chance of recovery.
The dramatic suggestion of a nude march through Hyde Park did not find much favourwith the E.G.S. whose members had no hankerings after martyrdom Four years later Captain Vincent was arrested in H yde Park for sunbathing in shorts. How much more lasting his martyrdom would have been had he gone the whole hog. Perhaps he would not have been so conspicuous. At that time hundreds of boys used to swim naked in the Serpentine on hot summer days. Before the end of 1925, the English Gymnosophist Society had to give up the use of its grounds at Wickford.
Whilst looking for a new site, it was re-named the New Gymnosophy Society and it devoted itself to propaganda: Gymnosophy stands for simplicity, temperance and continence in every phase of life. It is useful in the rearing of the young, in the relations between the sexes, and in promoting a democratic and humane organisation of society. Consequently, the implications of gymnosophy extend far beyond the practice of nudity alone, for it connotes a thorough-going change in the outlook upon and mode of life...... next to number 11.

The New Gymnosophy Society produced England's first nudist magazine a couple of cyclostyled sheets for members only. The magazine survived for eleven issues until April 1927. Inaddition, the Society held several public lectures in London and on Saturday afternoons in 1926, in a carpeted showroom in the heart of the City, little groups met for nude country dancing. One of the many people who attended the New Gymnosophy Society's public lectures was Mr. N. F. Barford. He was to create the first of many ideologica! splits in the English nudist movement.
"He proposed that the Society should endeavour to make a beginning by arranging facilities for sunbathing in slips or slips and brassières". This course did not at all commend itself to the active element; reported one of its members. Barford believed that by taking this more cautious approach, public opinion could be won round. Other members of the Society he1d that such an approach would make them look silly, would abnegate everything they stood foro The quarrels had begun.
Barford was proved right in the end. In 1929 he opened Sun Lodge, Upper Norwood, in the suburbs of London: The sun and air bathers frisked and jerked and exercised their way along the strenuous road to health. . . all, of course, decently attired in the scanty bathing wear by now tolerated and even approved. In this way sunbathing could be proclaimed from the housetops, and the starchiest folk be invited to view it with benevolent approval. In 1927 Barford had formed the Sun Bathing Society to promote his philosophy and recruit new members to the cause. In 1930, the respectable Pearson's magazine sent a journalist to Sun Lodge to investigate.
I was confronted by the master of the house, whose name I learned was N. F. Barford. He was wearing old flannel trousers and a high-necked pullover. He had very blu e eyes, and gave me a penetrating and slightly astringent look that did not exactly soften when I told him the purpose of my calI. In fact he gave the impression that he was rather suspicious of journalists, and perhaps not without some justification.
I think he had taken a slight mauling from several of my species who had, seemingly, waxed very humorous in print at the expense of those pioneer sun bathers who gave themselves the grandiose name of The Sun Bathing Society. . . Sun bathing, I thought during those first minutes, must be about as chilly as Mr. Barford's reception of me. But I made promises that nothing I wrote would be published without Mr. Barford approving the manuscript. I was then invited to attend the next Sunday session of sun and air bathing at Sun Lodge.
I went, expecting to attend as a spectator. Mr. Barford invited me to take my clothes off and try the crowded garden in a pair of shorts. In a flash I was converted to sun bathing. It was like stepping into a new world. I wrote my article. My Editor liked it. I took it to Mr. Barford - would he like it? To my relief, as he read it he mellowed. He signed it. He congratulated me. He gave me a cup oftea. He let me pick out photographs to go with the article. Wonderofwonders, he invited me to be a regular attendant at Sun Lodge.
That summer Barford held the first of five annual conferences in the New Forest. The later ones were he1d at Bedales School, Harrogate and Haslemere. Barford had a knack of letting people do what they wanted and many chose to bathe naked at the summer conferences. The press was welcome and the Sun Bathing Society attracted a good deal of favourable publicity. So although it took him five years, Barford managed to achieve his goal, the public acceptance of nakedness. Indeed, the Yew Tree Club which he founded at Croydon in 1931 eventually became complete1y nudist.
His graduaI and openminded approach succeeded fifty years ago, whilst the clandestine purists still await their victory. Two years before Sun Lodge opened, in Spring 1927, the New Gymnosophy Society managed to acquire four acres of land at Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire. A barrister member advised that no payment should be taken for visitors. He feared a criminal charge of conspiring to commit an act of indecency. Instead the four members who jointly leased the land were 'hosts' to the carefully vetted visitors to Britain's first nudist colony, "'The Camp". It was not until 1931 that a democratic committee was formed.
The Camp was re-named "Four Acres" but it remained secretive and suspicious of outsiders. Harold Booth was still a leading light in the Society but, one ofhis fellow members later claimed, he had a certain furtiveness of manner; (this) and other peculiarities did not inspire confidence and enthusiasm in strangers; he was not cut out for the task That description would fit many present-day English nudist club leaders but Booth had reason to be careful. A Mrs. Nesta H. Webster had just made the first of many stinging attacks on the fledgling nudist movement.
In her book, The Socialist Network, she claimed that members of such organisations were part of a vast German-Russian-Jewish conspiracy directed against Christianity and the British Empire. The attack was far off the mark but it encouraged the gymnosophists to keep their heads down. It is true that many of them were professional people who would have been ruined if their double lives had become known, but it is also true that there were among them those who found their status enhanced by membership of this secret society. If 1930 was to be Christmas for the English nudists, 1928 was undoubtedly Advent. It was another heatwave summer.
The newspapers were full of pictures of sunbathers and giri harvesters in bathing costumes; there was news from the French Riviera of naughty nude bathing parties. Hans Surén's book Der Mensch und die Sonne, now in its sixty-seventh edition, had just been published in an English translationas "'Man and Sunlight" It became a best-seller when the Dean of St. Paul's endorsed it and defended its explicit illustrations. 'The new freedom of the body, which is sweeping Europe is a splendid omen of increasing health: wrote Dean Inge, "'I am in favour of publication - the author is a bit of a fanatic but the book will do good"...