The cultural politics of Englishness : John Gordon Hargrave, the Kibbo Kift and Social Credit, 1920-1939
This thesis explores the idea of Englishness in the context of a social movement that lasted from 1920 to 1951, known as the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift and later, the Green Shirts and Social Credit Party. It is primarily a study of the movementâs founding leader John Gordon Hargrave (1894-1982), who sheds light on the reinvention of English identity, politics and culture in interwar Britain. It surveys how Hargrave and his Kindred constructed their Englishness against the backdrop of cultural change in the 1920s, before assessing their engagement with young, likeminded national movements on the European continent. It concludes with an appraisal of Hargraveâs attempts, after he adopted the ideology of Social Credit in 1925, to translate his movementâs cultural sensibilities into a mainstream political directive, positioning it against (and at times within) contemporaneous projects elsewhere, including European fascism. Assessing these thematic treatments collectively, I argue that the Kibbo Kift was an innovative expression of Englishness that embodied a libertarian impulse to âdecoloniseâ the metropole, before turning in on itself and finally fragmenting. This study seeks specifically to interrogate
Qugana, Hana Fe
The cultural politics of Englishness : John Gordon Hargrave, the Kibbo Kift and Social Credit, 1920-1939. This thesis explores the idea of Englishness in the context of a social movement that lasted from 1920 to 1951, known as the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift and later, the Green Shirts and Social Credit Party. It is primarily a study of the movementâs founding leader John Gordon Hargrave (1894-1982), who sheds light on the reinvention of English identity, politics and culture in interwar Britain. It surveys how Hargrave and his Kindred constructed their Englishness against the backdrop of cultural change in the 1920s, before assessing their engagement with young, likeminded national movements on the European continent. It concludes with an appraisal of Hargraveâs attempts, after he adopted the ideology of Social Credit in 1925, to translate his movementâs cultural sensibilities into a mainstream political directive, positioning it against (and at times within) contemporaneous projects elsewhere, including European fascism. Assessing these thematic treatments collectively, I argue that the Kibbo Kift was an innovative expression of Englishness that embodied a libertarian impulse to âdecoloniseâ the metropole, before turning in on itself and finally fragmenting. This study seeks specifically to interrogate
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