ABSTRACT
Even as a very young man, Rolf Gardiner had been wont to describe landscape in the most lyrical of terms. Rolf Gardiner was the favounte nephew of his bachelor uncle and the two men were to remain close until Balfour's death in 1950. During the pioneering years of 1927 and 1928, Rolf Gardiner had felt an outsider among the worthy denizens of Cranborne Chase. When the Second World War broke out Rolf Gardiner was in something of a quandary. Rolf Gardiner and H. J. Massingham in particular had a lengthy and sustained row over the former's insistence on parading his Germanist views in the Case-books. Rolf Gardiner would have deplored the preposterous bureaucratic excesses of today's European Commission and been horrified by the apparent venality and avarice of many European parliamentarians, but he would nevertheless have applauded the idea of Europe. On 6 October 1968, Rolf Gardiner delivered the Harvest Thanksgiving sermon in Cerne Abbas church.
