ABSTRACT
Jenks was English to the core but distant from any yeoman lineage, his background being urban and upper-middle-class. His father was an eminent academic, his mother the daughter of a prominent Liverpool merchant and city father. Jenks was himself an alumnus of Haileybury and Balliol, who spent the first decade of his working life as a government officer in New Zealand. Later he became an articulate voice for the reconstruction of the neglected British countryside and later still for ecology and the early ‘organic’ movement. Even during the 1930s, when he was one of England’s ‘“dirty-boot” farmers’, there was always ink on his fingers besides the mud on his boots.4 As well as being a tenant farmer, he was then also an author, the Agricultural Correspondent of The Yorkshire Post and a lecturer at the Architectural Association’s avant-garde School of Planning.
