Joachim Grundmann

There are certain figures in the bio dynamic history movement who I think need more attention. They take on quite some responsibility. Chair of the bio dynamic association even. But what they do in daily life is remarkable and also very significant for the bio dynamic history. And one of those is Joachim Grundmann. He was in the Camphill communities of Grange, Oaklands and later Larchfield in the 1960s, to the 1990s, and he was chair of the Biodynamic Agricultural Association at the end of the 1980s when David Clements resigned as chairman after the sale of Broome Farm.

But let’s go back to the beginning. Joachim, actually was a German citizen in what is now known in Silesia and of course, the German population had to leave Silesia at the end of the war with the Russian invasion. And that is what his family had to do. And they had a farm. And when the war ended and the Russian invasion happened, they had to move and Joachim with his family and his parents found himself in Hamburg and very dangerous it was,  bullets flying everywhere and he had some quite dangerous experiences. Joachim grew up and became a nurserymen for the Hamburg Parks Department, rebuilding the city after the war and rebuilding and replanting all the flower beds, the shrubbery, the trees. He was a very proficient and much admired nurseryman in the city until one day he attended a lecture by Dr Karl Koenig, who talked about Camphill. And in a country which was had been at war with his own, he was attracted to come and do the land work at a new Camphill Village Trust community called The Grange.

This is in the forest of Dean, or rather, I should say, on the edge of the forest of Dean at Newnham on Severn on the west side of Gloucestershire with spectacular views over the Severn Valley and the Severn as it becomes a large estuary. Once upon a time, there was a ferry from Newnham across to the other side towards Stroud and Stonehouse. Joachim came with his dear wife, Ingeborg, and their firstborn.

They took on the horticulture side of the Grange, the Grange topography is very hilly and needs a particular approach, but it’s very warm in summer and very suitable for growing fruit. And so it was, in the early 1960s, Joachim and Ingeborg lived in the Grange Village, developing the market gardens and the fruit orchards. Trees were planted in terraces on the fields and vegetables were grown on the, really the only flat piece on the farm, animals were taken on and there was a farmer.

But the main topic was the vegetables and the fruit. And the Grange Village was soon producing a very healthy amount of produce under Joachim’s care as part of this growing adult community. Now, the Grange had been an interesting experiment. It was the hostel for the young Camphill staff children going to Winstone’s in the 1950s.  Camphill bought the Grange House on the Hill above Newnham and up there, the children from Camphill, mostly from Scotland came down to attend Winstones School.

Memories of these Camphill children are quite strong in people’s minds of creative, unruly, crazy children who had lots of nature around them in their Grange Village setting. And they would stay for term time and return home on various trains and transports back to the Camphill community they lived in.

Joachim, worked very hard at the gardening and his knowledge was much appreciated, his interest in biodynamics and his interest also in bringing a group of people to work on the land and encourage them with a mixture of clear instruction of how biodynamics works and interest in the young people as they came meant that the Grange soon had a group of people who were very involved in the land work. They had all their work cut out, the trees needed pruning, the weeding around the trees, the flower beds and vegetable beds that were built along the terraces and on the flat area.

They all had work to do. And soon, in a sense, the Grange land had kind of run out for the amount of people that the community could take, houses were being built in the 1960s into the 1970s and it wasn’t long before a hall was going to be built at the Grange to accommodate all these extra people and the land that it needed to grow the produce. An idea was put forward about four or five miles away.

There was a smallholding for sale called Dawn House with a decent house which would hold a family and residents and a farm and farm buildings and  very suitable horticultural fields. And soon Joachim and Ingeborg and their young family were ensconced in this house, Dawn house and developing the land there with help from the residents of the Grange and Young Volunteers. Now, this Dawn House on the main road, which runs through Newnham from Gloucester and goes to Chepstow and actually could be a very good place for selling produce on the roadside, was next door to a large country estate called Oaklands Park.

And by the middle of the 1970s, it was clear that this park would actually come up for sale. The old lady who lived there, owners of the coal mines in the forest of Dean, was needing to go into a nursing home. And what happened was that the possibility of buying this estate, this large estate, Oaklands Park estate, came above the horizon. And it is Joachim’s  creative ideas which form a bit the destiny of this place because the Joachim could see that with land help and with young people and with willing residents who liked working on the land and who like doing a good job and could be trained to care for plants, to dig, to harrow and to rake and mow even.

Joachim was no stranger to machinery and he developed some quite remarkable machinery for the horticulture. He would get a Ferguson tractor, turn the wheels round to make them a wider width and widen the front wheels as well.  He would take out the middle furrow ridger of a potato ridger and he would have a four foot wide vegetable growing bed which with a path in between that residents could hoe from, rake and tend and not tread on the vegetables growing, or the seeds growing.

And that was very creative. He was also an early user of a rotivator which had some concerns amongst especially the organic fraternity who would not use rotivators, particularly because of the problem of panning, but Joachim never used the rotivator deeply, it was just to tickle the surface, to create a tilth.And he used the tractor as well to steerage hoe the beds, so  the machinery on a human scale played quite a part.

The healthy income receipts showed that if he had a wide market for organic produce, and there certainly was a market in the Gloucestershire area and further afield, that Oaklands Park could not only be a place for people with special needs, but it could be self-sufficient, that it needn’t rely on government subsidy.

I think it’s fair to say that Joachim felt quite passionately, that if everybody just relies on the government handouts, it doesn’t do the human character any good. It breeds a kind of dependency. Now, you can have lots of opinions about this, but with people with special needs in Camphill, the payment was for the work. Camphill Villlage Trust was very lucky in originally getting the Deficiency Grant which goes back to 1957 and Botton village and the efficiency grant wasn’t just given to.

People working in a workshop, it was given to everybody in the community, whatever they did. All the residents received it housework, gardens, land, agriculture workshops. And Joachim saw that although this was a quiet right  in certain cases you, Oaklands Park could be built on a model of total self-sufficiency. And that would be because Oaklands could also grow and develop. And there was soon after it started in the late 1970s, a project to take the British Weleda company from East Grinstead to Oaklands Park to grow all their medicinal herbs and and flowers.

And this was, a very real idea in the early 1980s when the East Grinstead site was becoming too small. Joachim was on the council of the Camphill Village Trust and he brought these ideas. And it is fair to say that the council were a little bit behind the. times with ideas at this time, this late 70s, early 80s time, They were happy to see  Oaklands Park develop, more places for people with special needs and there was a quite a waiting list coming up at that time with the CVT, but they were not happy to see Oaklands Park community become separate from the ManPower Services Commission payments. This caused quite some frustration amongst people at Oaklands Park unable to make the changes to a self sufficient community.

 Of course, these are times before safeguarding and  the many regulations that would accompany the process of registration of the Camphill Communities. Although one has to say that some of these elements were coming around the corner at the early 1980s time. So the CVT was, I think it’s fair to say, unsure how people with special needs would live self-sufficiently.

I think the spirit of Oaklands was that the community would not go out or have things beyond because it would develop a self-sufficient kind of culture where the work and the social life and the cultural life would be enough. So therefore that it could finance itself quite happily from the sales of the vegetables, which by then were really becoming quite large with regular deliveries of produce to other places such as Stourbridge, in the Midlands. What to say about this question Joachim would have loved to have shown the world that you could still even in these days of welfare payments and such things, you could live a self-sufficient community, with people with special needs, with no harm done, and an invitation to any social worker to come and see that the welfare of those students would be cared for and properly looked after.

I think it is also fair to say that Joachim felt quite thwarted  by this prevention to show the world that a person with special needs could stand on his own two feet or her own two feet could do a job which he or she could be proud of. And all the time being shored up by grants and and monies for deficiency in work was somewhat arbitrary and also, in one sense, a bit false.

Joachim did have this wonderful ability to bring the best out in people on the land and he surrounded himself, in the best possible way with a devoted workforce who made sure that the greenhouses were watered, that weeds were kept to a minimum. The gardens looked healthy and well. And with his mixture of the labour from the people with the land and some very ingenious machinery, a large area became under vegetables and fruit, soon after Oakland started, One of the conditions that Oaklands could begin was the sale of Dawn House and its land.  Joachim held out very strongly against the order from the CVT council that it should sell the whole property to make a contribution towards Oaklands Park purchase.

And perhaps the final straw in all this, which had some indirect effects, was that in 1978 the communities of Grange and Oaklands were then, as it were, glued together to become Grange Oaklands Community in which everything was run under one body, even though the nature of the community at the Grange; older, perhaps more craft orientated with the pottery there and the basketry, perhaps a little bit gentler in pace to Oaklands, which was a young, busy, active horticultural community.

The amalgamation didn’t sit well in Joachim’s eyes. It is almost as if the CVT had sort of stopped Joachim’s ideas in their tracks and and in a strange kind of twist, amalgamated Oaklands so that it couldn’t become independent. It is a question which one can ask of this, and one can never quite get to a clear picture, because I think there was a real need to show how a  self sufficient land unit could work, but was prevented from doing so.

It’s interesting to note that in another situation in the CVT,  an expansion of the Camphill Community in Stourbridge was also thwarted at this time where Mark Gardner had  a vision for a kind of courtyard community extension of Camphill houses in Stourbridge, which would take on some quite imaginative projects. For example, the sixth form from the local Elmfield Rudolf Steiner school could be housed there with all the creative work the sixth form could do.

There’d be a market garden, there’d be workshops, there’d be meeting spaces, a cafe. And it was centred around a farm building complex, which was for sale right on the south west corner of Stourbridge off the Broadway it was known as. And an application for funds was made , Camphill Houses, worked very hard to get this project off the ground with a proper financed plan and such things. But a rather slow council, not particularly enamoured with the idea,  Camphill Houses Stourbridge had suffered terribly from employment problems in the late 70s, early 80s with the closure of all the big workshops in the black country such as the Austin manufacturing plant at Longbridge where lots of people worked and there was no employment for the people with special needs who’d come down from places like Botton Village.

And this was causing some problems. But the solutions were being offered but not being taken up. I think the other area was that both Mark Gardener and Joachim really found themselves at odds with the council. The council was not responding to something which was quite revolutionary, to have more places for people with special needs. But there was a certain caution in the wind, maybe financial, maybe human. So the project in Stourbridge didn’t happen and Oaklands couldn’t become self-sufficient.

For Mark, he when the sale actually went to another organisation, it became actually a very successful nursing home.

 Throughout the 1980s, Oaklands went from strength to strength, partly through the coming of Till and Sybille  Van der Voort, who joined Oaklands in the late 70s, early 80s working with Joachim  and making a remarkable contribution to the community building, building up the land work and at the same time developing training.

This, in a sense, gave Joachim a space to step back. And he did ask for a sabbatical when he spent a term at the Special Three-fold Development Unit at Emerson College and then came to Middlesbrough, at the other end of England, to a project which had attracted him from the start, which had originated in Botton village in the early 1980s, when three chief officers of the Middlesborough Council came to Bottom and said,” We would like you to start a project to help unemployment because we have unemployment is a huge problem for this town, also for people with special needs. They do not have anything to do. And we’ve seen you have workshops and such things, and we’d like you to come to Middlesbrough. Well, it’s an interesting story. Botton Village was quite intrigued by this visit of these three chief officers, the Three Musketeers, they came to be known as, Tony Noble, Geoffrey Watson, and Alf Illingworth.

And these three, covered quite a special, you could say,  rainbow of activity of the Middlesborough Council, which at that time was being very innovative in finding ways to combat unemployment in a town whose industries were reducing and closing in large numbers and also try to ameliorate some of the sort of poor housing that the council had been building for a totally different situation in previous years.

So the group of people who had assembled around Larchfield, the Middlesborough project as it became known in Botton, was deeply grateful, but also quite surprised to see that Joachim and Ingeborg would like to come up from Oaklands and live in the proposed community of Larchfield. One should say that the community had started as an idea in the city, in the town of Middlesborough, and people would come in on the train from Botton every morning and help and people from Middlesbrough would be employed as well.

So it would become a kind of workshop community. But the Middlesborough Council were quite surprised when the group of people from Botton, who started to negotiate the idea with them, said maybe we should be better served if we actually lived on the edge of Middlesborough and  worked the land and had a farm and workshops, and without too much kind of delay, Middlesborough turned around and said, well, we have some land at the south end of Middlesbrough and we are looking for new ideas for it.  and this would fit beautifully. And the Larchfield Community came into existence in 1986, but it came into existence with a remarkably efficient and proficient market gardener in the form of Joachim who had come up to Middlesbrough and then spent six months working in the town council’s planning department and had become very taken by what was going on in this city, which had huge problems to rebuild its infrastructure . So by , 1986, Middlesborough had worked out an idea whereby Camphill would rent at a very reasonable amount for the first 10 years, just for a penny, this land and build houses on the land. Middlesborough council would grant money, through the european social fund, to restore the farm buildings and together they would develop a land project with people with special needs, with workshops. 

 Joachim took to Middlesborough like a duck to water. He was very much appreciated in the project.

The Larchfield group included myself, the writer of this piece, my family, Anna Betts with her children and a young co-worker from Botton called Maggie White, and then Joachim found Peter Smith, who was working on an organic farm near Redding, and he came in the autumn of 1986.  A new community had begun in which quite a diverse group of people came together from different parts of the country and from different Camphill experiences to set up this urban fringe community. And with the help of Middlesborough Council and Joachim’s enormous ability to plan and execute  projects.

Very quickly, houses were built, the farm buildings restored, a special maintenance building was built and 2 tractors were bought. People from Middlesborough came on special schemes, both job creation schemes and youth training schemes. They could plant trees , most notable a shelter belt which was sorely needed on the windswept area above Middlesborough.  A youth training programme was built up and monies were given for a site hut and a minibus for transport to and from Middlesborough.  A  forman  was appointed with the assistants. A team could  be created and Joachim  was very good at doing the paperwork, filling in the forms for the Manpower Service Commission.  There was experience to be gained from work on the land, work in fencing and tree and shelter belt maintenance.

And again, Joachim is very much the is the cornerstone  there, creating these projects and developing the workshops. And also the new addition to Larchfield, a fine building called Hemington Grange.

 It was a busy time for Joachim,,  he had been on the Biodynamic Council, and we have in these conversations about the biodynamics in the 1980s, covered the Broom farm sale. We should cover the whole story of that in more detail, because the departure of George Corin as fieldsman  and the appointment of Jimmy Anderson in his place and the moving of the Fieldsman from Wales up to Scotland is a topic in itself.

But the sale of Broome farm in 1987 did send shockwaves through the Biodynamic Agricultural Association, especially when David Clements saw the opportunity to step down as chair. And  he was replaced by Joachim himself, who was busy at Larchfield doing all the work that he had to do to develop the community with the group, but felt also called, as it were, to carry the work of biodynamics. It is interesting to note that biodynamics had developed quite strongly in the south of England, especially in places like Gloucestershire and Devon and Sussex.

But apart from the work at Botton Village, the North had much more of a sporadic sort of connexion to biodynamics, and biodynamics in new social environments. For the example in cities where unemployment was high, places where you could bring the social aspect of biodynamics together. Joachim  happily took on the chair of the Biodynamic Agricultural Association at a time when biodynamics was finding its way into more socially inclusive situations and also areas of the country where wasn’t so present.

This is an important aspect of the end of the 1980s because the BDAA  was recovering from some pretty difficult moments after the sale of Broome farm, not only had the chair changed, but the secretary as well. So by the end of the 1980s, Joachim was chair and Ann Parson’s daughter of in a new office setting in the Sunfield Children’s Home, Woodman Lane, Clent, Stourbridge with the postal address which had changed to West Midlands, although it was still in the Worcestershire district of Bromsgrove.

Middlesborough Council was very fortunate in having access to a number of grants, especially when you came to situations of underspend at the end of the financial year. So when Tony Noble from the planning department said, can you spend one hundred and twenty thousand pounds in the next three weeks, Joachim spend three days almost non-stop, drawing plans for new workshops for the farm and the new farm complex. And Tony Noble  was deeply grateful because it meant that  his grant allocation was up to proper proportions of what the council needed to develop spend on the town.Spending money is always a strange thing. How do you how to do it? And Joachim had a vision immediately for a new farm and put his pen to paper and a new farm began to take shape from these underspent monies from the European Social Fund.

Well, you could ask what happened next?   It is fair to say that Joachim’s creative enthusiasm was suddenly drawn to an event which was happening far away across the North Sea in Berlin when the wall came down and the two Germanys, East Germany and West Germany had the opportunity to unite and moreover, in uniting become part of the European Union.   Also Poland, now Silesia, where Joachim had grown up, had the question about all the German community who used to live around Wroclau asking about repossesion of their lands .  Joachim’s  family was no exception. And it is also fair to say that from 1991 Joachim’s attention had really turned to  going back to where he had origins and roots and saying goodbye to the community, which he had been very, very involved in setting up. And so in 1991 Joachim left for Germany and for Poland and for helping to set up a Camphill community there using monies  from some lands in Lincolnshire which were sold for the purpose by supportive friends.

But it’s fair to say that Joachim’s  tenure at the BDAA as chair for just a few years came to an end, because once he was back in in Europe, he relinquished his chairmanship of the Biodynamic Agricultural Association. There was a moment at the end of the 1980s, when he had quite some influence on the proceedings and kept a steady ship after the quite dramatic events around the sale of Broome Farm and the relocation of the office and all that, that entailed and kept the project going with his  fine administrative skills and kept  the Biodynamic Agricultural Association on a straight furrow.

Vivian Griffiths