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Keith Gascoigne

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Philip Tom Oyler

2020-06-23: This page is ‘work in progress’. New items have been added recently. Apologies to all the kind people who have sent information and who are still sending me information. (Life short; websites long.)

Background to my interest

I first discovered Philip Oyler through his book, The Generous Earth, bought at a book fair in the mid1970s. I was captivated by his account of life in France between the wars and just after - especially the traditional french way of cultivating the land in a holistic or complete way of life to support the farmer, his family and the local community.

A few years later, in the late 1970s, I found myself in France, in Lot and in a village near the river Dordogne in a commune that Oyler must have known well. At that time there were few modern roads into the area and it was then relatively unspoiled by mass tourism and the exploitation of les touristes. The village looked run-down, many houses were empty and in a poor state of repair but there was a thriving butchers shop (this was before I became vegetarian and recently vegan), a PTT (Bureau de Poste) the pattisserie van came round once a week and so did the fresh fish van which stopped outside the barn where I was staying at the time.

Life appeared somewhat difficult for some of the inhabitants - there were few jobs for the men - a small quarry on the outskirts of the commune provided some jobs but generally the people seemed calm, satisfied and contented. There was an air of peace in the commune that I had not experienced in England for some time and I found the way of life of these people, far from Paris and the hustle and bustle of modern life, refreshing.

I soon got to know the villagers and they me. The door of the barn was always unlocked and open so anyone who felt like it could and did wander in to look and see what l’etranger anglais was doing.

While staying there, I met an English woman (originally from the Sloan Square area of London) who lived over the river from Carennac. I told her about my interest in Philip Oyler and she told me that she had met him and that he had lived near Puybrun (a village a few kilometres away) where, during the fifties and sixties, he’d had quite a few visitors - young girls (she said) mainly - and he’d been considered something of a ‘guru’ attracting quite a few young people who stayed for several weeks.

She also told me that in the early 1970s Oyler became ill and was sent to the sanatorium in St Cere but became worse and was taken to a ‘special hospital’ south of St Cere where he died.

In 1999, I made the forerunner of this website and put some images of the commune on a page with a request for anyone who had heard of Philip Oyler to contact me. For years there was nothing on the web about him. Then Paul Roberts in America contacted me with some information and links to information connected with Oyler, which reawoke my interest and I did another search and found more articles and information. A general interest in Oyler’s ideas was beginning to grow and this page is the result. Everything I know about Oyler is or will be on this page. I will state whether the things are ‘facts’, hearsay or anecdotal. Maybe others will add to what is here and gradually a picture might be built up of the intelligent and aware person that Philip Oyler certainly was. I still find it surprising that so few people know anything about him.

Associations:

Theosophical Society

In the 1908 - 1929 Adyar Bulletin of the Theosophical Society see copy here (press the ‘back’ button to return here). Philip Oyler is listed as giving two talks ‘Of Love of Life 1 and 2’ in April and May 1913. He was giving his talks at the same time as C W Leadbeater and also Annie Besant. It is possible that J Krishnamurti was in Adyar with Annie Besant and C W Leadbeater at that time. If Krishnamurti was at Adyar when Oyler visited then Oyler must have been a well-known, honest and trustworthy person at that time. See later about my question concerning his present ‘unknown’ status.

Oyler at Grez sur Loing and his friendship with Delius and Eric Fenby

Grez sur Loing, near Fontainebleau and around 65 kilometres south-east of Paris, attracted many notable people - many of the Impressionist painters including Sisley who painted scenes of the Loing river there, G I Gurdjieff who had the Prieurie there which attracted many famous people - and also the composer Frederick Delius and his wife, Jelka - and also, later still, Eric Fenby, Delius’s amanuenses.

I knew that in the early 1930s, Oyler was restoring an estate near Grez sur Loing, and was a friend of Delius but all my information then was sketchy.

In march 2013 I was contacted by a past student of Eric Fenby who mentioned that Oyler had had a daughter and her name was Soldanella and this set me off again looking for information.

I discovered that Oyler had been married for a time at least. His wife was Elsa Giöbel, a Swedish painter.

Philip Oyler was either improving or managing an estate not far from Grez-sur-Loing on behalf of the millionaire owner Theo Pitcairn, who was also a friend of Delius. It was probably Theo Pitcairn who introduced Oyler to the Delius couple.

Oyler met the Delius couple around 1932 (maybe because of Oyler’s horticultural interests; the Delius garden was large and fruitful) and became a close friend. While there, Oyler wrote an article, ‘Frederick Delius in his Garden.’ in which he describes Delius’s house as, “...an extended plain front with three storeys, the top one having dormers. It is distinguished from the other houses by being much longer, by having all its window shutters painted green instead of the prevailing grey, and by having at intervals rambler roses climbing up it and adding, when in bloom, some pleasing masses of colour against the solid stone walls.” Oyler also took at least one photograph of the house.

Toward the end of his life Delius became ill and could no longer transcribe his music. Eric Fenby in England heard about this and offered his services freely. He went there in 1928 and remained with Delius until Delius died in 1934.

Fenby states, in his book, Delius as I knew him, that he met and liked Oyler, who was living in a house in Grez-sur-Loing, and they became good friends. Oyler’s daughter, Soldanella, was also in Grez-sur-Loing and she and Fenby became close friends. In Fenby's own words, “Delius thought I was paying too much attention to a very charming young English girl who was known by the lovely name of Soldanella and who happened to be staying for a short while with her father, a great friend of mine, in the village.”

I think that, for Fenby, talking with Philip Oyler was probably a welcome diversion from the pressures of working with Delius and also, Oyler was more ‘religious’ (in the popular sense) than Delius, who could be quite outspoken, and Fenby was quite ‘religious’ too.

However, Delius warned Fenby never to get married as it would interfere with his musical creativity so Fenby and Soldanella became engaged secretly on the bridge at Grez sur Loing. Another reason for the secrecy was that Soldanella’s mother was ill and they did not wish to upset her. Soldanella was expected to take care of the family in the event of the death of her mother - something she eventually had to do until 1972.

Delius died in 1934. It had been his wish to be buried in England but as Jelka herself was quite ill at the time Delius was buried in the local church-yard. Later, after Jelka recovered a little, his body was moved to England. Jelka died there in 1935.

What Oyler did then is unknown at the moment. He would have been around 50 years of age in 1935. He could have stayed to run the estate for Theo Pitcairn or he might have moved back to England. It seems unlikely that he would have stayed in France during the hostilities of the 1939-1945 war.

Eric Fenby, Delius and Grez sur Loing

For more information about Eric Fenby and Delius see his book, Delius as I knew him - especially the 1981 edition and also the Stephen Lloyd (ed) book, Fenby on Delius. Many thanks to ‘the student of Eric Fenby’ for the useful information.

 

 

The name ‘Soldanella’ seemed familiar to me. It took me some time to remember where I had seen it. It is in Oyler’s book. He dedicates The Generous Earth simply ‘To Soldanella’. He must have been quite fond of her.

 

Organic Husbandry and the New English Weekly (NEW)

This might also have been called The Kinship in Husbandry group which was the forerunner to the organic soil movement. It was formed in 1941 by a group of individuals including Oyler and his associate and fellow traveller through France, Lord Northbourne. The members of the group were concerned about the growing use of artificial fertilizers and modern farming methods controlled by financial institutions rather than people who knew and cared about healthy soil and nutritious food plants. See this PDF copy of an article written by Phillip Concord, (14pps) (press the ‘back’ button to return here).

Information from ‘Dr. Trelawney unmasked - Aleister Crowley and Dr. Philip Oyler’

There is, as far as I know, no record of Oyler having gained a PhD so the title ‘Dr’ is either incorrect or ironic. Although the tone of this is patronizing (and it is possibly incorrect) it is another small piece in the jig-saw puzzle, “Oyler next turns up in the 1940s near Sarlat in the Dordogne where he buys a farm and discovers a vanished pastoral world and becomes something of an advocate for the soil, for an acre of land for every countryman and other Utopian ideas. His books The Generous Earth and Son of the Generous Earth are about his experiences there. He was a neighbour of Delius whom he saw often and his last recorded writing is a piece on the great composer published in 1972.”

So where was Oyler in the 1940 - 1941 period during the war? Was he in England helping to form the Kinship in Husbandry group or living near the river Dordogne?

If the date of Oyler’s last recorded writing was correct (1972) then Oyler must have been taken ill fairly suddenly because he died in 1973.

There are still many questions to answer. What about his family - are any of his family alive in England? The name ‘Oyler’ could be Dutch or German. Oyler states in his book that he can trace his family roots back to Provence. It could be that his maternal family came from Provence and his paternal family (and name) came from Holland or Germany?

Another question that refuses to go away is, ‘Why do so few people know about Philip Oyler?’ Did he deliberately want to keep a low profile or has information about him and his interests been deliberately removed from public circulation? If he was in a group campaigning against the taking over of agriculture by large commercial companies wanting to control agriculture purely for profit then maybe the large commercial companies suppressed his findings and observations? It has happened before, with Tesla’s discovery of ‘free’ electrical energy.

 

 

Around the year-end, 2013, I was contacted by Dr Juliet Jain telling me that her mother, Juanita Jain, had visited Oyler’s house near Puybrun, in 1959. She had written a letter to Oyler and he had invited her to go down and stay with him for a while. Staying in Philip Oyler’s house near Puybrun was, possibly, one of the highlights of her life and she is, most probably, one of the ‘girls’ that the woman I met in Carennac had told me about. Here is her account of her stay of over 50 years ago:

A visit to the house of Philip Oyler in 1959

After a stressful journey by train, boat, trains again and taxi, my 9 years old daughter and I arrived at the tiny hamlet where Phillip Oyler lived. Pauline, Oyler’s ‘hostess’, put us to bed with hot-water bottles. The bed was galleon-shaped and made of dense walnut wood, walnut and plum trees being prolific in the area.

When we were awake we were enchanted, the balmy clear air, the tranquility and attractiveness of the old house made me feel renewed and happy. Philip was always called Peter and he introduced himself at breakfast – I see him as distinctly in 2014 as in 1959. He was a tall, spare man and looked to be in his late sixties and retired from farming.

Peter was affable. He knew that I had read his book, The Generous Earth and that he had been a farmer at Plaxtol in Kent, which I knew about as I had been raised in Kent. He always wore a bright pink, pure silk shirt, cords and open sandals on his enormous feet. He had a beard and grey hair.

Pauline was a kind, cultivated and practical lady. Although Peter called her ‘hostess’ she was a house keeper and cook but always presented a lady-like appearance and was kind to us both.

The breakfast table was a long, wooden kitchen table on which were offered milky coffee, wholemeal wheat and rye loaf, honey from bees feeding on vine blossom, butter and fruit. My daughter, Susan, had never tasted melon but Peter soon managed to persuade her to try it and from that time she liked it. To cut the loaf, it was placed at the table-end by the drawer and sliced in that way. The honey was unusual and tangy. All the meals provided during our stay were wholesome and tasty and the wine was made in the cave.

Each morning Susan and I had the task of breaking the crust on the wine vats, where the must had bubbled up to form a solid ‘scum’. In the corner was a still in which fermented small, sweet grapes, a mist of fruit flies hovering above. As well as breaking the crust of the wine barrels it was my task to press the grapes in a large vat. To do this you had to be fairly tall (I was 5 feet 5½ inches) in order to push the tool to the bottom. (I can’t remember the name of this instrument) but it was shaped like an enormous garlic press, with a flat-ended club. The container was called a ‘comporte’.

I can’t remember what Peter did with his time. I believe he was writing or out in his small Citroen car of 1936 vintage which he had just bought from a showroom in England.

There were no buses and scarcely any traffic on the lanes. It was decidedly rural France – no tourists – one had to speak french if only haltingly. I had some interesting chats with the lady in the only shop a little way out.

The washer-woman would call in her pony and trap. She would arrive ringing a bell, collect the washing and scrub it clean on a washboard in the river.

Another interesting feature of the village was the shoeing of oxen and sometimes cows used for ploughing. Not a tractor in sight. It was another world from the suburbs of London.

There was a composting earth lavatory at the end of the garden. One tossed walnut sawdust in each time it was used.

Philip believed that we could, in England, live by home-grown produce. The farmers had very small farms from about 10 acres to 20 acres. Everything was not grown in one place. For instance, the grapes needed a special soil which was usually on a hillside, so maybe part of their farm was a little distant. Most of the plums were small and sweet but the larger plums were spread out on large nets to dry into prunes, likewise, grapes were dried in the sun – half-way to raisins and made into a special sweet wine.

The prolific walnut trees supplied the wood for furniture and the nuts were made into a liqueur called crème de noix and which was intensely dark brown. This was drunk with very light fluffy pancakes (pêtes des nonnes) or Nun’s farts. These were all local specialities although crème de noix was available in wine shops. It all seems so unreal now, like a rural idyll which had all but disappeared in England

At certain times of the year, oxen and some ploughing cows were shod. This was performed on a grassy triangle with a kind of gallows-like structure and a big leather hoist. This was placed around the belly of the beast and unlike horse-shoeing, the animal was hoisted upon high with legs dangling. Owing to the cloven hoof, the shoes were forged into a different shape, a bit like a modern flip-flop with the metal piece enclosing the gap.

There were plenty of discarded shoes laying around but I have lost mine over the years. We were shown around the village/hamlet and peered into cellars and pigstyes draped in cobwebs, the owner referring to them as ‘lace curtains’. I don’t remember horses being used and apart from a few ponies and donkeys for transporting vegetables, etc., I can’t remember seeing another car except Peter’s.

Peter was attentive in a fatherly way and informed us about interesting places to visit by bicycle. Sarlat with it’s market and old buildings was one. Susan and I hired a bicycle from Bretenoux; she sat on the back on a cushion, and we made a shaky visit over the hills to the caves of Gouffre de Padirac.

The nearest village was Carennac, a charming place with tiled pointed roofs. Some churches in the region had painted walls, one with a blond Eve and her Adam. The whole countryside was interesting and attractive, especially the nearby River Dordogne which was embedded with fools gold. The water was crystal clear and fast running. The air of the Dordogne had a lovely atmosphere, early mist and warm, not boiling days.

We found the french people friendly and helpful. Peter and Pauline were the only English people we saw there. I think that Peter was a real ‘one-off’ personality as they say. He did his own thing but was kindly. I know nothing of his family or personal life. I didn’t ask and he never voluntarily disclosed anything but he did tell me that when he died he would like the Tennyson poem to be read about a ship going to its own port with him as a passenger.

 

My notes to the above:

 

What a lovely image of Philip Oyler in his pink, silk shirt, brown cords and sandals. Reading this takes me back to my time in that area in the late 1970s, just as things were beginning to change but, in my opinion, not for the better. Many thanks to Juliet Jain for contacting me and to Juanita Jain for her time in writing her memories. I appreciate your help.

 

List of Philip Oyler’s life events as currently known:

Philip Oyler

Born in 1879 at Sutton Valence (historically Town Sutton or Sutton Hastings), a village some 8km SE of Maidstone, Kent, England. ‘On a Kentish Farm’ according to his book.

Gained an MA at Oxford University.

Married: Elsa Giöbel, Swedish painter. Date unknown. (However, it is possible that this marriage took place in Eastbourne, Sussex, in October 1911. (From AN) ). Divorced in the late 1930s.

Location 1913(?) - possibly Wales and probably with Elsa Giöbel where they tried farming and possibly teaching.

According to PN, who lives in the house where Soldanella had lived in Sweden:
‘In her research, PN learned that Oyler was an ‘odd’ man. Elsa, who was an accomplished and influential artist, struggled as a woman painter (in a male dominated environment) to fight her way into the art world and change the Swedish Academy (its appreciation of female artists). She had a difficult life with Oyler. When she married and moved in with him, she put her paintings on the walls. Oyler looked around the room, and after a few days told Elsa that he had lit a fire in the yard and asked Elsa if they would burn her paintings. Most likely in shock, and the belief that her art was not good, Elsa did as Oyler said. Elsa stopped painting. Soon after Oyler’s death, she started to paint again. This was all narrated by Soldanella in a documentary that PN was aware of sometime around the late 1980s.’
My apologies if I have slightly altered what PN stated. I have tried to be true to the essence of her email. Writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue is difficult - as I discovered while in France.
Again from PN: ‘I send some pictures of Elsa Giöbel’s art to show you how beautiful she painted and what (a) fool Philip probably was.’
PN sent me some images taken in Soldanella’s house of Elsa’s paintings. Having been a (not very good) painter, I can state that they are all extremely good. Elsa really was an accomplished painter. Unfortunately, PN stated that the images were ‘taken by a photographer and are copyright’ so I can’t display them here.

So why did Oyler force Elsa to burn her paintings; what was happening here? There is a clue, I think, in Oyler’s statement, in his book, that he spent years at university but what he learned there didn’t help him at all to survive in the real world. Oyler might have had a dislike of any knowledge or skill which didn’t help him to survive in the world? He probably didn’t think that art was a neccesity to living well? Food for thought there to help build up the jigsaw puzzle that is Oyler. Personally, I think that art: painting, music, poetry, prose-fiction, is essential to living a good life but maybe this is a contemporary approach to living well?

 

According to PB, ‘Philip Oyler could have been a supporter of composer Rutland Boughton’s efforts to establish an English version of Bayreuth. Oyler advocated Glastonbury and persuaded Boughton away from his first intention to go to Letchworth. He was a very active presence on the scene at first but disappeared just as things began to get going.’ There are no dates available for this information.

Location during the 1930s - apart from him living in Grez sur Loing near Fenby and Delius - is unknown at the moment.

On 29th December 1933, while living at Chateau les Pleignes, Grez sur Loing, and meeting Eric Fenby, Delius and Jelka among others, Philip Tom Oyler wrote a letter to Lord Sandwich. Lord Sandwich passed it on to Leonard Elmhirst who, with his wife, Dorothy (née Whitney) owned, renovated and lived at Dartington Hall near Totnes, South Devon, England, where the letter was found in the estate archives there by a PhD student working on English-French relations. (By a strange quirk of circumstances, a few months later, I visited Dartington Hall, with my wife as she was giving some talks there so I had time to explore and appreciate what a beautiful place the Dartington Hall and gardens are - and also the Schumacher College in the Old Postern Building).

The student, AN, photographed the pages and, although a little blurred, she kindly sent them to me. The images, linked below, make very interesting reading - especially the hand-written pages about Oyler’s aims and the ‘nightmare’ effect of the war. AN stated that, ‘...the letter makes a very interesting connection between French and English projects to help mankind through improving the land.’ The first 3 pages are hand-written, and contain some of his personal experiences and thoughts. The remaining 4 typed pages generally suggest his basic ideas. This whole document is important in showing Oyler’s thoughts, intentions and aims. Letter from Philip Tom Oyler to Lord Sandwich:

Page 1   Page 2   Page 3   Page 4   Page 5   Page 6   Page 7

It is interesting to see Oyler’s hand writing. There are 7 pages, each has its own image. As far as I know Oyler received no reply to this letter either from Lord Sandwich* or Leonard Elmhirst at Dartington Hall. Personally, I think that this ignoring of his letter would have been a disappointment to Oyler.

*Lord Sandwich, at the time, was probably George Charles Montague (died 1962), 9th Earl of Sandwich.

After his work in Grez sur Loing had finished, Oyler could have moved south to Lot or the Dordogne region during the late 1930s - 1940s although there were hostilities happening in that region so it is highly probable that he returned to England?

Location: Lived in the then small commune, Chapou, near Puybrun from the 1950s until becoming ill 1972-1973.

EM sent two emails about living with her husband and young children in Chapou near Oyler’s house: ‘My husband and I, with our very small children, lived in the same hamlet in the early 1960s. We knew his housekeeper and her family well. Life was wonderfully simple in those days with no tractors, only horses and oxen working the fields; a lovely community where all the people were trustworthy.’ Together with her husband, EM used to help Oyler transplanting his tobacco plants and remembers the government official coming to count them. EM goes on to state that she remembers Oyler as rather a crusty old man in the mid60s who did not often leave his house and who was looked after by the English lady who lived close by. EM, with her husband, often visited in the intervening years and still found lots of small things left just as they remember them. For instance; on the door of Oyler’s barn there were still nailed the same ancient horse shoes that helped their children to learn how to count.’
The ‘horse’ shoes mentioned could have been the smaller ox shoes as someone else mentions these and oxen where used much more, on the small farms in that region, than horses but some horses, not many, were used.

Chapou

I remember seeing a small hand painted sign - black on white - almost hidden in the grass at the side of the road just outside of the commune many years ago (it might even still be there?). Recently, I looked into the meaning of this word and found very little. Then I reasoned that it must be a family name. It is a family name and the story is quite sad. Jean Jaques Chapou born in Montcuq (Lot) in 1909, was a french resistance fighter in the FTP (Les Francs-tireurs et partisans francais) and died near Bourganeuf 16 juillet 1944 after making a surprise attack on members of the german army. One source stated that he was captured and executed by a firing squad. Whatever, he died fighting for France and was looked upon as a local hero, one of les Heros de la Resistence. There is a monument to him in Cahors near Cathedrale Saint-Etienne.

Oyler died: 24 Feb 1973, ‘special hospital’, south of St Cere, Lot, France (more later when researched). London Times obituary 19th March 1973. (Thanks to AN).

 

Occupations: farmer, estate manager and restorer, writer. School-teacher (so far unverified).

The man

So what about Oyler the man? There is scant documentation of Oyler’s inner world but there are a few clues in what I have seen so far. It can never be conclusive but I offer my assessment which might be of help.

According to one personal account Oyler was ‘affable’; according to another he was ‘crusty’. He appeared to have the well-being of people, generally, in his heart, yet he could be unkind or harsh - for example to his wife by ‘encouraging’ her to burn her paintings. Something that I found quite shocking as painters not only put shape and colors on a canvas they also put their soul into their paintings.

A clue to his light and dark complexity can be found in the hand-written part of his letter to Lord Sandwich where he states that his ideals had been thwarted by the war (the great shatterer of lives and ideals) and put a stop to his undertakings and produced ‘a great upheaval ... a nightmare of dissillusionment’. Oyler bought a cottage and some land and ‘went into a retreat to reassess his life’.

Oyler’s belief was that humankind would find salvation in the land and this became his goal. The principles are typed in the second part of the letter to Lord Sandwich. Oyler states that he needed to find a new field of service to bring this about. He was intent on following his ideals.

Basically and generally, he was being driven and little was going to stand in his way again, not ‘unecessary’ paintings, not even the love of a wife. He probably felt that he had to follow his path and discard what was unnecessary.

I hope I am not being overcritical of Oyler’s character. Our world society has often been changed by strong-willed people and I think that Oyler did a lot of good in his attempts to awaken people to the horrors of a small group of financiers, with simply a profit motive, influencing politicians to control farming, and change farming from a person-centered job to a profit-producing operation and wrecking the soil in the process but the cost for Oyler was high. He was both affable and crusty.

Note Oyler’s handwritten insertion of the word ‘humane’ in the typscript.

If you have any thoughts, observations about this or any information or especially an image of Philip Tom Oyler, often known as Peter Oyler, then please contact me.

Apologies for the unstructured nature of this ‘Work in Progress’ page and for not updating it until recently. It is now at the top of my list of ‘Worthwhile things to do’.

Acknowledgements

Midsummer 2020: I am starting to add initials of the people who sent information. I will try to email all the people who have sent this information asking if they consent to their full name being added to this acknowledgement section. If you do not want your name made public I will not include it. If I cannot contact the people I will consider the ethical thing to do. Some of this ‘new’ information was sent to me over 5 years ago but, unfortunately, I became ill and unable to continue with this until recently.

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© Copyright, Keith Gascoigne, England.