The year 2025 marks the 75th anniversary of The Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research.
As if seventy plus years was not enough, Braziers has a history, which
long predates its actual founding in 1950. Dorothy and Normal Glaister
met as members of the arcanely titled Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (OWC),
which had direct links to Quakerism and the work of Ernest Thompson
Seaton: naturalist, artist, conservationist and teacher, and more
tangential ties to other utopian movements like the Kibbo Kift and
experimental education movements of the time.
The OWC ran a small independent school called The Forest School, in
Fordingbridge in the New Forest. Norman Glaister supported this school in
many ways and Dorothy Glaister taught there. Dorothy's interests lay
mainly in education, penning Chiron's Cave and Tented Schools to explain
her ideas and methodology, but Norman’s thoughts were more concerned
with psychology and the therapeutic use of community. He put his ideas
into practice with the Grith Fyrd camps for unemployed men and the
more experimental Quakerism camps, and Norman supported socialist political
movements including the social credit movement as well as being a
strong advocate of his Sensory/Executive method, which of course
Braziers still uses today. Norman's thinkings are recorded in his tome,
‘Greater Things’ (1945).
A number of Summer Schools, where intellectual explorations of these
educational, psychological and political threads were discussed, were the
precursors to the project that, in 1950, became Braziers Park School of
Integrative Social Research – a deliberately non-therapeutic, self-
experimentation in community living.
In the safe off the butler's pantry, where the door sometime yields, and
sometime does not, like some fickle keeper of past fires still acts as a
gatekeeper, lie fragments of this story – weavings, photographs, accounts,
minutes, brochures, and many parts of the story from 1950 onwards with
its schisms and coups and occasional outbreaks of harmony. Until very
recently, the archive was a holy jumble redolent of grandmother’s attic, but
recent efforts have been made to box things rather more systematically.
It is an ambition of Braziers Park to make sense of this archive and to
present it in a manner, which will be accessible to scholars and
entertaining to all but we are not quite there yet. You do not need to
understand this history to enjoy Braziers, but if you ever wonder where
the madness came from, enquire within.
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If you would like to find out more about the archive or explore ways of engaging with the history of Braziers Park, please contact admin@braziers.org.uk.