‘Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice’ (Psalm 96: 12) … the sun sets behind the fields at Frating Hall Farm, near Colchester in Essex (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)
Patrick Comerford
I have been writing these evenings about our visit to Colchester earlier this week. But for two of us the primary purpose in being in that part of Essex on Monday was to visit Metallic Elephant, a printing machinery business based in Frating Hall Farm Industrial Estate.
Frating is almost half-way between Colchester and Clacton and the home of Metallic Elephant, a family-owned business with a lengthy experience in the printing industry and a team of dedicated, skilled craft workers and engineers.
Frating is a small village with a population of about 540, on the Tendring Peninsula, about 8 km (5 miles) east of Colchester and 15 km (9 miles) north-west of Clacton-on-Sea. The nearest railway station is 3 km (2 miles) away at Great Bentley, so Charlotte and I took a taxi from Colchester through the village of Elmstead Market.
Frating includes both Frating Green and Hockley. The parish church is now a private house and Frating also has a village hall, Frating War Memorial Hall, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2022, and one public house, the King’s Arms.
Frating is recorded as Fretingham in the Domesday Book and Frating Church dates from the 12th century. Frae is the Saxon word for a lord, and the name means the settlement of the people of Fraete.
The village sign incorporates a fruited apple tree, recalling the apple-growing industry in Frating during the 20th century, a bell representing the three church bells of Frating Church, a cartwheel representing the 19th century wheelwright of Haggar’s Lane, and a ram’s head from the coat of arms of the Bendish family of Steeple Bumpstead.
Sir Thomas Bendish (1540-1603) of Steeple Bumpstead married Eleanor Ford, a daughter of John Ford of Frating Hall, and was buried at Frating Church. Their son, Sir Thomas Bendish (1568-1636), was created a baronet in 1611 and was High Sheriff of Essex in 1618-1619 and 1630-1631. His son, the royalist Sir Thomas Bendish (1607-1674), was the English ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople in the mid-17th century. Another son, Richard Bendish, inherited Frating Hall.
The barns on Frating Hall Farm, near Colchester in Essex, probably date from the 17th or 18th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)
The barns on Frating Hall Farm probably date from the 17th or 18th century. The more recent history of Frating Hall Farm is an interesting chapter in the history of pacifist communitarianism, and the links between pacifism and agrarianism, or the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement, in the mid-20th century, when farm work offered a way for pacifists and conscientious objectors to remain within the law.
Frating Hall Farm is associated with key figures in the pacifist and anti-war movements from the 1930s to the 1950s, including Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth and a founding figure in the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) in 1936, along with the Dean of Canterbury, Dick Sheppard (1880-1937), the poet Max Plowman and the literary critic John Middleton Murry, a friend of DH Lawrence.
For many years, a photograph of Dick Sheppard, a former Vicar of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, hung over my desk in my study in the house in Firhouse where I lived for 20 years until the mid-1990s. His pacifism and his social activism were among the many influences on the development of my Anglicanism and my spirituality.
By the end of the 1930s, the Peace Pledge Union had almost 100,000 members, all of whom had signed a pledge declaring: ‘War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.’
Two pacifist settlements in Essex played a major role in developing the link between the peace movement and farming: the Adelphi Centre in Langham (1934-1942) and Frating Hall Farm (1943-1954).
The Adelphi Centre at the Oaks, a rural Edwardian mansion at Langham near Colchester, was a socialist education centre with a degree of agricultural self-sufficiency, and had links with George Orwell, John Middleton Murry and other intellectuals.
Frating Hall Farm, on the other hand, was a Christian pacifist community where a 300-acre arable and livestock farm was home to more than 50 people, including refugees and former prisoners-of-war. The story of Frating Hall Farm is told by Ken Worpole in his recent book No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain (2001). The title of his book is from the opening paragraph of DH Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and Worpole charts the history of the Frating community over 11 years.
The pacifist community at Frating Hall Farm lasted from 1943 to 1954 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)
A group from Murry’s failing project in Langham took over Frating Hall Farm in 1943 and ran it as a radical pacifist settlement until 1954. At its peak, more than 50 people lived and worked at Frating, one of the most successful of the pacifist rural initiatives providing legitimate alternatives to conscription during World War II.
The settlement also provided shelter and accommodation for visiting supporters at harvest time, and offered sanctuary to refugees and former German prisoners-of-war. Over time, Frating Hall Farm became a centre for the arts, winning the grudging respect of their neighbours.
It was an extraordinary geographical and international cultural mingling of religious and political interests – between the steelworks and mines of north-east England, bohemian London, rural Anglicanism, Russian anarchism and Jewish phenomenology. Many of the community members at Frating Hall shared strong religious beliefs and an interest in the works of Leo Tolstoy, DH Lawrence, and religious philosophers, writers and theologians such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Simone Weil – all referred to in letters and farm broadsheets.
Shirley Williams (1930-2021), later a Labour cabinet minister, went to work there as the ‘second cowman’ after leaving school at the age of 18. She was in charge of ‘a herd of Ayrshire dairy cows, handsome red-and-white animals of a certain temper.’
Her mother Vera Brittain (1893-1970) contributed towards buying the farm. Shirley Williams learnt much of her politics at Frating from the earnest radicals there, particularly the charismatic Joe Watson. She later recalled her experiences at Frating in her autobiography Climbing the Bookshelves.
When the co-operative structure was dissolved in 1954, a former Quaker member bought the farm at Frating Hall, and eventually bequeathed it to his stepson, Martyn Thomas, who arrived there at the age of four and then continued to farm there with his wife Barbara.
Frating is part of Clacton constituency, where the MP is Nigel Farage. I had thought of visiting Clacton-on-Sea for a walk on the beach. But, by the time we had finished our afternoon business, darkness had enveloped the Essex countryside, and we returned to Colchester under the January full moon, which is known as the Wolf Moon – because it was thought wolves howled more at this time of year as there was less food in the middle of winter.
The parish church in Frating dates from the 12th century and is now a private house (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)
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