All about Eve

Dismissed as a crank in the late 1930s for her progressive views on farming, Lady Eve Balfour went on to co-found the Soil Association, says Sarah Langford

- Sarah Langford

OF all the experiments that Lady Eve Balfour undertook over the course of her long life, the one most likely to have baffled her neighbours was her investigation into whose urine was the most beneficial to compost: her own (alkaline) or that of her long-term companion, Kathleen Carnley (acidic). Lady Eve, however, did not much care what her neighbours thought. The woman who co-founded the Soil Association and pioneered an organic farming movement rarely minded being called a ‘crank’. After all, a crank—as she told the BBC’s Food Programme in 1989— was a small and useful, inexpensive instrument that causes revolutions.

Born in 1898 to Scottish nobility, Lady Eve was an unlikely revolutionary. Raised in a society that had few ambitions for her beyond marriage and family, at the age of 17, she became one of the first women to study for a diploma in agriculture. The daughter of a landed family and the niece of a prime minister, she led a successful revolt against the tithes farmers were obliged to pay. Ignoring the conventions of her time, she dressed in trousers when it was still taboo, lived companionably with women and men to whom she was not married, drove to agricultural shows in an adapted Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and learnt how to fly a Tiger Moth aeroplane. She also mostly lived in rundown houses, a horsedrawn gypsy caravan or on the road as she travelled the world visiting farms and giving speeches well into her eighties.