How a hippy commune’s bucolic bliss was torn aside by a stranger

Moving home is always hell, but as Simon Fairlie, Jasmine Hills and Jon Hill discovered, when you’ve been thrown out of your happy hippy commune after months of bitter arguments about stolen cider bottles, tool maintenance and scything, the logistics are especially challenging.

‘Fifty trailer loads!’ cries Simon. ‘We had to move everything. Everything!’

Four cows – Taffy, Conchita, Coco and ­Follie. Two pigs – Jelly and Biscuit, named after Jelly Roll Morton and the band ­Biscuit Town – ‘we always give them a jazz or blues theme’. An entire haystack. ‘That was at least five trailer loads.’

A lot of rusty farm machinery. Piles of tools. Plants. Gardening equipment. Milk urns. At least five water butts. A large freezer containing a lot of frozen sausages – from last year’s jazz pigs. An impressive array of specialist Austrian scythes. 

‘Did you know Austria is the global centre for scythe making?’ says Simon, an enthusiastic scythe user and teacher. And a scattering of unsatisfactory tents and makeshift shelters for the three of them to sleep in.

‘This is not quite where I envisaged being at this stage of my life,’ says Simon, 73, a veteran commune dweller and former editor of The Ecologist magazine, as we sit around a very smoky fire, waiting patiently for the giant metal kettle to boil. ‘Having to start from scratch again. Build up a whole new community. It’s rather daunting.’

It doesn’t help that, beautiful though their 20-acre home in Devon is, there are no buildings here. ‘We don’t want to show you our sleeping arrangements, because they’re not as we’d like them to be,’ he says. Or power. Or even, until Jon fixed it up this week, water.

And it must pall a bit that their last home – along with about a dozen other permanent residents and a few volunteers – was Monkton Wyld Court, a Grade II-listed neo-Gothic rectory in Dorset surrounded by 11 acres of farmland and micro dairy that, through a ­charity, had operated as a sustainable commune for more than 80 years.

Simon ran the farm and the micro dairy – producing 8,000 litres of milk a year, cheese, butter and yoghurt. Jon was his assistant, Jasmine head gardener. The community lived in stables, yurts and vans and, at the weekends and in the holidays, ran events in the main house to pay the bills including yoga, life drawing, scything workshops – surprisingly popular – cheese making and even the odd orgy. (‘They were fantastically well organised,’ says Simon.)

Frankly, they couldn’t believe their luck. ‘Oh it was just perfect. So beautiful,’ says Jasmine.

They’d been there for years. Simon for 13 and Jasmine and Jon, five and four respectively.

Until early last year – with the arrival of a new resident called Stephen Williams, it all started unravelling in a blizzard of disagreements, allegations and counter allegations – many directed at Simon, Jasmine and Jon.

From missing milk to the management style of the commune, to stolen cider ­bottles – ‘I paid for them!’ says Jon, 38, who has a magnificent thatch of blond floppy hair and is still hopping mad and threatening to sue for harassment and distress: ‘I’ll need to fund-raise for that, of course.’

A petrol lawnmower went missing. ‘Yes, of course, we hid it! We’d been scything the land for years and they bought a mower in!’ says Simon in horror. A pint glass was allegedly thrown in The Reluctant Volunteer – the commune pub. Someone got their head bashed by a door. Jasmine’s brother, Jared, was accused of trespassing. Locks appeared on doors for the first time ever. And a dry-stone wall was left unfinished with tools strewn about. ‘That was a real sign,’ says Simon.

‘At one stage the police were being called constantly – often multiple times a day! says Jon. ‘I think they got rather tired of it.’

I bet they did because the callouts all sounded rather silly and a crazy waste of taxpayers’ money.

But things spiralled when Simon was accused of stealing the commune’s 22-year-old Honda – a car he claims he’d spent thousands maintaining. ‘I never thought the police would take it seriously.’ 

But they did. Simon was arrested, charged, bailed, given a restraining order and forbidden from speaking to Stephen, even though they were living in the same commune, which made things a bit tricky. Until, eventually, the whole sorry Honda battle ended up in Weymouth Magistrates Court, and Simon and, separately, six other long-term residents were given their marching orders.

‘It was such a wonderful place. It was our home. We are still in shock,’ they say sadly.

I’m not surprised. It is peaceful here with the pigs snuffling and the cows mooching, but it’s also hilly, exposed, very windy and I wouldn’t want to spend a night here past September.

But first, let’s rewind to early 2023, when a new set of trustees took over the charitable trust, didn’t seem to approve of the way things were being run and promptly changed the remit of the trust to beef things up a bit commercially (without consulting the Charities Commission).

Stephen arrived at about the same time, hoping to become a permanent member of the community. ‘We weren’t sure, because he was a bit pushy,’ says Jasmine. ‘With a quick temper. And he had clearly never lived in an ‘intentional community’ before.’

‘Apparently he used to work at a paintball centre!’ says Simon darkly. But it was a tricky balance, because he had the skills they needed for essential works to maintain the big house. And so, after three months, they extended his probation, hoping he might start to embrace commune life.

Sadly not. It turned out that he had already lodged a litany of complaints about Simon, including bullying. The new trustees took Stephen’s complaints very seriously and didn’t seem to want to hear from Simon & Co. ‘We gave them an incredibly well-documented list, but they just weren’t interested!’ he says.

Instead, Simon’s farm tenancy was terminated. And in June, Jon was given his notice too, for supporting Simon – as were several others. Then Jasmine was told to lay down her hoe and stop work in the kitchen garden.

‘After five years, to be told to down tools! I went into shock for a month. I was in bits,’ she says. It was about then that one of the new trustees bought the ­mower in – the final straw for some.

‘We were very upset about that. They just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the way we lived.’

Unlike Stephen and the ­trustees, this lot are old hands at community living. So, presumably, they know that life in a ­commune is not all lentils and free love. It’s bloody hard work growing all your own food and milking cows, instead of just popping to Sainsbury’s – and waiting for 22 minutes for the kettle to boil over a smoky fire (yes, really).

And the relationships are even harder. Commune living attracts a particular sort of person. All of you thrust together, vulnerable to pettiness, politics and power struggles – clearly part of the problem here – along with the ­bitter cold of winters.

Simon has enjoyed an alternative lifestyle since 1968, when he dropped out of Cambridge much to the fury of his father – Henry, a notable journalist, who had an affair with Kingsley Amis’s then wife, Hilary.

Over the years, Simon has travelled, been an activist, pioneer of the road protest movement, a stonemason at Salisbury Cathedral and a scything instructor.

Sadly, this is not his first commune that ended badly. Before Monkton, he spent a decade at Tinker’s Bubble, a large commune in Somerset with a ‘no fossil fuel machinery’ policy – where he first discovered the joys of scything and argued a lot with the others about their approach to land management. All of which came to a sudden halt when his girlfriend hooked up with another resident and he had to leave.

Jasmine and Jon, meanwhile, have spent years travelling around the world, pausing for breath in communes as they go.

The great pity here is that, after the nightmare of the pandemic, it seems things were on the up at Monkton. ‘We’d had our best financial year ever,’ says Jasmine. ‘The scything festival alone attracted 5,000 visitors!’

On top of that, they tell me, they had hosted endless yoga retreats – ‘too many, so boring’, says Simon. But also rather more niche events. Including the weekends when the visitors dressed as clowns and a group of singers perched in trees around the estate and chanted. Not forgetting the orgy, of course.

‘We didn’t realise until they started asking for extra beds in the sitting room,’ says Simon. ‘But they were very helpful.’

Indeed, when one of Simon’s volunteers was taken ill after taking too much spice ­(synthetic cannabis), one medically- trained orgy participant kindly withdrew from the action to attend to him.

‘The rest were still at it ­hammer and tongs!’ he says.

Simon and his fellow rejects might have left Monkton Wyld, but they have not really moved on, reminiscing angrily.

They are making a documentary of the fallout – throughout my visit a cameraman called Anson is busy filming.

And, of course, when I spoke to Stephen – now manager of Monkton Wyld – he saw things very differently, explaining to me how Simon played God. How he’d been living on the farm rent free – other than providing the commune with milk and a few potatoes and onions – was making money on the side through his scything, and discouraged visitors so he could rule over everything.

Stephen says he and the current residents at Monkton now just want to move on, peacefully and harmoniously. Lord knows who is really to blame for what happened at Monkton over the past 18 months – Stephen, Simon or the new trustees. Or, more likely, all of them.

Even so, Simon has since been cleared of stealing the car.

But there’s no doubt that there wasn’t much love, kindness and friendship in this ­commune; that almost everyone behaved appallingly and that the Charity Commission hasn’t handled the whole ­debacle very well.

Meanwhile, back in Devon, Simon, Jasmine and Jon are putting a brave face on it.

In a few weeks, they have started a vegetable patch, penned in the pigs, scythed back mountains of nettles and brambles and have applied to Dartmoor National Park for permission to erect a barn so they can start their new ‘intentional community’.

Now they just need to find somewhere to live before the winter kicks in – and attract a few more community members. I think I’ll pass.