During the late 1960s and early 1970s the Commune Movement was an umbrella organisation for people interested in living communally. It was run from a crumbling farmhouse in rural Wales which was home to the Selene Community. Named after the ancient Greek moon goddess, the community itself was seeking to revive paganism and members were sometimes sighted walking naked in the fields.

The leading light of Selene, and the wider Commune Movement, was Tony Kelly, who produced Communes magazine from the farmhouse (examples here). The magazine, which had more than 2,000 subscribers, was meticulously designed and elegant in a rustic sort of way: all its text was produced on a typewriter rather than a typesetting machine.

Such was the importance attached to its appearance that one non-essential design choice - to have the text justified (with even margins on both left and right) - more than doubled the typing time. To justify text on a typewriter it had to be typed twice: once to work out how much space would be needed between words to fill out the line, and a second time, more slowly, carefully spacing out the words.

I visited Selene during a hiking trip in Wales sometime around 1970 and was surprised to find that the "community" consisted of only three people: Kelly, his wife Betty (who he continually bad-mouthed) and a young woman called Josie who had previously lived at a commune in Scotland founded by the folk singer Donovan.

I stayed a couple of days and saw no nudity apart from bare feet. On the second day they invited me to join them on a shopping trip to Carmarthen, the nearest town. I declined when they said they were all going barefoot and expected me to do the same.

They got some money from renting out land for grazing but relied mostly on sockness benefit (Kelly described himself as schizoid). According to one account, Kelly was too busy with the magazine to develop the commune properly and and it eventually fizzled out. After that, Kelly focused more on paganism and he became a founder of the Pagan Movement in Britain and Ireland.

- BW

The farmhouse where Communes magazine and the related movement were based.