Rolf Gardiner was involved for a while in the Morris revival, and certainly had strong links with the pre-war extreme Right. He was never an officer of the (all male) Morris Ring (he did speak at a couple of meetings), if my recollection of the interminable and sometimes strident correspondence on the subject in English Dance and Song during the '80s and '90s is accurate, and after a while he wandered off into Ruralism and neo-Paganism (Odinism, I think, but I could be wrong about that). In the 1930s, a great many people dabbled in various mixtures of nazism and fascism, into which all sorts of otherwise innocent things like paganism, Morris dancing and even nudism were often dragged, until the cold light of reality intervened. Sharp himself was not guilty of this.

Although, like us all, he had his share of faults, I wouldn't characterise Sharp as particularly misogynist -though it has been fashionable to accuse him of all sorts of things in the past, his political leanings were more-or-less Christian Socialist- and he died ten years before the foundation in 1934 of the Morris Ring. His famous falling-out with Mary Neal was a conflict of personalities, not sexes. Georgina Boyes has done valuable work (and Step Change is very much worth consulting), but I can't help but feel that her attitude to Sharp is distorted by her political viewpoint, as was Dave Harker's. To an extent, the anti-Sharp stance was a typical iconoclastic reaction against the unqualified admiration of his followers (in particular, his biographer, Maud Karpeles), but he is beginning to be re-evaluated. There does seem to be some way yet to go before a properly objective assessment is arrived at, but see for example Mike Yates' article, Cecil Sharp in America at the Musical Traditions website.