The Elmhirsts of Dartington

Michael Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000761580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Biografías educativas

Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst were the founders of Dartington - she the daughter of an American millionaire who was once Secretary to the US Navy; he the son of a Yorkshire parson and secretary to Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal before he married Dorothy. They were the twentieth century's most substantial private patrons of architecture in England as well as of the arts and education.

Dartington School was one of the most famous experimental schools in the world. Bertrand Russell sent his children there, as did Aldous Huxley and the Freuds. Dartington College of Arts and its associated Summer School of Music were equally famous in the world of the arts. Bernard Leach taught pottery, Mark Tobey painting, and Imogen Holst music. The Amadeus Quartet was formed there. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were frequent performers.

In a setting of great beauty, school and college belonged to a general experiment in rural reconstruction. Dartington Glass was made in the Devonshire countryside and exported world-wide. So were Dartington Textiles, Dartington Furniture and Dartington Pottery. This book, originally published in 1982 (and reissued in 1996), describes how a unique combination of education, arts, industry and agriculture came to be put together.

The result was one of the hardiest Utopian communities of modern times. It eventually overcame the strong local opposition to such a daring undertaking. The author finds the origins of modern Dartington in the founders' hopes that mankind would be liberated through education; that a new flowering of the arts would transform a society impoverished by industrialisation and secularisation; and that a society seeking to draw together town and country would combine the best of both worlds. This book is an extraordinary memoir of two people and the place they made.

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

People often ask — if a boarding school, why an estate? If a well-run estate, why a school? Or an arts department?

Faith and Works, 1937

Visitors coming for the first time can drive off the road from London at Buckfastleigh and miss altogether the first indication that they have arrived at Dartington. Only if they take their eyes off the car ahead will they notice a grim stone church standing on its own, with hardly a house in sight, as if some nineteenth-century ecclesiastical planner absent-mindedly stuck it down on paper without venturing out of his deanery; and only if they slow down sufficiently might they see, almost hidden by grasses, the small blue signpost leaning drunkenly to one side:

DARTINGTON HALL TRUST

← COLLEGE OF ARTS

← SCHOOL

Parking in the church car park and continuing on foot they will see a rounded hill topped by a collar of trees and then half a mile away over the top of the bank a sawmill gantry and by its side a box-like building, surely twentieth-century. White. In Devon old buildings are grey. On the left there is an old one in the right colour, very strung out. In the car park for that, labelled OLD POSTERN, are four orange kayaks and a boy pumping up tyres.

Through the trees to the right of the road, on an escarpment, stands another large building, looking from this distance like a very overgrown house except that it has a square clock-tower with a clock that always says twenty past ten. Not factory, nor office; it must be the school or the college. Fields of rich green are broken by sharp lines of red earth where one of the fields has been ploughed, the only animals Friesian cows like cardboard cut-outs with all their heads held down to the same angle against the grass, all pointing in the same direction. Men in Mini Metros and women with round faces on puttering Hondas, as they get up speed for the hill, force the pedestrians into the hedge. A small girl walks cautiously holding her violin case on the hedge side, away from the traffic.

Another architectural puzzle lies on the right-hand side, a little like a ship set in concrete, white again, with long slit windows almost the whole length of a wall, not to look out of because they are too high for that, but to let light in. Its size suggests luxury; so does the ostentatious absence of anything that could be thought of as decoration. Again, not a Devon style. This is an idea dating from the era when houses were machines for living in. Such machines were never cheap.

From the top of the hill, looking back, a distant silhouette of Dartmoor. Ahead the road forks before descending. Going one way there is a gate. Whatever is hidden behind it can only be approached on foot around the side of a stone pillar past a notice which says ‘Trail Users. These are the Hall and Gardens. To return to the Cider Press please retrace your route.’ The garden, which is what it turns out to be, is an unusual one, in the shape of an immense irregular amphitheatre. Beyond the gate the ground falls away at first gently and then more precipitately, down a series of terraces like a stepped green waterfall. At the bottom is an expanse of lawn and, rising up again on the other side, more terraces leading to a line of soft grey buildings which are the focus from every point of view. With its high arched windows, this must be the Hall itself, flanked on the left by another church tower. The old drive is serpentine, following the contours, and so are the walks wherever they can escape from the pressure to straighten themselves to the command of the rectangular terraces and the buildings. William Kent, the landscape architect who made other gardens in other places, said that nature abhorred a straight line.^1* This garden masks the hand of man. Come around any corner, sit on any of the many garden seats, and there again are the buildings seen through a lace-work of tree branches, over the tops of magnolias or around the sides of rhododendrons. On a fine day in summer the garden is peopled, by a man with a whirring motor mower, boys with bamboo rakes shaped like fans, other boys with yellow plastic tanks on their backs spraying ground elder with weed-killer, visitors moving slowly along the many paths, and what are presumably college students rehearsing plays or practising dances.

* This and all other numbers in the text refer to the sources and notes listed at the end of the book.

The verticals are the abundant trees. A garden of trees as much as of plants — on the top terrace gnarled Spanish chestnuts, their trunks strengthened with pitch; four tall London planes stepping down the other terraces; a statuesque Monterey pine; an evergreen oak with skirts as enclosing as a hovercraft’s. The dominant colour, green, is all the more pervasive because there are so many shades of it. Other colours are in clumps, cherries in the spring, then azaleas and magnolias, rhododendrons later, then roses and hydrangeas, always planted together. One colour alone is constant through the seasons, the bright red of the flag which flies above the Hall. The wire snapping against the flagpole in the wind sounds from all over the garden like a giant jackdaw.

It is hardly a surprise in such a place to find so much sculpture: a half-reclining woman looking out over the garden with Henry Moore’s mark on her, a statue of Flora bearing a plaque ‘For Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst from the Community of Dartington on Foundation Day 1967’, two granite swans and a bronze donkey, a small semi-circular temple rather like a mausoleum engraved with the names of all the Trustees at the time it was built.

Penetrate further, around the back of the Hall, and there is a large medieval courtyard, with buildings of the same grey stone surrounding a cobbled oval drive and lawns out of which grow more cherries, two Scots pines, a Florida cypress, and where there are dozens more students of all ages. Up the steps under the clock tower there is a wooden door.

Half expecting a room of ordinary size, the vastness of the Great Hall is an immediate surprise. How large is it? There is almost no way of telling because none of the ready reckoners of size — ordinary window or table, chair or bed — are there to give scale. It swims all the more because there is such a ‘boundless wash of light’,² on the one side from the three arched windows which can be seen from so many points in the garden and on the other from the four which let in light from the courtyard. The bare walls are whitewashed. They rise from wooden floors, and at one end from a dais in front of an ox-long fireplace, on and up to the oak timbers of the roof.

The eight richly-coloured heraldic shields on the carved angels under the hammer beams of the Hall bear the arms of the successive owners of Dartington Hall. There is a notice to say so. Before Richard II there are three shields, for the Saxon Lady Beorgwyn³ who dates to the ninth century at a time when South Devon was liable to be raided by parties of the West Welsh from Cornwall; for Robert Martin and his heirs from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries; and for Lord Audley in the fourteenth. Then come the Plantagenet shields of Richard II and of his half-brother, Sir John Holand, Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter. Richard’s badge — a chained white hart on a red rose — decorates a central boss in the vaulting of the porch tower. After the royal pair others held the land for comparatively short times until the Champernowne family who owned it from 1560 to 1925. Finally, for modern times not one shield but two for the joint founders of modern Dartington, Dorothy Payne Whitney and Leonard Knight Elmhirst. No space for any successor.

As well as the shields there are eight banners. They were woven from wool by Elizabeth Peacock to represent the main departments of the Dartington estate as they were in the 1930s at the time the banners were made. A pattern of white wings for poultry; great blocks of stone for building; tree trunks and green branches for woodlands; suggestions of spinning and weaving for textiles; rays of light falling through fruit trees for orchards; upspringing golden corn for farms, and for the central office a net holding many and various elements together. Against the back wall, presiding jointly over the whole, rise Education represented by a range of hills rising to a far horizon and the Arts by figures also mounting to some heavenly summit.

Our visitors might be able to piece together a little more by using their eyes alone. But to find out what is happening inside the buildings they would either have to enter them one by one and talk to people or consult the records. Then they would find that the Dartington Hall Trust, despite that notice by the church referring only to a college and a school, owns a textile mill, a glass factory (Dartington Glass, at Torrington in North Devon), a furniture and joinery works, a number of shops, a substantial share in a large building contractor, farms, woodlands, a horticultural department and of course the promised college and school. The Trust, directly or through its companies, employs about 850 people. There are in addition nearly 300 students and nearly 300 pupils. It owns 2,000 acres of farm and amenity land and 1,200 acres of woods. The annual turnover is about £14 million. Even though the elements are no longer the same as in the banners, it is still a strange mixture, like the architecture.

How did it all come about? This book tries to sketch an answer. It is a memoir of a kind, and inevitably a personal one since the Elmhirsts were part of my life from 1929 when I came to the school as a pupil until they died. I have been a Trustee, for many years with them, for many years without them, since 1942. Detachment is something I have no claim to. The book is a memoir of them and also of the institution which they made, or suffered to be made.

Dorothy recognised that personal and institutional were so much fused they could not be separated. She said:⁴

The story ot Dartington is no longer my personal story. It is the chronicle of a great common effort on the part of many others, fired by Leonard’s imagination. At the start, it was an act of faith on our part to take over an old estate in a rural area, being at that time rapidly depopulated, and to believe that we could transform it into an active centre of life. And life with many facets. For we never intended to make Dartington an economic experiment merely, concentrating mainly on farming and forestry and rural industry. From the beginning we envisaged something more — a place where education could be continuously carried on and where the arts could become an integral part of the life of the whole place. We believed that not only should we provide for the material wellbeing of our people here but for their cultural and social needs as well. And in our dream of the good life we counted on the human values of kindliness and friendship to bind the community together. We hoped that in this way a certain quality of life and human relationships would emerge, relatively free from fear and competition. If any of these aims have been realised it is largely through finding the right people to help us and entrusting them with responsibility. As the place has grown and developed over the years it is to these countless others that we offer our grateful thanks.

‘Relatively free from fear and competition’ — I would emphasise that.

In the course of writing I have had the sense that how much I can say depends on how much the Elmhirsts will allow me to say. I lost any assurance I had almost as soon as I embarked on the book. I realised then how little I knew of those whom I thought I knew so well. I did not know about their lives before they entered mine in 1929, except anecdotally, and I did not know very much after that either. The letters, the records, the impressions gathered from people who also knew them in different contexts and with different angles of vision from mine or who had some expert quality in one or other ‘department’ of their lives that was denied to me — all diminished my own claim to know them.

What then do I mean when I say that how much I can tell of them depends on them? They are not alive and so cannot obviously give me permission to say this or that, or refuse it, any more than I can go to Dorothy and say ‘I am puzzled why as a child you lived with your Uncle’. But I am writing the book in their house, in the room below Leonard’s study. The footsteps I sometimes hear above me could be theirs. They are not banished as inhabitants of the place just because they are dead.

What they allowed of themselves to be impressed on paper is what I have to go on. Leonard appears very tolerant. He left a lot of himself behind. Dorothy, born in Washington, the daughter of- a man later expected to be the Democratic candidate for President, born, that is, to a kind of public life, on a public stage, was almost the opposite. She was secretive in life, and perhaps wanted to be in death. I wondered whether she was saying ‘Don’t write about me. I do not want it’, and whether I should stop. But gradually snippets appeared like the notes written in the Bahamas about the tears she shed there when she remembered her mother dying. She has not completely hidden herself.

Another way of putting the question is to ask it in another way — how much will the part of them that is in me allow me to say? They are me, or a little part of me, and have therefore formed the attitude which, even if I cannot define it, will inevitably influence what I select about them as being in some way significant.

There is plenty to select from. People who live in large houses do not have to throw things away. They can hoard paper and objects which others of more modest means would discard. Leonard and Dorothy lived, when younger at least, in an age when letter-writing took up a part of almost every day. There was no telephone, and when it was introduced their first number, Totnes 8, was used far less than its modern counterpart is today. Leonard and Dorothy retained the habit of letter-writing until the end of their lives and filed the letters they received. Leonard’s parents devotedly kept the letters he wrote to them, and these found their way to Dartington from the family home at Elmhirst, near Barnsley in Yorkshire. Dorothy’s correspondence, notebooks and diaries for the period of her life up to 1925 are divided between Cornell University, where her first husband studied architecture, and Dartington.

After 1925 most of their letters, except to each other and to family and close friends, were no longer handwritten but typed by secretaries. Every morning Leonard would be in his study after breakfast promptly at 9 a.m. to read the incoming mail, with Dorothy next door in the Morning Room, which was her sitting-room. Like joint managing directors they kept the doors between the rooms open so they could think together, bringing each other the odd letter or having a little discussion about something which had just been thrown up by the morning mail. Leonard would shut his door only when he was about to start dictating. After that was over he, and Dorothy, could devote the rest of the day to other things, without having their time fragmented by the telephone. External communication was reserved for the beginning of the day.

The Records Room is in what used to be their private house, which has no front door, being all mixed up with administrative offices, as it was when they were alive. The Tudor beams are still in the low ceiling, although the house was extensively remodelled in the eighteenth century. The leaded casement windows look out over the garden which became such an absorbing interest for both of them. About 800 Records boxes are installed on shelves covering its walls. Leonard’s boxes number about 500, containing over 100 million words by and about him; Dorothy’s about 80 and Dartington departmental boxes about 220.

As well as letters Leonard wrote extended essays on several periods of his life before 1925, often drawing on the diaries he kept at the time. Some of these have found their way into print, as an introduction to A Freshman’s Diary,⁵ his brother Willie’s diary at Oxford in 1911—12; The Straight and Its Origin,⁶ Leonard’s account of his two years at Cornell University from 1919 to 1921; and Poet and Plowman,⁷ about his work in India with Rabindranath Tagore in 1921 and 1922. The quotations I have put at the head of each chapter are taken from three Dartington publications — from the Outline of an Educational Experiment (1926), from the Prospectus (1926) or from Faith and Works at Dartington (1937). They were each written by, or in collaboration with, the Elmhirsts.

Many people have been extremely generous with their time and knowledge. Devoted work has been done by Anthea Williams as my assistant and by Robin Johnson, the Dartington archivist, who has made the Records Room bear fruit for me as for others. Without their skill and patient work I could not have managed at all. Marjorie Fogden shared an office with me throughout and was unfailingly helpful. The Dartington and Elmgrant Trusts gave support which enabled the work to be done, and individual Trustees — Maurice Ash, Ruth Ash, Sir Alec Clegg, Alfred (Pom) Elmhirst, John Lane, Peter Sutcliffe and Christopher Zealley — freely discussed my interpretations with me, without necessarily agreeing with them. Michael Straight gave me most valuable comments, as did Mary Bride Nicholson and John Wales....