Dartington
There are some place-names that resonate – fictional ones like Manderley, made famous in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’, or Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead: or actual ones like Tintagel, known for the Arthurian connections, or Iona, a unique and holy island. All these names have a kind of magic quality – not always totally benign, as in Manderley, or peaceful, but a quality of legend and translucence. Dartington often has that kind of numinous feeling for many people who know it: when the Music Summer School is living there for five weeks in the summer, and the music pours out of every window as you walk through the courtyard and groups play, dance and sing outside: or you wander at the top of the formal gardens created by Dorothy Elmhirst and can see the medieval town of Totnes lying in the valley, or through the rolling fields with their splendid ancient hedgerows to the edge of Dartmoor in the distance: or you learn within the heady ambiance of a course at Schumacher College, once the Parsonage of Dartington Church, of the more-than-human world, the wonder of Gaia and the threats to her, at so many levels.
Dartington Hall has for eighty years attempted an experimental community of living which has involved land, countryside, people of the area, art, music, literature, ideas and values, education of people of people of all ages, based on many enterprises of building, crafts, farming, manufacture, employment which have sustained the whole enterprise. Admittedly, it was only possible in the first place because of Dorothy Elmhirst’s extraordinary wealth – her “purse” as it was known – but it continues to this day as a prototype of a human community living relatively consciously within its landscape, its diverse and flourishing area, where both nature and people are enhanced immeasurably by the contact with each other. The story isn’t without many human errors, as one would expect, but it is to be admired for its attempt, in Leonard Elmhirst’s words, to enable people “to live more abundantly” so we are “happy inside and happy with people and nature in the outer world” (letter, 205 ED).
Why might we in Greenspirit be interested in such an enterprise? To me it seems that, surrounded as we are by fear and wars in the world, great inequality in the very possibility of living abundantly among humans and other species, destruction of our habitat, we NEED to have models where there can be community, access to intellectual and artistic resources within a small area, beauty, and a care for the land and all species. ‘The News’ is after all written by professional journalists who on the whole believe that people want to hear about threatening things and so chose, out of all the billions of things happening on the planet, those events that alarm: apart from the news-sheet Positive News, the only access we generally have is to Bad News. But don’t we need also to hear of models of how we could live, if we had vision? Places like Findhorn, Dartington and other alternative communities, are an important reminder that another kind of world is possible, based on values that are intrinsically spiritual and hopefully ecological.
This is the story of how Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst felt when they first saw Dartington in 1925. Leonard, who hunted for their future home with his sister Irene, had already told estate agents with houses for sale in the West Country, that first and foremost he wanted somewhere beautiful (103 ED). Michael Young describes the discovery as follows:-
“At last Leonard found his way in. He crept in bottom gear along a little cutting over a brook, and then up the hill and to his first view of the courtyard. It was like falling in love at first sight: he knew he need look no further. On his return he wrote to Dorothy on the Friday: ‘In we went and up and down some wonderful hills till we pulled up in a veritable fairy land – in winter too – what it would be like in spring or summer or autumn I dare not imagine. I wanted to kneel and worship the beauty of it all and every fresh vista only seemed the more to recommend the handiwork of nature joined with the reverent hand of generations of men….unlimited farm buildings with roofs and windows and doors like a fairy land, and such farmer folk, and the garden and the trees you must see for yourself, the orchards, the river and the boathouse and all the nine-tenths which remain unexplored….’ ” (6 March 1925)
Dorothy and Leonard married a month and a half later on April 25 at Dorothy’s home in the USA. Leonard was 31, Dorothy 38. After their honeymoon they lost no time in coming to Devon and went back for Dorothy’s first view of Dartington on May 30th. Her diary reads – “To Totnes by car – thence Dartington – all morning in the place. Too heavenly” – though she added later “interior difficult”. They went for service at Exeter Cathedral on the Sunday, and when she returned to their hotel she “wept idiotically”. (108 ED). They bought the estate as quickly as possible, and set to work the vision that had been growing between them.
That this vision lasted is well illustrated by a letter Dorothy wrote to her close friend Margaret Isherwood over twenty years later: “Jerry(as Leonard was known to members of his family) and I rush out whenever we can to have a fresh look at the beauty of it all” (27 April 1947). That this whole enterprise has been about beauty and spirit is clear from their personal writings which are held in the Dartington Archives.
Dartington Hall was already charismatic when they discovered it. It was built as an unfortified manor house/castle on top of a hill, in the midst of an estate in the fourteenth century, by John Holand, half-brother to Richard ll, a rather notorious King of England. The white hart on a red rose has been the symbol of Dartington from the beginning. After several owners, the estate was bought by the Champernowne family in 1559 who owned it until its sale in 1925. It was then in a very poor state of repair. The roof of the Great Hall was missing, the courtyard was in a sad condition. For some time at the beginning of their life there, the Elmhirsts lived in the medieval Old Parsonage, which is now Schumacher College, and which was in a much better state of repair than the Hall itself.
What was the vision the Elmhirsts had for Dartington, and lived, involving literally thousands of other people, over the next forty years? Leonard Elmhirst had developed a sense of community from his own Yorkshire background, but more particularly from several visits to India, both during the first World War and then in the early 1920s to Rabindranath Tagore’s school at Sriniketan which had a model of education that greatly influenced him and subsequently Dartington: to Tagore “education was nothing without the arts; he was poet, musician, dramatist and painter long before he was a teacher”, and this awareness, together with his deep sense of spirit and community, provided a spark which was to make Dartington’s education childcentred and based on imagination first and foremost – ‘to open wide the mind’s caged door’. This, combined with his very practical training at Cornell University in agriculture, was to provide the basis for the rest of Leonard’s life and vision.
He married a remarkable woman in Dorothy, who was already a widow with three children when he met her, and an heiress and someone who was determined to use the money to help make a better world. She also had a sense of a search for meaning throughout her life, though she regarded this as a very private search. Dorothy was a highly educated woman, becoming an expert on literature, particularly Shakespeare: and she too had a vision of a different world, a more benign one, which could be sensitive and expansive, practical and yet innovative, open and exciting. In their Outline of 1926,which was an educational plan for Dartington based on Dewey, Rousseau, and other educational establishments springing up in the 1920s, they indicated that the quickening of the spirit is one with the great mystery of life. Their vision was a universalist one, one they were anxious to share: – “in everything we have attempted at Dartington we have endeavoured to secure that element of universality which would make such discoveries as we made there be applicable, in principle at any rate, to any other part of the planet.” (102 ED). They wanted to change the world, and they had more resources than most of us have, to do so. They weren’t of course always universally popular with the local people – their values were often at odds with a conservative rural Devon, and they had spectacularly too much money in comparison with the local population – that relationship has varied much over the eighty years.
Leonard and Dorothy have been dead now for over 30 years. There were a lot of things we might criticise now in their modus operandi – the patriarchy and class system, the hierarchy of the place, but there was so much too to admire. When they died, Dartington was already a Charity, and it has struggled since then under leaders with different agendas, conflicts of visions and a shortage of money, having huge responsibilities – buildings, farms, several hundred employees – and no “purse” when Dorothy was no longer there. But much is rising again now, with more likelihood of an ecological sense because of Schumacher College’s installation in 1990, because different parts of it like Schumacher College have grown and bring in finances independently, as does Research in Practice and Dartington Plus which once again initiates music and the arts inside Dartington year round and in the local community of the West Country. And there is a renewed sense of coherence and inspiration in its values, now more clearly spelled out by the Trustees and new management.
So what could Dartington say to us now about a different way of living? One absolutely basic thing is the primacy of land for the way of life, which is clearer to us in the country than the town. There are two farms on the estate – and there used to be several more outside the central area. The principles and values for farming are only just becoming more organic – indeed ironically some of the earliest intensive farming in England was introduced at Dartington in the mid 1920s because of Leonard’s wish to regenerate rural prosperity. Now there are plans to develop more experimentally again – there is a beautiful Forest Garden of two acres developed by Martin Crawford: there have been several experiments in organic horticulture, and people are being encouraged to develop plans for alternative uses of the land. There are some wellknown organic and biodynamic farms and gardens in the local area. Hedgerows are being replanted and developed, and some of extensive tree plantations are reverting to a more natural woodland. Dartington Hall garden itself is a famous classical and beautiful sight, surrounding the Hall itself, and linking in the buildings, the more cultivated area and the countryside around, with every few yards a new perspective. There is now ecological work on the estate, using volunteers as well as paid staff to facilitate conditions for wildlife – of which there is plenty, from deer, to otters, to many species of birds and plants. Devon is rich in mini-climates: Dartington is surrounded by the river Dart with water being constantly renewed from Dartmoor, with its deep brown peaty colour,
In human terms, there have from the beginning been dramatically different nests of education, at every level. Now there is a kindergarten, a childcentred primary school, a College of Arts, Schumacher College and many conferences and courses. The most famous part of its system, the progressive Dartington School, was closed about twenty years ago but the building, Foxhole, lives on. It’s not difficult to imagine the scenes of the thirties at the school when you’re there – Bill Curry the headteacher in his architect built house and his open system of teaching, the unconstrained children swimming naked in the river, the experiments in learning, the excitement, the influence of the East, the suspicion of the local Church.
Music, art and drama continue: Ways with Words is now an annual event to which we all look forward with 200 authors there to speak to their published books. There’s a theatre cum cinema with no advertisements in a converted medieval barn. It is of course largely middle class but open to the whole countryside and to everyone on the estate. It’s a community, where you see people day by day, week by week, in all sorts of circumstances and where life really can be lived abundantly, and people recognised, and you feel part of something significant, part of a greater whole: small enough to be familiar, large enough to be full of diversity. Isn’t this the way humans are supposed to live together on (David Abram would say ‘in’) the land?
Sources.
The Archives at High Cross House,
http://www.dartington.org
Michael Young: The Elmhirsts of Dartington. 1996. The Dartington Hall Trust.
Jean Hardy. Paper: A True Recognition of Dartington. 2004.