Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst founded the Dartington Hall Trust, after they purchased the Dartington Hall Estate in 1925.
They bought it as a home, for themselves, where they would stay for most of their lives, and for the remarkable ‘Dartington experiment’ that they were to create.
Leonard Elmhirst
Leonard, born in 1893, and the son of a rural parson, came from a land-owning family in Yorkshire. Their estate had been much reduced, and their fortunes and income had declined.
After a time at Cambridge, Leonard was declared unfit for military service, and went to India to do missionary work – he had briefly thought of following his father into the Church.
In 1919 he went to Cornell University in the USA to study modern farming techniques, which could be used in India. While there he met Dorothy, then a young widow, whose late husband, Willard Straight, had also studied at Cornell. In America he also met Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali writer and social reformer who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
After graduating from Cornell in 1921 Leonard returned to India to work as Tagore’s Secretary. He travelled the world with him and created a department for rural reconstruction, (now a University) on a Tagore family estate at Santiniketan in Bengal near the radical school that was Tagore’s own venture.
These experiences in India, and the abiding influence of Tagore, were to shape Leonard’s vision for the Dartington experiment a few years later.
Dorothy Whitney (Straight/ Elmhirst)
Born in 1887, she was the daughter of the multi-millionaire William C Whitney, and was related by family marriage to the Vanderbilts. However, great wealth did not ensure an easy childhood. Her mother died when she was six, and her father when she was seventeen.
In 1911 Dorothy married the diplomat Willard Straight, and they lived in Peking (Beijing). They had a new house built on Fifth Avenue in New York for their return. During the First World War Willard served in France, but died of influenza in the great epidemic of 1918. Dorothy was then a young widow with three small children, Whitney, Beatrice and Michael. She was also immensely rich, clever, energetic and committed to a wide range of radical and progressive causes.
Elmhirst sharing a chair on the Great Lawn at Dartington" title="Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst at Dartington" class="Rimage" />
Together
Having met at Cornell, and having conducted a courtship partly by correspondence from around the globe, Leonard and Dorothy were married in April 1925. The US press spoke of the marriage of ‘one of the world’s wealthiest women’ to ‘ son of English clergyman’. Determined to find a base for their educational, social and rural experiment, modelled on Tagore’s example, they had already bought the Dartington Estate, then in a state of considerable dereliction.
They began at once with repairs and reconstruction, supervised by the architect William Weir, and then began to build new properties on the Estate. These were necessary for the new ventures. From the beginning there were farming and forestry projects, ventures including sawmills, textiles and a dairy- all designed to create employment in a then impoverished area- the development of the arts and their biggest project, the creation of a school. The Dartington Hall School set out to be one of the most radical schools in the world, with a then unusual emphasis on the needs of the individual pupils and on learning practical skills by working with farmers and estate workers. The school was to become an exemplar of progressive education for more than sixty years.
Within a few years Dartington was not only a centre of educational and agricultural experiment, but was also a magnet for artists and musicians from around the world, creating an extraordinary centre of creative activity.
Much of today’s activity at Dartington can be traced to these early initiatives. Click here for more about the Trust’s current work.
Leonard and Dorothy had two children, Ruth and William. Ruth’s daughter, Kate, is on the Board of Trustees.
Dorothy died at Dartington in 1968. Following her death Leonard married Susanna Isaacs in 1972. He spent his final years with her in the USA, and died in 1974.
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The Dartington Hall Trust is a registered charity no. 279756. Company no. 1485560. Registered Office: The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL United Kingdom. Telephone 01803 847000; Fax 01803 847007;