by Jane Brown
Mark Tobey was the most exciting teacher of drawing to children and adults, or anyone who wished to attend his class, for that was the Dartington way. ‘Mark did not teach by any ordinary standards, yet he taught everything, even by silence,’ observed Bernard Leach. ‘One fine day some of the class were missing, some were bent over their drawing boards, but their teacher was also missing – Mark entered quietly, stood in the open doorway, paused and said, “I too have been out for a stroll watching some of you move freely in the sun on the tennis-courts. Is there a piano? Play – now leave your boards – dance – let go! – That’s better – dance you emotionally tied up English! Now stand up and dance with your chalk on your drawing boards.” ’209
Tobey’s magnetism brought the thrill of creativity, a ‘buzz’ to life around the Courtyard. Bernard Leach had returned to teach in the pottery because Jane Fox-Strangways was unwell, eventually leaving his son David in charge. Dorothy’s largesse afforded a holiday trip to the Far East for Leach and Tobey, which allowed Leach to renew his friendship with Shoji Hamada and the Japanese craft potters who were his greatest inspirations. Richard Odlin travelled with them for a time and they collected fabulous Balinese puppets and oriental textiles for a growing collection at Dartington. It was Dorothy’s continued support of Bernard Leach which enabled him to write A Potter’s Book, which was to acquire biblical status for modern craft potters when it was published in 1940.
The arts thus gathered their own momentum. Dorothy’s way was to welcome newcomers as long as she found them inspirational teachers and they fitted temperamentally into the community’s ‘campus-style’ life. Quietly, however, she was running a rather different agenda with friends who came to stay as her house guests. One was Noel Brailsford, a left-leaning war correspondent whose interest in arms limitation and the causes of war had led him to her discussion groups at 1130 Fifth Avenue, and now – after another spell of travelling – he had found her at Dartington. He had given a winter series of lectures on ‘The World Today’ and she paid for his visit to the New School of Social Research in New York, and possibly also for his trip to India which resulted in his book Rebel India – controversial at the time for its anti-imperialist stance but now a classic. He became an affectionate sender of postcards from wherever he was in the world, and Dorothy was generous in her invitations to stay when he was in England. He brought the wood-engraver Clare Leighton in April 1931, having joyfully announced to Dorothy that they were married – he perhaps thought decorum was necessary even if it could not be as he was trapped in an unhappy marriage.210 Dorothy gained a friend in Clare Leighton and she owned at least two of her illustrations for Wuthering Heights, and also Breaking Camp.211
The liberated air of Dartington was attractive for lovers. The philosopher Gerald Heard, ‘pacifist intellectual’ friend of the Huxleys and Bertrand Russell, was a most frequent visitor during the 1930s, ‘grateful’, he said, ‘for what Dartington was doing for us two’. His significant other at that time was a young pianist named Christopher Wood, who found Dartington ‘the one civilized place in England’.212 Heard had been at Cambridge with Leonard, but it was his little book of 1924, Narcissus: an Anatomy of Clothes, that first attracted Dorothy. She was intrigued by his artful opening, ‘The Life Force is like a juggler; it is always contriving that we shall watch the hand with which the truth is not being done – and when we look back we realise that we were studying the symptoms and not the causes.’ Her copy is well thumbed; it is something of a guide to the undertones of life through the signals conveyed by costume, an actor’s stock in trade. Gerald became something between her sage and her confessor; she started a ‘Gerald’ notebook and wrote down his maxims, ‘Psychology is the science of the soul’, ‘self-examination and repentance are the first stages towards holiness’, these the clues to her yearnings.213 He persuaded her to find time for a daily meditation, and that her pursuit of self-knowledge would calm her fears about her past life and her present. Appointments with Gerald, friendly ‘psychiatric’ sessions, became regular reasons for her trips to London.
Heard also made a wider contribution to Dartington with his support of Leonard’s philosophy that the countryside must not be a museum, nor a ‘peasant’s reserve’, and its future economy needed careful planning – the framework of his article ‘The Dartington Experiment’ published in The Architectural Review in April 1934. Heard stepped perceptively from the rural economy to the quality of life in the countryside and the ‘real tragedy’ of its depletion:
The inventor, the artist, the men of ideas, originality and design, must not be let run off to the town studios, and there immure themselves in hermetically sealed groups and sets... the creative type must not be let evaporate, leaving the soil caked and hard – he must be retained as yeast in the leaven.214
Dorothy was grateful for this airing in the Review, their debut into the world of ideas via the liberally progressive minds of the paper’s readers. She harboured a quiet hurt at the lack of encouragement from people she admired, particularly Nancy Astor. Following a chance meeting in London she had written ‘My dear Nancy’, almost begging her to come down and see ‘more of what we are trying to do – you are not very clear I know’. Once more Nancy was too busy. Sensing this, Gerald Heard went on something of a crusade on Dartington’s behalf, telling his friends that ‘the structure of a complete philosophy of life’ might be found in this Devon valley. He brought Wystan Auden, then a teacher at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh.
Harold and Vita Nicolson were staying in the district ‘and want to know if they may come over?’ Harold was anxious to bring Oswald Mosley ‘to let him see that planning is already taking place in England’. Dorothy and Vita Sackville-West liked each other and – considering it was a long way from Dartington to Sissinghurst – their meetings had a rarity value and their lightweight friendship lasted for twenty years. Dorothy, who had already heard from Maynard and Lydia Keynes, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry and had enough imagination to suspect that Mrs Woolf might be in the offing, did not wish Dartington to become a Bloomsbury out-station like Garsington. They may live in country house style with silver salvers and breakfast-laden sideboards in their house, just as so many depictions in Country Life magazine, but this was for Leonard’s expectation, let alone the self-respect of her butler Thomas and the staff. Now she had discovered The Architectural Review – ‘the guide-book, totem and art object’ of the age – and the design revolution of the decade, and her tastes would change.215 Had her instinctive appreciation of the paintings of Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood led her into the fresh air of modernism – surely more fitting for her youth-oriented Arts Department at Dartington?
Jane Fox-Strangways had been her partner in crime. Jane had taught in her pottery for two years before her mental and physical health gave way, and in her frailty Jane became Dorothy’s companion, at least one afternoon a week set aside for ‘reading with Jane’. Jane’s artistry was turned to flower arranging in the manner of Gertrude Jekyll’s naturalism, at which she was brilliant, and to writing poetry.216 About once a fortnight they went to London on the train, and as Jane knew many of the young painters from her time in St Ives, she gave Dorothy her opinions as they went round the galleries together. Dorothy’s purchases extended to other members of the avant-garde Seven and Five Society, works by Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, David Jones and Barbara Hepworth. Prompted by the Review they went to the 1933 exhibition of contemporary design at Dorland Hall in Regent Street, where Dorothy discovered the work of the Russian émigré architect Serge Chermayeff. His clean-cut and ‘fitted’ interiors, furnished with geometric-patterned rugs by Marion Dorn, the newly dubbed ‘architect of floors’, had an immediate appeal. Dorothy felt that here was (at long last) the design complement to her own radicalism, her recognition of modern art as ‘a stimulation to living’ as Henry Moore had written in Circle.217 If one had to stiffen one’s sinews to participate in the Brave New World (Gerald’s friend Aldous Huxley’s novel was published in 1932) th
en it was as well to have le style sympathique.
Dorothy had leased a flat at 42 Upper Brook Street in Mayfair (the area known as Little America, as her compatriots’ clubs and societies gathered around the embassy in Grosvenor Square) which she commissioned Chermayeff to remodel. Behind the conventional sash windows, now masked with long gauze drapes, the flat became open-plan, with oak flooring and walnut veneer on the walls. The living-dining area, doubling as a meeting room, had sleek fitted sideboards and compartmented units on spindle legs for easy cleaning of the floor; the furniture was lightweight and there were wall mirrors reflecting uplighter lamps. The living room was warmed with two luxurious multi-pile rugs in a Greek key design of muted browns by Marion Dorn, and one of her more strongly geometrical rugs in darker browns was in the dining area. One photograph was published, amassing much praise for Dorn and Chermayeff, though the client was never named.218
Dorothy’s quiet voice easily became lost amidst the Dartington building spree of the 1930s and the expansion of corporate governance that it generated. She had hoped that Bill Delano and Chester Aldrich would build for the school, but their Aller Park for the juniors was expensive and unsatisfactory. Leonard turned to the stylish Oswald P. Milne who had built Coleton Fishacre for their neighbour Rupert D’Oyley Carte, so Milne built the main school Foxhole, the new textile mill on the Dart, the Dance School and several ‘well-mannered residences’ for senior staff, all by late 1932, when he was dismissed. The success of the headmaster’s house by William Lescaze was in his favour (and he had little work in Depression-hit Philadelphia) and so – working with his resident assistant Robert Hening – Lescaze designed the three school boarding houses, ‘extremely impressive and indefinably American’, cheap and quickly built. Departmental administration had far outgrown the Hall’s Courtyard and so Lescaze and Hening also built the utilitarian Dartington Central Offices at Shinners Bridge and more houses for staff along Warren Lane.219
Fate, in the guise of Dorothy’s perception, stepped into the brief vacuum between Milne and Lescaze, and almost launched Dartington’s fame into the stratosphere. Ben Nicholson, now parted from Winifred and living in Hampstead with his new love Barbara Hepworth, wrote to say that he and Barbara would like to visit Dartington, bringing new friends, the German architect Walter Gropius and his wife Ise. This was in 1933, on Gropius’s private, unpublicised first visit to England; he was fifty, with lean and intellectual looks, but a poor grasp of English. Except for the coterie of modern architects and artists who had travelled in Europe, and Review readers, few people knew of his work, only that he was the former director of the Dessau Bauhaus, now increasingly marginalised by the Nazi regime. Gropius found Dartington ‘a sort of English Bauhaus’, he was dazzled by the lavish budget for education and he and Dorothy understood enough of each other to realise their mutual interest in social housing and theatre design. He found it difficult to make up his mind to leave Germany and it was only after another year, in October 1934, that he and Ise arrived as refugees with little money and few possessions.
The Dartington Estate in the 1930s, showing the Great Hall with Dorothy and Leonard’s home at the north-west end overlooking the old church tower, the buildings around the Courtyard and the Barn theatre at the north-east corner. New buildings include the dance school, the junior school and the staff cottages. The drive leads westward, passing the Headmaster’s High Cross Hill; it divides northwards to the church on the Buckfastleigh road and south-west to Shinners Bridge, the offices, textile mill and on to Totnes.
They were taken in by the architectural community led by Jack and Molly Pritchard, given a flat in the modern Lawn Road block in Hampstead, and Maxwell Fry took Gropius into partnership.220 In the December he visited Dartington, where Dorothy was now convinced of his genius and hoped he would be appointed as architect for future housing schemes. Some cross-fertilisation had occurred as Gropius had met Henry Morris, the pioneer of village colleges in Cambridgeshire, for whom he was to build Impington Village College.221 Morris was probably the one man in Britain who was on Dorothy’s wavelength; he drew inspiration from the New York Settlements, and his colleges were to give an involvement in the arts to those ‘who learn by practice and action’ and had ‘lost out’ in conventional education.222 Dorothy did go to see Morris, at least once, and what she and Gropius learned fuelled her desire for a ‘college’ of domestic design and furniture making, which would be ‘a sort of English Bauhaus’. Leonard, who could not be such a free spirit as his wife, with the expectant Lescaze and Hening waiting for their next commission, could only see Gropius as an occasional consultant, and for goodwill asked him to specify for a manager’s house and workers’ cottages at the New Piggery on the estate at Yelland. As every farmer will understand his new pig unit was clearly the light of Leonard’s life at that moment, but to Walter Gropius – Gropius who built the famous Fagus factory, who was director of the Grand Duke of Saxony’s Academy, who designed a Ukrainian State Theatre, the Moscow Palace of Soviets and the Reichsbank in Berlin – had his pride. He dashed off a brief technical note with some measurements and added his opinion that William Lescaze was ‘a second-class modernist’ (which of course he was), and that was the end for the time being.
Dorothy fared better with her Dance School. She had seen Martha Graham dance in New York but found that free or German dance, dance-mime, were little known in England. One of Graham’s pupils, Margaret Barr, had come to Dartington and she and Louise Soelberg had trained a small group, but dancers did not seem to grow in Devon fields and Dorothy wanted a larger company now that she had Milne’s Dance School. Coincidentally Whitney Straight’s arrival at Trinity College in Cambridge had prompted the bursar of neighbouring King’s, John Maynard Keynes, to remember his meetings with Whitney’s father, then to write to his mother in early 1932. To Dorothy he recalled ‘our common friend Croly’, that they both supported ‘an organ of the Left’ and were interested in dance.223 Keynes was also ‘getting into farming’ at Tilton, his Sussex home, and he would appreciate an opportunity to look around at Dartington. He did so, and he and Leonard were happy in farming talk. It was a friendly overture, and Keynes being so much more at the centre of things, Dorothy invited him and his wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, to the opening of the Dance School in April 1932.224 They could not make the day but came soon afterwards, and suggested a joint performance with their Camargo Ballet, which Lydia ran with Frederick Ashton, and could Dorothy help with their overspend? Dorothy pleaded poverty but sent £20 for goodwill. It became a delightful friendship, both Leonard and Dorothy enjoying the company of the miniature vivacious Lydia, who had been Diaghilev’s principal ballerina, but wore her fame so lightly. Of course her lanky, looming husband was even more famous, and also ‘charming and kind’ to Michael Straight when he arrived in Cambridge in 1934. ‘He is a very nice boy,’ he told Dorothy.
The Keynes’ neighbours in Gordon Square were the dancer Beryl de Zoete and sinologist Arthur Waley, another pair of lovers who became regulars at Dartington.225 They were all in the audience for the Kurt Jooss Company’s galvanising presentation, The Green Table, which foretold how the iniquities of the Versailles Peace Treaty would surely lead to another war. Kurt Jooss danced the role of ‘Death’. Dorothy found it disturbing on behalf of Willard’s ghost, hearing again Walter Lippmann’s words from their last conversations, ‘that what we had meant, and what alone could justify it all, was not the meaning and justification of those who will decide’.226 She recognised Jooss as the supreme director of his immaculate company. She approached him backstage, nervously, apparently ‘pushed’ by Beryl de Zoete, and asked him to come to Dartington, but Jooss was as hesitant about leaving Germany as Gropius had been. Also the press reception for The Green Table was lukewarm – London was not ready for dance on the O’Neill spectrum of harrowing – though Lydia declared it ‘a masterpiece’ and Maynard told Dorothy not to be discouraged. Surely enough and soon, a matter of months, at his home at Essen Jooss was instructed to
dismiss the Jewish members of his company, which he refused to do – and they were able to escape just in time as they had friends and sponsors at Dartington and knew where they would find a welcome. The company, ‘20 dancers, a manager, a stage manager, 2 pianists along with 23 students and 3 teachers’, duly arrived; a large house, Redworth, on the road to Totnes was bought for them, and Kurt Jooss, his wife Aino Siimola and their daughter Anna soon moved into their own house in Warren Lane, effectively becoming Dartingtonians.227
For light relief Dorothy now had her garden. Beatrix Farrand had paid her first visit in the early spring of 1933 concentrating upon the Courtyard and the garden on the south side of the Great Hall. She had gone to Wisley and Kew to refresh her memory on English plants, and to Oxford and Cambridge to look at courtyards before spending ten days at work. Dorothy watched from her window as ‘she worked incessantly – scrutinizing every corner and angle, setting up her stakes, taking meticulous notes, planning, planning every hour of the day and night’. It was a sheer pleasure to have an old friend there, to whom nothing needed explaining. Beatrix was now well into her sixties, a tall, elegant woman, muffled against the February weather, with stout boots, and when it rained a mackintosh cape, so that her dramatic figure stalking the tiltyard was christened ‘Queen Elizabeth’. Her plan for the Courtyard – a farmyard space of awkward levels – envisaged a serene oval, paved with setts and cobbles around an oval lawn; she ordered Magnolia grandiflora, wisteria, roses and honeysuckles for the grey walls and camellias and azaleas for the garden walks. Later Dorothy recalled, ‘In a short fortnight she had shown us the way to proceed.’228
