by Jane Brown
In America it was Harry Whitney’s legacy that Dorothy should have the use of Camp Deerlands in the Adirondacks, where she had stayed with their father, and where she now took her family for their annual summering. That August, 1933, after Camp Deerlands, she and Leonard had gone to Washington to see Beatrix Farrand’s most famous garden at Dumbarton Oaks, but it was all rather a rush and the Oaks’ owner Mildred Bliss was still away. Beatrix was pleased with their verdict:
No mother ever purred more audibly with praise than I do over commendation of the joint work which Mildred and I have done... she had imagined the box ellipse when she was a child, so that its actual existence only wanted a spade and level to make it come true.
Dartington’s Courtyard, being longer than it is wide, gave itself to the oval lawn, but it does seem that Beatrix had the Oaks ellipse in her mind, especially when she concluded:
If you like Dumbarton Oaks let us all three, Leonard and you and I, work to make Dartington its English fellow.229
Beatrix came to Dartington again in February 1934; she forwarded her vision for the three magical paths, the Spring, Camellia and Rhododendron Walks that were layered along the hillside above the tiltyard. While in London Max Farrand sounded out his distinguished colleagues for their opinions on their educational experiment, finding great interest and enthusiasm among younger men, but the older ones – so typical of the English Establishment – were ‘sitting back and doing nothing’. On leaving, Max wrote to Leonard from the Athenaeum in early March, ‘It is a big thing you’re attempting and thoroughly worth doing,’ and he added that he had ‘nothing but admiration’ for the standards they were setting. He also added that he was happy to see Dorothy ‘looking at least ten years younger’ than when he had last seen her, when she was actually nearly ten years older.
Nine: 1935, Sitting for Mr Beaton in Her Schiaparelli Hat
It may seem strange that a museum director from California, albeit a distinguished Ivy League historian, should have to take news of the educational and farming experiments in the West Country to the opinion makers of Pall Mall. Also strange that in encouraging Leonard and Dorothy in their ‘big thing’ Professor Farrand omitted to say that few people he spoke to had ever heard of the place. True, if he had asked in the Crush Bar at Covent Garden some would have known of an outpost of the dance, and in public school common rooms some would have cursed another so-called progressive establishment; some architects and the journalists at The Architectural Review would know of the building spree, and at the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings there would be praise for William Weir’s restoration of the Great Hall; but in general, in the mid-1930s, Dartington was a secret place. In a way Leonard Elmhirst had intended this; in choosing a fortified manor house set in fields that wore the River Dart as a chastity belt, in a tree-girt valley in that remote country beyond Exeter, served by one road and one railway line, he wanted to work away from prying eyes and the criticisms of his peers. South Devon was almost as far as he could get away from his family in Yorkshire, as well as distant from the Home Counties stamping grounds where Dorothy had enjoyed herself in her previous life. Was Dartington her refuge – did her increasing shyness dictate her preference for the nunnery that de Tocqueville had identified as the American woman’s lot in marriage? Or was it her prison? Her weakness for big hats had been subdued of late but her mother-of-the-bridegroom hat from Elsa Schiaparelli floats through 1935 as her banner of her independence, still flying.
Dorothy was forty-eight on 23rd January 1935. She had been married to Leonard and in England for almost ten years. Herbert Croly’s prophecy had come true, her life was divided between two countries with dwindling perspectives on both sides of the Atlantic. New York was still fun, she shopped at Saks and Abercrombie and Fitch, bought piles of books and American magazines, and their Park Avenue apartment had been decorated, with lily-flowered chintz for her bedroom and rose hips and leaves in Leonard’s. She was still close to her sister-in-law Gertrude whom she loved, but the deaths of her brothers Harry and Payne had shaken her identity as a Whitney, and she felt isolated. On their 1934 holiday in the Adirondacks she had wandered away from the picnic party to find a knoll where she could sit and contemplate the beauty of the land she had relinquished. She recorded in her notebook her need to ‘keep a tryst’ with her spinster aunt Etta Whitney, who had recently died at a great age, ‘but it was more than a tryst, it was an act of renewal with my father – with my forebears’. Summering at Camp Deerlands on Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks, which she so wanted her new family to enjoy, was now the immovable event of her year.
In England her constant companion is her slim navy leather, week-at-a-glance diary from Frank Smythson of Bond Street, which it has become her habit to use, and will be for the rest of her life. Inside, in green ink, she always writes her addresses – 42 Upper Brook Street (Mayfair 6782) and Dartington Hall, Totnes (telephone 193). Her diary encapsulates her English life, she is slim and often dressed in navy blue, she exists between the poles of Dartington and Mayfair, only rarely leaving her allotted path, and the diary is a model of confinement, its pale blue pages crammed with the pencilled minutiae of her days.230
Her New Year of 1935 began at the Chalet at Portwrinkle with walks along the sands, ‘soppy golf’ and a party for Ruth, William, Dorcas, Eloise and their neighbours’ children. She was rather pre-occupied with Whitney and Michael who were piloting themselves home from South Africa, where Whitney had won the East London Grand Prix. He had previously raced his Maserati at Brooklands and Monaco, but never gone this far before; she plotted their stops, ‘boys at Khartoum’ on Sunday 6th, then Cairo two days later, Benghazi on the 9th – the day the school opened and they all returned to Dartington – then the boys reached Tunis on the 10th. Dorothy left for London on the Saturday afternoon, had dinner with Gerald Heard, and was at Heston aerodrome on the Sunday for the heroes’ return. She gave them a celebration dinner. Michael Young, who had been part of her family for his teenage years, called ‘Youngster’ to distinguish him, and was now at the London School of Economics, was with them. Michael Straight, about to begin his second term at Cambridge, needed more of her time so they went to the Tate Gallery then a film and on the Tuesday evening they saw Gielgud’s long-running Hamlet before she caught the midnight train to Devon.
At Dartington her daily round of interviews, meetings, lunches, teas and evening events is relentlessly crowded, but gradually, as the days go by, there is a sense of something growing out of apparent confusion. Kurt Jooss comes for a morning business meeting, the business of dance and also of making Redworth, the house at Totnes, a comfortable home for his company. Dorothy spends a great deal of her time there. A few evenings later Kurt and Aino Jooss are at dinner, a social occasion, with a ‘Mr Martin’ – formality indicating a first meeting, which is very soon, in early February, warmed into ‘Chris and Cicely Martin’. Christopher Martin, whose only fault was that he was the nephew of the disapproving Reverend J.S. Martin of St Mary’s church at the end of the drive, had been appointed arts administrator by the Dartington trustees. His first task had been to produce a report identifying the ways to unite the rather opportunistic gathering of painters, potters, dancers, actors and musicians into Dorothy’s dreamed-of Arts Department. He had given her a choice: was the Department’s ethos to be professional ‘having amateur work with the Estate as an offshoot... or, primarily amateur and dilettante with professionalism only as a chance consideration?’ Without hesitation Dorothy opted for the former.231
Walter Gropius, always Gropius in her diary, Herr Gropius across the dinner table, stays overnight in early February as she is trying to woo him back. She loves his vision and talk of unifying the arts as he had done at the Bauhaus, and she realises that he is a born teacher and organiser who is, unusually, a good listener. His enthusiasm for low-cost housing and system design reminds her of her architect-beau Grosvenor Atterbury, and also of her ancestor Eli Whitney, the patron saint of systems design.232 She
asks Gropius to redesign the interior of the Barn Theatre, to ensure his return. ‘Mr and Mrs Collins’ were also at that dinner, this her first meeting with the surrealist painter Cecil Collins, and his artist wife Elisabeth Ramsden, whom Mark Tobey had suggested as teachers of drawing in his stead.233 Whitney comes for the weekend bringing his fiancée Lady Daphne Finch-Hatton for a first meeting with her prospective mother-in-law; Dorothy had arranged for the maestro Arturo Rubinstein to give a recital, playing on the gleaming black concert grand piano which had been bought for the Dance School.234 As February is the month for nursery ills she spends some days with Ruth and William, and she is equally attentive to Dorcas and Eloise. All their birthdays are religiously celebrated, William’s sixth with a film shown by George Bennett. February closes with the trustees foregathering for their quarterly sessions, three days of intense talks, with inspections all under Leonard’s chairmanship about the workings of the Dartington departments. Dorothy doodles her way through milk yields and poultry economics, but now at least the Arts Department is included, and in Chris Martin’s capable hands. Between them they persuade the trustees to appoint Walter Gropius as consultant and controller of design.
As the last meeting closes Dorothy and Ena Curry catch the train for London for a meeting of their philosophical group with Gerald Heard. Unsurprisingly he steers them to the metaphysical, and they are studying Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, the writings of Kahlil Gibran especially The Prophet and The Rock, the recently performed pageant-play for which T.S. Eliot wrote the choruses.235 Dorothy manages tea with Whitney, perhaps to tell him how happy she is with his fiancée and their plans to marry in the summer, and they see a film together before she catches the midnight train home. It is Michael who concerns her, and she goes to Cambridge to see him, perhaps staving off his problems until they have time together after his term ends on 15th March.
Unfortunately for Michael, Dorothy’s March is frantic. All her usual meetings and she is out and about more than usual to Paignton, Plymouth and Exeter, stung by the criticisms that the denizens of Dartington were more familiar with the streets of New York than of Devon towns. She finds a local hairdresser and a dentist, though still keeps her appointment with Mr Gilliatt in London, after a visit to the birth control clinic.
Michael emerges from his second term at Trinity College, they manage some theatre dates in London and he makes a brief visit to Dartington. With much attendant publicity he and Whitney are moving into a house belonging to P.G. Wodehouse, who has moved to Le Touquet, in Norfolk Street at the Marble Arch end of Park Lane, where they have a pet monkey.236 The gossip columns make much of the monkey. Whitney, whom she meets often for tea or dinner in London as she is trying to persuade him to give up motor racing, is well able to cope with the celebrity lifestyle, but Michael is vulnerable. He seems younger than even his eighteen and a half years, and so like Willard, tall, fair with his candid oval face and faux insouciance; a young man who never knew his father, always in Whitney’s shadow, and now the older half-brother quite understandably jealous of his mother’s new children, let alone her new husband.
March closes with a rush of ‘meetings all day’, a housing committee, a performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull, another visit from Gropius, Ruth’s ninth birthday, and Whitney brings the racing driver Richard ‘Dick’ Seaman to dine. It transpires that Whitney wants to set up his company, the Straight Corporation, with Seaman as a director, and Fred Gwatkin of their London lawyers McKenna’s as their legal adviser. He intends to acquire operational rights on a dozen or so of the new municipal airports and run first-class travel and flying training courses. Will Dorothy arrange for the money? She shelves that one for the moment as a string of people need her attention – Christopher Martin, Jane Fox-Strangways and Kurt and Aino Jooss – and on Tuesday 2nd April her oldest friend Gladys Szechenyi arrives in London and they meet for the first time in years. The next day, after having her hair fashionably waved, she meets Daphne’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Winchilsea and Nottingham to be correct, and after a session with Gerald she meets Leonard at Southampton and their much-labelled trunks are delivered on board the Majestic and they sail for six days of peace.
Beatrice Straight, who will be twenty-one in the summer, had chosen to resume her life in America, and she waits on the dockside in New York. She has already telephoned excitedly (to Dartington’s newly installed telephone) to say that she has found just the teacher for Dorothy’s drama school. The following afternoon they are on the train to Philadelphia to see a performance by Michael ‘Tchekov’, Dorothy’s spelling, and his company of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. It is in Russian, but Dorothy is bewitched, and apparently without a second’s thought she invited the company to Dartington, and was accepted. At Old Westbury she sees friends and Beatrix Farrand, then goes into the Sloan Hospital for two nights, for she still prefers New York hospitals. They spend Easter with Louise Croly at the St Simon’s Island resort off the coast of Georgia, returning to the city for her doctor’s check and lunch with Gertrude. Four days at the Park Avenue apartment are filled with serious business catching up with Miss Bogue and the Committee on Commitments, seeing her trusted American lawyer Milton Rose, and the men who guard her money, on Whitney’s behalf. Lunch with Louis Froelick at Asia is pleasant for the magazine causes her few problems, and the stable-mate Antiques even makes a profit. Lunch with Bruce Bliven, now editor at The New Republic, is less easy; Bliven is quiet, ‘mousy’, and admits he was ‘frightened’ when asked to take over from Herbert Croly, but now feels proud that ‘almost all the ideas of the New Deal had been thrashed out in our pages’.237 Dorothy’s light touch is evident; they published W.H. Auden’s cynical Song for ‘a world that has had its day’, Noel Brailsford wrote a piece from London on Armistice Day (1934) and Newton Arvin on Robert Herrick is a homage to one of her favourite poets. It becomes clear that in the midst of all the activities at Dartington she must read far into the night to keep up with The New Republic. President Roosevelt, just over two years into his rescue of ‘the stricken nation’, is ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’ to Dorothy for ‘his grim and stern determination to oppose the evil and selfish forces’ – the right-wing extremists that she so feared. His New Deal powers to provide employment, work schemes for conservation and social insurance, improved industrial relations, plus relief for home owners in ‘negative equity’ and ‘agricultural adjustment’ on farm prices and production, all these testified to an America that she had imagined. Did it cross her mind that if FDR had come into office earlier, for his struggle with polio had cost him eight years, she would never have left? Her enthusiasm for the president and all his works was not wasted on Editor Bliven, who went to Colorado to assess the effects of the Boulder Dam, part of the nation-transforming Tennessee Valley Authority scheme, on which he wrote a feisty article. He could also report that the New Deal ‘gloss’ had increased The New Republic’s weekly circulation to forty thousand, but twice that number was needed to break even.
After dinner with May and Herman Kinnicutt they left on the Aquitania on 27th April. Whitney and Daphne meet them at Southampton, eager to discuss business and wedding plans. It is King George and Queen Mary’s Jubilee, London is en fête and expectant, Dartington is quiet and fine enough for lunch outdoors, and then its own Jubilee Fête on the Bank Holiday Monday. For Dorothy meetings come tumbling in, with Architect Lescaze and Christopher Martin – where are they going to put Chekhov and Company? – with Headmaster Curry and Kurt Jooss, and then thankfully tea and quiet reading with Ena. Evenings at home are now blessed with music broadcasts on the BBC’s Third Programme – this time Bach’s B Minor Mass from the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place. Rabindranath Tagore comes for a brief visit, which allows Leonard to show how the fruits of his experience in Bengal are ripening at Dartington. Hot on his heels another demi-god, Walter Gropius, arrives. This time Dorothy has invited him and Ise, with a cheque, as she has heard they are in difficulties. Her hope that Dartington would
manufacture modern furniture on Bauhaus lines has come to little, partly because Gropius has been involved with a big scheme for Isokon’s flats in Manchester, but this has failed for lack of finance. Bridget Edwards, the mother of Dorcas, comes to dinner, and after seeing Ruth’s school play, the hairdresser in Paignton, Gropius yet again, Dorothy and Leonard are off to the Glyndebourne opera in Sussex for the opening season performance of The Marriage of Figaro.238
From Glyndebourne it was but a charmed journey to another stage-set, the renowned and beautiful Leeds Castle near Maidstone in Kent, set in a moat so large that it appeared as a lake. The castle was the home of Dorothy’s niece and sometime bridesmaid Olive, her sister Polly’s elder daughter, fairly recently married for the third time and now Lady Baillie. There were striking similarities, and differences: Olive was twelve years younger than Dorothy, she was thirty-six, tall and elegant, reserved and quiet, with her steady blue gaze and Whitney strength of will – ‘the assumption that she would get her own way’. Unlike Dorothy she smoked cigarettes and wore glamorous gauzy dresses; they both hated publicity and valued their friends. Lady Baillie’s castle was her passion. She had bought it in 1925, it had cost her six times the price of the Dartington Hall estate, and each year she spent as much on restoration and decoration as Dorothy dispensed through her American charities. Lady Baillie had two daughters from her first marriage, Susan and Pauline Winn, and she and Sir Adrian had an infant son, Gawaine. Sir Adrian was planning to enter politics as a Conservative. Leonard cannot have found their visit congenial, and it was perhaps forced upon Dorothy by her sense of duty to Whitney, who understandably wanted to gather up some relatives to come to his wedding. Whitney had found the Baillies for himself, for his name appears in the castle’s visitors’ book alongside his friends the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Anthony Eden, David Niven, Joan Kennedy and Errol Flynn.239
