Angel Dorothy

by Jane Brown

  And what of their marriage? What if Dorothy had not come back? Would Dartington have crumbled and been sold and forgotten? Would Leonard have returned to India and become one of Tagore’s heirs?285 He had worked hard for his part of their bargain, he had become a familiar figure in the South Hams and further afield, elected as a Devon County Councillor where he enjoyed peppering their conservative conversations with his enlightened viewpoints. He had become used to his cars, his Savile Row suits and shoes from Mr Lobb and he dressed his part fastidiously – people called him ‘dapper’. He knew that he would take nothing away from Dartington, other than his own earnings, but – and was it really only fifteen years ago – he had been astute enough to pin his future not only on Dorothy’s money, but on her unshakeable loyalty that would not fail once her promise was given. If any one moment marked the change in their relationship it was when they climbed aboard that Dixie Clipper seaplane, she was not completely sure she had conquered her fear of flying, and she would have needed to lean on his arm. She now refers to herself as ‘Mrs Leonard Elmhirst’ rather than ‘Mrs Dorothy Elmhirst’ as before, a small point but significant.

  In New York Michael Chekhov’s production of The Possessed, with Beatrice Straight as the beauty Lizaveta Nikolaevna, and Nellie Van in the role of Varvara Stavrogin, opened on Broadway in the October. For Beatrice it was the real beginning of her stage career and her road to Hollywood, even though the play did not have a successful run.

  In England the mood darkened – the Jooss ballet performers left for New York although Kurt Jooss remained to look after his students. Lisa Ullman spirited the frail Rudolf Laban away into the Welsh countryside. Internment as aliens threatened many – Hein Heckroth, Hans Oppenheim and the sculptor Willi Soukop among them, seeming a cruel betrayal by the country that had given them refuge – and Chris Martin and Dorothy spent long hours writing letters and pleading with the authorities in the interests of these people they knew so well. For many of them there were miserable conditions to be endured in the camps at Paignton and farther away, until the regulations were thankfully relaxed.

  This was merely Dorothy’s opening campaign as she prepared for whatever the war would ask of her; make no mistake, the war had saved Dartington because she knew, as she had told Willard twenty-one years before, ‘We women have to play our part.’ She listened to the King’s Christmas Broadcast, and she was so deeply moved – along with many others – that she copied his words into her Commonplace Book:

  And I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year:

  ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’

  And he replied:

  ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God

  That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.’286

  Eleven: The Children of Light

  Three names spring from the front of her 1940 diary, the people uppermost in her thoughts: first Whitney, then Jane Fox-Strangways and Christopher Martin. Whitney always came first and, with Beatrice and Michael now settled into their American lives, he was nearest. Whitney had a string of addresses and phone numbers as he was in the RAF Volunteer Reserve and forever on the move, for the moment based at Biggin Hill in Kent and flying with the 601 (County of London) Squadron of well-heeled and already-qualified pilots. His business interests in airfields at Ipswich and Clacton, in Devon and at Weston-super-Mare (operating a shuttle flight to Cardiff for 9s. 6d. return) had all been subsumed into the war effort.287 She met him as often as possible in London, taking him and Daphne for dinner at Boulestin’s or Prunier’s, or for tea and buns at J. Lyons and then a film at which they could laugh together. In the April Whitney disappeared on a secret mission to Norway to locate a landing field for the RAF, and was invalided home after a German attack. He was awarded the Military Cross and appointed an aide to Prince George, the Duke of Kent.

  Jane Fox-Strangways was three years older than Dorothy and they had been friends for more than a dozen years since Jane had come to Dartington as a vibrant and talented potter. Dorothy admired Jane’s artistry, which had not faded, though her health had given way and she was no longer able to work. In theory Jane shared a house in Totnes with her younger sister Elinor, but in practice she spent more and more time at Dartington as Dorothy’s ‘artistic pensioner’ spending her time drawing and writing poetry as she felt able.

  If Jane was her light cross to bear then the Martins, Christopher and Cicely, were most nearly her kind of people at Dartington and she held them in great affection, perhaps guiltily and in gratitude for their keeping the Arts Department going in her absences. Now she had frequent meetings with Chris Martin to discuss how they would start afresh with a new arts programme. Dartington had always gathered artistes, teachers and students into its fold, now it was to be ‘outreach’, a new word for the initiative into public patronage, via the county education authority’s committee for Music and Drama, and the government’s CEMA – the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts – of which John Maynard Keynes was the first chairman. Dorothy had drawn back from Keynes’s overtures for her money and her presence on his committee, feeling that her place was to support Chris Martin in his pioneering of the role of ‘Arts Administrator’ in their quiet corner of Devon.

  On the domestic home front she was determined to economise, which in general meant freeing Dartingtonians on her staff for war work or service, and in the particular her decision to close her house kitchen consigning the silver-service breakfasts to history. Everyone was to eat in the White Hart dining room together. A stray sheet gives the workings of her budget for February 1940 – the largest sum still for household wages, £67, the next largest £25 for meals in the White Hart, and with fuel and other small bills the total was £156. 19s. 0d.288 Also on her desk, and not unconnected, was a volume of Alfred Tennyson’s later works, open at his long mystical poem The Ancient Sage, from which she copied some lines:

  For more than once when I

  Sat all alone, revolving in myself

  The word that is the symbol of myself,

  The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

  And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into heaven.289

  She needed her dialogue with the Sage, for to resign herself into walking into the crowded White Hart each day for her lunch, conscious of the whisperings about her dress or shoes or something she said, was no mean feat for her, far harder than the economising. She accomplished it with grace so that both residents and visitors expressed surprise that she queued for her lunch and chatted to her neighbours. The artist John Piper was one guest who was definitely not amused at having to queue for his lunch, but no exceptions were made, not even for Cabinet ministers nor, as the war went on, American colonels.

  Nor indeed for the captains of industry and commerce who were Leonard’s colleagues in Political and Economic Planning (PEP), the research group given birth at Dartington nine years before, in April 1931, and now preparing to tackle the unpopular causes of war aims, peace terms and post-war reconstruction.290 Leonard had taken over the chairmanship of PEP from Israel Sieff of Marks & Spencer Limited, and they worked closely together, planning a trip to America in the spring. In his Memoirs it is Sieff, later 1st Baron Sieff of Brimpton, who dubbed Dorothy and Leonard ‘the Children of Light’ for their war work and their patronage of PEP; he admired Leonard, identifying him as ‘one of the makers of the way of life, a leader because he really loves the led’, and counting him among his three finest friends outside of his family, the other two being Max Nicholson and Aneurin Bevan.291 PEP was an overwhelmingly male organisation of businessmen, professionals and academics, which we would now call a ‘think tank’. The conservationist Max Nicholson, its ideological father, took several pages to explain ‘what kind of body it was’, and for present purposes it might be called a club of extraordinarily clever men who applied their experience to planned solutions for the problems in national life, within the framework of a fre
e-enterprise society.292 Conventionally Dorothy was regarded as their ‘constant support’; she and Leonard gave them money, and she presided at lunches and teas in London, and weekend gatherings at Dartington for their deliberations, though it is unlikely that if asked most of the clever men, even Israel Sieff, would have acknowledged her as anything more than a figurehead, with money.

  However, one of those who happily queued for his lunch knew rather differently, for the first General Secretary of PEP and long-serving council member was Kenneth Lindsay, who as a young war veteran had sat at her feet at 1130 Fifth Avenue discussion groups in the early 1920s and fallen more than a little in love with her. The young man she had called ‘a bit of a genius’ acknowledged her social work as part of his inspiration to be a founder of PEP, and a glance at the subjects of their early publications – on conditions of employment, consumer affairs and co-operatives, social services, ‘the economics of having children’ and Roosevelt’s New Deal – suggest that he still had her inspiration in mind.293 Now, in 1940, Lindsay was Independent National Labour MP for a Kilmarnock constituency, which could hardly be farther from Dartington, he held various political appointments and had not married. They must have met frequently during PEP’s existence, and on the late April weekend when PEP gathered at Dartington Lindsay stayed on for an extra day, according to Dorothy’s diary.

  Soon after that meeting Leonard and Israel Sieff left on their trip to America. Dorothy’s May diary takes on liquorice allsort tones of pointillist pleasures mixed with black perils: tea at J. Lyons in Coventry Street with Jane, then the new film of the Broadway success Ladies in Retirement, a domestic thriller starring Ida Lupino and Louis Hayward; a performance of King Lear [7th–9th May the government crisis, Hitler crushes Holland and Belgium, Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister]; at Dartington on the 11th she has a visit from Max Nicholson and Tom Hopkinson of Picture Post and on Sunday 12th her garden is open to visitors. Bandaging instruction classes are held [21st May Germans reach the coast, the evacuation from Dunkirk was under way, 23rd Germans take Boulogne]; Basil Liddell Hart, their Devon neighbour and friend, prophesies ‘the Germans would land at Start Point, wheel right and take Exeter’, which would mean marching through Totnes. Liddell Hart is an invigorating guest, he is a brilliant military historian and his strategic expertise gives him what seems like foresight, but he also has the ear of Fleet Street’s finest as he is a columnist for the Daily Mail.294

  [Italy declares war on 10th June]; at Dartington evacuee workers arrive, the children from Blackfriars and Southwark are already here, being occupied with ballet classes and walks beside the Dart, some are delighted, others run riot; [14th June, Paris falls, Dorothy if given to such phrases might say her heart is breaking for Paris and all it has meant to her, though in another life]. The sociologist Barbara Wootton comes to stay overnight, she is a Conscientious Objector and perhaps hopes to find agricultural work in the sympathetic air of Dartington; Noel Brailsford calls as he is researching a piece about Devon in wartime. [18th June, the first big raid on the East Coast]; Dorothy sees the film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca ; Arthur Waley and Beryl de Zoete come to stay, Beryl says that the Vic-Wells Ballet need to escape from London to work on Frederick Ashton’s new ballet, can they come to Dartington? On 2nd July and in gloomy mood Dorothy writes to Michael of our ‘veneer of easy-going democracy’ that has blinded us to the ‘rottenness of the system which tolerates poverty and unemployment and exploitation’:

  Soon, of course, the invasion will have begun... we shall presumably be cut off from you, from one another, from the world – but I can’t believe we will be easily conquered. As I look at these antique terraces and trees and buildings I know, if they are spared, they will bring new life to birth, as they have done for the last five hundred years, and it matters little whether we are here or not.295

  Later in July after false alarms, delays and silences Leonard arrives safely from America, full of plans for a return trip. Dorothy is busy with Dartington trustees’ meetings, and a visit from Professor and Mrs Cornford who wish their grandson James to become a pupil at the school in the autumn; she warms to Frances Cornford and her poetry and hopes they can become friends. The absent Biddy’s birthday on 2nd August, so often a day for celebration, is marked with a First Aid Demonstration. After an influx of Fabians and Local Defence Volunteers, she and Leonard snatch a day out, driving north to the lovely Exe valley route beside the sparkling river to Bampton, taking the by-road across the Brendon Hills then turning east to Bridgewater and on to Glastonbury. The comforts of this English landscape, and of Leonard’s presence, are seeping into her heart. The next morning, Wednesday 21st August, Leonard is off to London, resuming his weekday work on war transport, hoping for weekends at Dartington; [22nd August, ‘bombing’, 24th the first raid on London].

  Dorothy is shown around the textile mill at Shinners Bridge by Hiram Winterbotham, who is very tall with thick tortoiseshell-framed spectacles. He is making beautiful and colourful furnishing weaves and she realises that the mill is a Dartington enterprise she has hardly noticed; Hiram proves an interesting companion and their friendship flourishes. With Leonard she steals another day to look at the beautiful stones of Dodington, Dyrham, Bath and Ashton, just in case they don’t survive. The Pilgrim Players arrive, very late, to present Murder in the Cathedral and Tobias and the Angel and eventually all turns out well, largely thanks to Chris Martin’s young assistant Peter Cox, who keeps a cool head. The following week in London she has Tuesday lunch with Lady Colefax, attends the National Gallery concert and lunches with Arthur and Beryl on Wednesday, and on Friday when leaving she discovers the Crowther’s treasure house, or yard, of garden ornaments in North End Road, Fulham, where the beautiful Flora awaits.296 At Dartington she takes stock: ‘We now have 150 soldiers quartered in the Dance School and the Chekhov Studio, and our own Junior School buildings are filled with evacuees.’ Merely housing and feeding were not enough, at least for Dartington, and she could foresee ‘a new kind of community life opening up, based on singing and dancing, painting, acting and all the activities we love so much’.

  September opens with a lecture on manure. Either she has no news of Whitney or she would not write it down, but he is flying his Hurricane in what would soon be known as the Battle of Britain. For the first weekend they go to her parents-in-law, the Elmhirsts at Barnsley, and she steels herself to go out with the shooting party just because Leonard does and it is expected. The little ironies of the spatter of the guns followed by ‘All Creatures of Our God and King’ on Sunday morning are fading, when quite late on the fine evening, 8th September, they board their train for King’s Cross:

  Half an hour before we were due the lights suddenly went out... and we slowed to a crawl – Air raid? Slowly the train crept along until finally one hour late we drew up in the station. Still no lights. The porters had small torches and with the help of these we collected our baggage and walked to the entrance. What a scene as we stepped out into the night. The sky a great sheet of crimson to the east – and a stillness like death in the streets – not a sound – no taxis – no buses – no human beings. Deserted city yet glowing with sinister crimson light – planes overhead buzzing like angry mosquitoes, thuds and crashes.

  They took themselves to an air raid shelter where Dorothy concentrated hard on learning a Shakespeare sonnet by heart, ‘it seemed the best thing to do’.297

  The raid continued all night and eventually they reached Upper Brook Street. Next morning the PEP executive, including Israel Sieff, Max Nicholson and Kenneth Lindsay, arrived for their meeting, and afterwards Dorothy took ‘a quiet walk with Kenneth’. The next day she has lunch with Whitney and the Duke of Kent, and the following day with the Sieffs. Back at Dartington she ‘slept all day’, then gardened; [16th–22nd September is ‘the worst week for shipping losses’.] The end of the month is lightened by Arthur and Beryl bringing Frederick Ashton and the Australian dancer Robert Helpmann for a long weekend. While they talk a
bout the practicalities of the Vic-Wells Ballet coming to Dartington she is absorbed with her rockery; a letter has come from Mischa Chekhov who has heard from Beatrice about her gardening. ‘If I dare say something,’ he writes, ‘it would be the following. I think all your experience with flowers is the bridge which links you with us, and your acting... and with your flowers you are undoubtedly rehearsing your future parts.’298

  Her quiet New Year at her adored Chalet with The Ancient Sage is her last, as it has now been requisitioned, surrounded with barbed wire as a lookout station. She has to go over and check that all their belongings have been removed. Will she ever see it again? On 4th November President Roosevelt is returned for a second term and he and Eleanor remain in the White House, at least there is some stability. William and Mary Elmhirst celebrate their Golden Wedding, which Dorothy has to accomplish on her own – they are Papa and Mamma now – as Leonard has gone travelling again, in secret.

  Home is a matter of meetings, the Dartington trustees have worries over the school as Headmaster Curry is preoccupied and frequently absent on his ‘war work’, which is promoting world government as the only way of saving the situation. Dorothy tells Leonard in a letter that there is nothing to be done about Curry, or rather that she is too exhausted to do anything, and she takes to her bed in mid-December – there is no one left for her Christmas anyway. [29th December is fire over London, the City and the East End reduced to smoking ruins.] Snow in Devon.

  For the New Year of 1941 she has no Chalet and little hope. Even the ballet dancers have succumbed to the mood for they give a farewell performance of Ashton’s Dante Sonata, his interpretation of the struggle between ‘the children of darkness and children of light’, before they leave to be transformed into the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and enduring fame.299 ‘My drama class’ means that Dorothy is teaching now, which is something. She has cut from a newspaper a map of Europe to put in the front of her diary; it shows most of France, and Belgium, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Norway in enemy occupation. Another cutting is a report of Beatrice playing Viola in Twelfth Night, triumphantly in New York. On a Sunday in early February Chris Martin is taken ill, and as Cecily is away, Dorothy and Peter Cox go with him in the ambulance to Exeter; it will be April before he comes home.