Angel Dorothy

by Jane Brown

  [20th/21st March, Plymouth is bombed.] The King and Queen had been visiting, having tea with the Astors at their house in Elliott Terrace, and when they left for the station the siren sounded. No one paid any attention but that evening the city centre was almost obliterated. On Wednesday 26th Dorothy goes to see Nancy Astor; ‘Plymouth is a tragic sight,’ she tells Leonard. ‘In answer to my offer of hospitality Nancy decided to send us 20 Nursery School children, and they have been housed here in the Courtyard gym and the Barn studio above.’ On 1st April she goes to Buckingham Palace to see Whitney receive his Military Cross – she notes, ‘He is full of airman’s talk of dogfights and near misses, all wonderful and terrible.’ He is now sometimes with the Duke at Northolt, sometimes at Manston in Kent and sometimes at Stapleford Tawney in Essex; she can only try to pray.

  The bombing does not stop, it goes on and on; the Blitzkreig was to continue to the year’s end. On 7th May, ‘Nancy my dear, my thoughts are with you every day and all day,’ as the Astors struggle to help their beleaguered city. Dorothy feels ‘it is a comfort – perhaps the greatest comfort in the world – to feel that one can still be of some use to people’. She is reduced to tears by the text of a talk Noel Brailsford has given on American radio, his theme that ‘Life in England is not all struggle and destruction’. Brailsford, it is the key to their continuing friendship, was brought up in South Devon, and remembering the things he did as a child he follows the fate of some of the London children now here – ‘groups of boys shouting and laughing were wading in the usually silent Dart’. He allows that many of them had lived through ‘days of terror’, that they missed their mothers and that they found the countryside ‘dreary and uninteresting’. But there was a chance that some of them were about to be transformed – they were growing vegetables and flowers, absorbed in trying to catch a salmon with a lasso, helping the farmers’ wives with their dairying and poultry; they were acting, dancing and singing. At least one hundred and fifty children lived at Dartington, another one hundred and fifty were fostered in good homes; they were clean and healthy, their manners were gentler, their horizons widened. ‘We have stumbled in our half-conscious English fashion,’ concluded Brailsford, ‘into a social experiment of great promise.’300

  The hope of rural futures, or simply holidays, for city children was not to be entirely lost at the war’s end, but in 1941 it was the message of hope that counted, the message to America that, in the almost dying words of the British ambassador Lord Lothian, ‘If you back us you won’t be backing a quitter.’301 Leonard had returned from a tour speaking to American farmers on his pet subject of agricultural economics and telling them that ‘Uncle Sam and John Bull needed each other now’. His tour was made with the blessing of the Department of Agriculture, in the person of Assistant Secretary Milburn L. Wilson, a honeyed relationship that sprang from that White House dinner of Easter Sunday 1938 when Dorothy had asked to meet Henry Wallace and Wilson on Leonard’s behalf.302 Even though America still stood aside from the battlefield, the New Deal successes in soil and water conservation, the reduction of surpluses and support for prices of Roosevelt’s first term were all being adjusted to the wartime president’s Lend-Lease programme, and his declaration that America would become ‘the arsenal of democracy’. A nationwide system of War Boards urged American farmers to meet new targets for producing grains, oil-bearing soya, peanuts and flaxseed and vegetables, the ‘food and fiber’ in government language needed by America and her allies.303 The disappearing surpluses and rising prices made the farmers happy but persuading them that it was worthwhile to grow food to put into British mouths was a delicate task; there could be no taint of politics or propaganda. Wilson, who had worked for years on experiments in rural revival in Montana and was steeped in agricultural economics, was Leonard’s alter ego in ideologies, and he and his department liked Leonard’s transparent honesty and practical approach. His talks had been well received, and they hoped he would make another tour. Only a few people knew of this plan, and of them only Eleanor Roosevelt would have remembered Dorothy as a convincing public speaker for her causes during the Great War.

  Dorothy’s response to Leonard’s suggestion that they make a long public-speaking tour is not recorded, but if they were wise and the request came from the Roosevelts she would not have had a minute’s hesitation. She would also have an unexpected chance for a holiday with her children. She had time to prepare her talks on subjects of her very own, on community life at Dartington, more generally on the arts in British life, and on her own experiences of the bombing and the incidental benefits of country life to refugee city children. She would reach out to women in colleges and universities and gatherings of farmers’ wives, while Leonard told their husbands of British efforts to feed their beleaguered nation despite shortages of every kind. It was all very secret. Dorothy had a few visitors for the sake of appearances: her new gardening friend Constance Spry, and Stephen and Natasha Spender, Natasha giving an impromptu concert on the Great Hall’s piano.304 Then, at more or less their usual time so as not to cause comment, they were spirited away to Bristol on 20th July, and flown to Lisbon, where they had to wait a week for seats on the Pan American Clipper seaplane which took them on the southerly crossing, via Horta in the Azores, then Bermuda to La Guardia. They landed at 4.30 p.m. on 29th July. Leonard was whisked away to planning meetings, while Dorothy went to stay with Susie Hammond in the city, where she was on 1st August when her diary has a note, ‘news of Whitney missing’.

  She went out to Long Island, surrendering herself to Old Westbury, ‘walking in a dream’, and finding the rest of her family. Ruth, William, Dorcas and Eloise were in high spirits because Nanny Jefferies had found them a holiday house on Chappaquiddick, ‘such a lovely island off the Massachusetts coast’, with its own beach, sailboat and tennis court, and a barn for William’s pet goats and the pony which Dorcas and Eloise, both being lightweights, rode together. Biddy came too, and Michael and Belinda and Leonard all arrived; they swam, sailed and baked clams, and after William and Dorothy had weeded the tennis court, Michael and Dorothy played William and Leonard, ‘such a good four’, Dorothy reported to Mamma Mary Elmhirst. Dorothy and Ruth went for a long walk and talk, as Ruth, now fifteen, home from her arts studies at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, missed her mother dreadfully. Chappaquiddick was base camp until the end of August with Dorothy returning between trips to Washington, to Cornell for a talk and dinner in Willard Straight Hall, and from several days in collegiate New England.

  Dorothy and William at Chappaquiddick during World War II

  A little to the north of Maine President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were having a secret rendezvous at sea agreeing the Atlantic Charter, the war aims and ‘hopes for a better future’ of the Allies, including Russia. Germany responded by attacking the American ships guarding North Atlantic convoys and making a pact with Japan and Italy to declare war on any nation that attacked any of them. Japan’s disunited government and renegade generals meant that, freed from fears of invasion from the north by a non-aggression pact with Russia, the army turned to harassing American interests in the Pacific. Roosevelt made Willard’s hero General Douglas MacArthur commander of all the American forces in East Asia. As Dorothy read these headlines, and of the Atlantic Charter’s reliance on President Wilson’s (and Walter Lippmann’s) Fourteen Points, which she had heard the president utter twenty-three years ago for that other war, she must have bit her lip, uttering her characteristic ‘Mmnn... n... n’and renewed her vow to live in the present, thankful that she had something useful to do.

  For Michael’s birthday on 1st September they were all at Woods Hole, their old haunt, with ‘a great sail on high seas’. Dorothy saw Biddy playing Viola in Twelfth Night, several performances as if to store up her pleasures. Then came news of Beatrice Fletcher’s death on 9th September; she was sixty-four, and Dorothy felt with sadness that her life had not been happy, that her late marriage had been but a quiet reverie
after all the excitement that Beatrice had found as her companion for those nine brief, youthful years. She attended the funeral at Arlington, and promised to meet Prather Fletcher for a quiet talk when her schedule allowed. From Washington where, she noted, Leonard gave a talk on the same day as the president’s broadcast explaining the Lend-Lease programme was relayed on the Columbia Broadcasting System, they left on the train to Kentucky. A meeting at Louisville on the Ohio River was followed by others at Lexington and Bowling Green, where they were kept talking for six hours. From Cincinnati they continued northwards to Toledo, Detroit and Lansing – the meeting at the students’ union at Lansing was ‘very worthwhile’ – and then on to Chicago, speaking at the Madison and Purdue campuses. At Lafayette, Indiana, they had meetings at breakfast, in the afternoon and evening, and the next day at Urbana, Illinois, found themselves eating a soya bean dinner with six hundred farmers. Secretary Wilson’s department had mastered the organisation of their train travel, hotels and destinations well, and even-handedly, for Michigan and Indiana (along with several Midwestern states) had voted Republican in 1940, supporting the local hero, ‘a Hoosier farm boy’ with ‘disheveled charm’, Wendell L.

  Washington to Indiana, the beginning of their first tour, August to October 1941

  Wilkie. Wilkie had been only an ‘occasional’ Republican and he strongly supported the food for the Allies campaign, so it begins to seem that Leonard and Dorothy were carried along on a wave of enthusiasm, and characteristically warm American welcomes. They had been allocated a rest day, Friday 26th September, at Urbana but Dorothy was persuaded to give her talk on their work at Dartington, especially on her Arts Department, using slide illustrations made from Leonard’s photographs. She included Noel Brailsford’s theme of the evacuee city children whose horizons were broadened by country life, which found a sympathetic echo with these Midwestern farmers and their wives who believed themselves the stewards of God’s Own Country.

  From Urbana they went south to Decatur, on to St Louis and to Columbia, Missouri, to a meeting at Salina in deepest Kansas. On 1st October they were driven to the Manhattan campus of the University of Kansas where Dorothy spent two hours with the women of the university staff and had ‘a marvellous lunch’.

  St Louis to North Dakota, winter 1941–42

  Next day it was Lincoln, Nebraska, for a student convention at eleven, a faculty lunch and an afternoon meeting of farming women. More meetings with always a barrage of questions about everyday life in England, then on to Ames in Henry Wallace’s Iowa, and more meetings before they were shown the fall glories on a tour to Sac City and Sioux City in the hill country of the Missouri River, where Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota meet. No time for a leisurely stay, even at Sioux Falls, but another meeting before they boarded the midnight train to St Paul. They saw a lot of midnight trains. From St Paul they went to the agricultural school at Morris, Minnesota where there was a huge crowd, then on to their northernmost stops, Fargo on the Red River, where Dorothy spoke at a ladies’ lunch, and Valley City, North Dakota, where Leonard broadcast. A flight to Chicago for a meeting of the English-Speaking Union allowed them to continue to New York. At some point along all these ways Dorothy had heard that Whitney had crash-landed and was interned as a prisoner of war.305

  She had been travelling and socialising rather frantically since the beginning of August, even Chappaquiddick had hardly been a holiday for her, and it was now the middle of October. Leonard had an appointment at the British Embassy in Washington, and together they reported on their tour to the First Lady at Hyde Park-on-Hudson.306 Then they went separate ways, Leonard to Canada, Dorothy spending a few days in Manhattan seeing friends – Bill Delano, at the Colony Club and Bruce Bliven at The New Republic, who assured her that he and George Soule had been so shocked at the news of the Blitz, fearing that Hitler would win the war, that he had changed the paper’s line to support of America’s entry.307 She went to Ridgefield and joined some of Mischa Chekhov’s classes, saw Prather Fletcher at Old Westbury as she had promised and lunched with Gertrude Whitney. November passed in this way – she needed the reviving influence of those she loved – she saw Biddy’s Viola yet again, more than once, and on 7th December she took Biddy and the man she wanted to marry, Louis Dolivet, out to lunch, the first meeting with her future son-in-law.308 While they were lunching the news came through of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other Pacific bases: she and Leonard were due to start another tour the following day and her diary has a definite note that they were due at the White House ‘at nine’ – for a briefing that the story was now changed and America would be at war.

  Leonard and Dorothy set out as planned to a Lions’ charity lunch at Blacksburg in Virginia, then on through Tennessee Valley Authority country to Knoxville. The TVA was not only building dams and generating power, it was also producing fertilisers and advising farmers on crop management and forestry, and mining metals for aircraft production – it really was Roosevelt’s war work-horse. From Knoxville they headed deeper into the South, to Birmingham – ‘very sociable’ all day meetings, noted Dorothy – to Tuscaloosa, Starkville, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge and finally New Orleans, where their treat was to dine at the legendary Antoine’s. Next stop was Houston where the ‘good discussion’ reflected the enthusiasm of Lyndon Baines Johnson, then champion of small farmers and conservation in mid-Texas.

  The second tour, winter 1941–42, Dorothy added up that she had made 40 speeches, caught 15 night trains and travelled about 8,000 miles

  After stopping at Austin and San Antonio they took the night train on the long haul to El Paso on the Rio Grande border with Mexico, then westwards through desert land to Tucson in Arizona. This was already a fashionable retirement spot and Dorothy records seeing, of all people, Cecil Davis who had painted Willard’s portrait in 1912.309

  Continuing northwards Leonard spoke at the Los Angeles Veterans’ Patriotic Hall, the Agricultural Hall on the Berkeley campus, then at the County Court House in Sacramento, while Dorothy spoke to the Berkeley Women’s Faculty Club and revisited some of the sights of San Francisco. On New Year’s Day of 1942 they reached Corvallis, home of the University of Oregon, where the next morning Dorothy spoke to a women’s group, and they both spoke at a ‘big meeting’ in the union in the afternoon. They drove on icy roads to Portland and relaxed seeing the new John Ford film of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley; in below zero temperatures they progressed into Washington state, to Pullman and Spokane then across the state line to Moscow, both speaking in all these places, before making the long journey south through Idaho’s spectacular mountains and plains to Pocatello.

  They reported to Washington on what they had seen and heard, and by her birthday, her fifty-fifth, on 23rd January 1942 her New York and Old Westbury commuting life resumed, except for one more talk, her 41st, given at Wellesley College. She invited Louis Dolivet to lunch on his own and was immensely taken with his dashing looks and air of mystery, and – needless to say – he had a scheme to put before her, for her investment in his new magazine. She saw Martha Graham dance, she met Clare Leighton, she did blissfully ordinary things with her old friends. In mid-February they were summoned to the White House to dinner, and lunch again the following day, and they saw Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. There was one more trip to make, and on 20th February, with Leonard, William, Michael and Belinda, she flew to Des Moines in Iowa, where Biddy’s Twelfth Night company was performing, for her marriage to Louis Dolivet the following day.

  With Leonard she left for New York the next day, the 22nd, Washington’s Birthday, but her mind was already on England, and she noted down the names and posts in Churchill’s Cabinet reshuffle. At some moment she had the news that Whitney had escaped from his château prison and been spirited to safety and the Royal Navy by the French Resistance. She went to Poughkeepsie for the wedding of Willard’s niece Dorothy Sanborn, made a farewell visit to Ridgefield and Mischa Chekhov, gave a last hug to Biddy and Louis who were now in New Yor
k, met Jim Ede who was in town on a lecture tour, and then they were gone once again – from La Guardia on Tuesday, 24th March to Bermuda and ocean-hopping. They reached home late on Thursday evening having been away for eight months. Dorothy spent the Friday going around her garden with David Calthorpe.310

  Spring in her garden welcomed her home and she snatched every moment to go out and look for the awakening treasures, for Beatrix Farrand’s legacy of anemones, scillas and primroses planted along the Camellia Walk, for the uncurling spires of Solomon’s Seal beneath the trees, and everywhere the advancing cavalcade of blossoms. The green filigrees of the newly hatched beech leaves were her favourite effects: she found these signs of new birth that floated above the bronze carpets of the dead leaves the most comforting of all, especially when she had just returned from London, a strange city now, brimming with uniforms and sandbags, everyone grimly forgiving of the craters in the streets and shortages in the shops. Before they had been home a month the Luftwaffe bombed Exeter in a series of ‘Baedeker Raids’ from late April into May aimed at the heart of the city. Almost three hundred people were killed, many more were injured, and something like twenty buildings were destroyed or damaged, which meant that much of the historic High Street and the city’s ‘old world charm has disappeared for ever’.311 Leonard had already noted how she was ‘using her spade and trowel as a means of defeating Hitler’, and now Dorothy admitted to herself, ‘Despite the war – or perhaps because of the war, I have begun to concentrate on the garden. I find I have a great desire to add to the permanent beauty of Dartington in these days when everything else seems so transitory.’312