by Jane Brown
Music and drama dominated Dartington’s arts after the war; many of the paintings were lent to exhibitions and public galleries, but Dorothy was no longer the dealers’ delight and her purchase of the Henry Moore maquette from the Leicester Galleries for Chris Martin’s memorial commission in 1947 was exceptional. Her favourite pieces were still hanging in her London flat and on her house walls at Dartington but many more were stored away. Why was there no Dartington Gallery to radiate the spirit of the place? A gallery had been mooted, most probably by Jim Ede, but he was absent abroad for twenty years; when he returned to Cambridge in the mid-1950s to create his ‘poor man’s’ Dumbarton Oaks he wrote to Dorothy wondering ‘if you were only a dream?’ He heard nothing, presumably because of her illness. Ede’s Kettle’s Yard open house afternoons in term time, where undergraduates could enjoy his collection of contemporary art, soon acquired admiration and fame. He did reach Dorothy in 1964, asking her to lend her Alabaster Boy for a Gaudier-Brzeska exhibition in Paris; she refused to part with him but agreed to lend the small bronze torso, which was exhibited. Sporadic correspondence ensued but when Ede did visit Dartington he only glimpsed her in passing and they seemed as strangers; was he black-listed with other importuning dealers? Did her frailty keep her from the realisation that Kettle’s Yard, Ede’s living place, his ‘continuing way of life’ from the times they had both lived through, was both a homage to and a celebration of her own embrace of the modern?396
Now in 1965 she was divesting herself of her most beloved paintings – Ben Nicholson’s Charbon, Cecil Collins’s Fools, Winifred Nicholson’s flowers, many by Kit Wood, John Piper’s Old Church Tower – even the little Alabaster Boy are all made over to the Dartington Hall Trust, except for Wood’s Pony and Trap, Ploare, Brittany, which was given to Ruth.397
In her Garden Diary for March she wrote:
Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, Founders’ Day 1967
Hundreds of people in the garden on this first perfect day of Spring. Warm sun and no wind. The stillness brings such peace. And now people wander down to the stream – in fact everywhere you look the place is thick inlaid with humans – and dogs and prams and cameras and all the happy paraphernalia of a Sunday out – and into the Spring.
Their winter weeks in paradise continued to benefit her physical frailties, but to prevent Pink Sands feeling too much like the ante-room to eternity – the utter peace was no longer quite such a miracle – she invited her young. Michael and his family were the nearest and most frequent visitors, and in February 1967 Biddy came all the way from Los Angeles; over forty years had gone by since, in 1925, Dorothy had taken her star-struck daughter to Hollywood, and now Biddy was living and working there. ‘I wish you could have seen her,’ she wrote in William’s birthday letter, ‘telling ghost stories to the two girls who were stretched on a bed at her feet and almost in a trance... I was overcome myself by the extraordinary power that Biddy has to radiate light and warmth and the glory of being alive. It is as if she reflected light directly from the sun – and the warmth affects everyone around her – and a kind of spiritual joyousness is born.’398
On the following Founders’ Day, 10th June 1967, Dorothy addressed the gathering, a unique event which surprised everyone; it was more than forty years since the beginning of their project and now Dartington was filled with professional newcomers with careers to pursue, people she had never spoken to, and who took little notice of the rather frail grey-haired lady crossing the Courtyard; who was she? A hushed ‘Dorothy’ came the reply, as if she was already a haunting ghost. Now she was standing before them in the Great Hall, still tall, still slim and expensively but unobtrusively dressed. At first her voice sounded English, but gradually her clipped a’s and long o’s became more evident, and the slightest of American lilts ended her sentences. She was short of breath but determined in her message, ‘take the present day, but don’t take it too easily’ for it was the outcome of a long, long struggle. She meant them to hear of the ‘selfishness, hostility and misrepresentation’ that had beset their efforts, but to know that ‘the quality of dynamic life’ was here from the start.
Her soft, clear voice was mesmerising and she warmed to her purpose to recall five distinct periods of Dartington’s development, inspired by Leonard’s ideas. She gave him sole credit. The beginnings and the restoration of the Great Hall by the ‘genius’ William Weir taught reverence for the old and joy in the new. We had a ‘sense of life, working together, doing things together, life, life, life, with the school for our own children and others as part of our house’. Then came the American phase, Leonard’s friends from Cornell who ‘set the pattern for work on the land’, the teachers from Columbia, and Mark Tobey, Nellie Van, the Barn Theatre, the dancers and Beatrix Farrand, so very distinguished and christened ‘Queen Elizabeth’. The 1930s were depressing times, t-i-m-e-s, she drawled as if painfully remembering, with their open door to the refugee artistes from Europe, all those lost souls with their talents and their dark memories. In wartime Dartington’s doors opened ever wider to hundreds of evacuees, for whom they managed to carry on their education. There was ‘music in every corner’ thanks to Imogen Holst and her gift ‘of bringing everyone into a life of music’. Frederick Ashton and the Sadler’s Wells Company were here, the Estates Committee was started and the First Founders’ Day was celebrated in 1943.
She spoke of a ‘kind of miracle’ in the way the challenges of the post-war world were being met; it becomes clear that her history lesson is meant to bolster Dartington’s essential values against the inevitable expansion, and ‘the danger of losing contact with the individual’. Her audience might have feared she was flagging, not realising what a well-trained actor she was, and she modulated her voice for her finale.
‘I wonder sometimes if we take too much for granted’ – that England gives us freedom – ‘Freedom. Thank God England is free, never, never, never take that for granted. Beauty’ – too many people are condemned to live without beauty, and “some urban living was cruelty”. Beauty and Peace must be treasured here and are found especially in the garden. And new life, always! Not change and decay in all around I see but change and new life all around I see, we need never despair. I never thought anyone could have been as happy as I have been for forty-two years, it is almost too much for one person to be given. Carry on! Carry on, always, please.’399
In early 1968 their flights to Harbour Island were cancelled – ‘plans changed overnight because of my (psychosomatic) liver pain’ – and she was laid low once again. Her Garden Notebook for March noted:
Sunday morning with Jerry in the garden – the first time I have been able to get out and enjoy what I see. For weeks now we have been under the blight of east wind that can darken our days – And now, suddenly, today the wind has changed into the north bringing sun and strong blue sky, and hopefulness back into the heart.
‘Our Wedding Day’, 3rd April, was spent at the Chalet with ‘my two so dearly-beloveds’ Leonard and William, reading poetry and listening to the sea. Later in the month, she wrote in her Garden Notebook, ‘A pleasant day for Mr Cane’s visit. The slope with white star-like daffodils at its best and the magnolias glorious and Tai Hakus at their peak – he was delighted – but there were still adjustments to be made, the fine tuning – such an endearing proceeding.’
August too was spent at the Chalet, which she had decided to leave to William, who was now married to Heather Williams, a former student of Imogen’s and oboe teacher. For her thoughts Dorothy is using a green flower-covered notebook from Mr McNally’s bindery, a gift ‘from the Children of your Christmas Parties’. Inside she kept a card from Gladys Szechenyi, her oldest friend, who had died in 1965.
Her September Garden Notebook says:
Coming back after 3 weeks at the Chalet I am struck by the growth – the tremendous growth of everything – all the shrubs and trees look gloriously full of life and rich in development. I’ve never felt it so strongly before and never have I been so consc
ious of the perfect shape of it all. The form is so clear and strong – so exciting in every part of the garden – what a revelation is here – of beauty, of variety, of interest that never ceases to draw me deeper into the mystery of this wonderful place. And this is the time of few flowers.
Her diary is full of dates for shopping, carol concerts and parties; Saturday 14th December was the night of the school party at Foxhole to which Leonard went with William and Michael Young. Dorothy felt she needed to go to bed early, and there she died quietly at some time before midnight.
The quiet of her passing touched people most; she had been seen crossing the Courtyard and going indoors as usual, and it was impossible to believe it was for the last time. The silence of the Sunday morning was deep; William remembered that they were all stunned, not knowing what to do. In the evening the Great Hall was crowded for carol singing, all eyes drawn – many with tears – to the sight of her empty chair. Memorial services were held at Dartington and in the Grosvenor Chapel in Mayfair in January; the service at St Thomas’s Episcopal church on Madison Avenue was on 23rd January, which would have been her eighty-second birthday. Her body had been cremated and her ashes placed in her garden.
The Times of 24th February 1969 noted that she had left £77,000 with £65,000 paid in duty. Clearly her fortune was still elsewhere, her children and grandchildren being provided with separate trusts; a note in Whitney Straight’s papers shows that he received something over $800,000 from the Morgan Guaranty Trust later that year. Dorothy’s will had been made in 1965, leaving all her personal belongings to Leonard, Ruth and William, and making generous bequests to everyone at Dartington who had looked after her so well; there was an annuity to Mrs Emily Thomas ‘in the hope that’ she would continue to look after Leonard.
Of his father-in-law, now in his mid-seventies, Maurice Ash wrote perceptively of his ‘remarkable energies’ which were now concentrated on his work to unite two Oxford institutes, Agrarian Affairs and Agricultural Economics, to ensure a future for his own International Conference of Agricultural Economists. Oxford University awarded him an honorary degree which he added to four others, from Durham, Exeter, Freiburg and Visva Bharati; he stalwartly refused any honours from the British government. He spent some time going through Dorothy’s papers and notebooks, annotating and editing in smudgy blue pen, and thinking to protect her he probably destroyed a great deal. Her diaries, the testaments to her addiction to activity which was inherited from her mother Flora, the major sources for this book, remained untouched.
At Dartington the younger generation of Ruth and Maurice Ash and Michael Young were eager for progress. William Elmhirst, also a trustee, had a difference with them, which led to his resignation, leaving Dartington in the autumn of 1972, never to see his father again. In December that year Leonard married Susanna Isaacs, a doctor and psychologist and a school contemporary of Michael Young at Dartington. They spent time in Italy before leaving for California where Susanna taught at the University of Southern California’s Los Angeles campus. Leonard died there on 16th April 1974, a few weeks short of his eighty-first birthday. Susanna brought his ashes back to Dartington.
Sources and Further Reading
As befits her two lives there are major collections of papers in America and England, all now with online catalogues. The Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst papers, collection number 3725 (prefix DWS) in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, have a small amount of material relating to her childhood, and the complete correspondence between her and Willard Straight throughout their relationship and marriage from 1909–1918, as well the letters of sympathy after his death.
A related and larger Collection number 1260 (prefix WDS), the Willard Dickerman Straight Papers 1880–1918 have his juvenilia, his diaries, notebooks, drawings, paintings and photographs especially from his time in the Far East and from his official career. These papers, edited by Dorothy, formed the basis of Herbert Croly’s Willard Straight, published in 1924; they were kept at Old Westbury, some selected by George Bennett for an exhibition on the 25th anniversary of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1950, then subsequently sent to the Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, formally donated in 1953 by Beatrice and Michael Straight.
In the year 2000 I sought and obtained the permissions of the Dartington Hall Trust and the Elmgrant Trust to use their archives, then held at Dartington, though subsequently moved to the Devon Record Office, Great Moor House, Bittern Road, Sowton, Exeter EX2 7NL – [email protected].
Dartington’s Papers of Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst 1914–1968 (prefix DWE) have the early diaries and notebooks she brought with her when she came to England in 1925, and the collection appears complete until her final year, 1968. These small and fragile diaries, the key to her life of activity, have formed the bedrock of this book. The Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst (DWE) and related Leonard Knight Elmhirst (LKE) Collections have the correspondence between them, and in addition DWE/Arts and DWE/General Correspondence contain materials relating to contemporary celebrities. There is apparently no correspondence with any of her children and I understand there is a closed family collection, but then Dorothy’s actions clearly demonstrate her feelings towards each of them, and I don’t imagine they wrote many letters, especially after the telephone was installed at Dartington in the early 1930s.
Published sources are as follows:
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Banham, Mary, and Bevis Hillier, eds. A Tonic to the Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976.
Bartlett, Mary. Inky Rags: Letterpress Printing and Bookbinding on the Dartington Hall Estate 1935–2010. Buckfastleigh: Itinerant Press, 2010.
Benton, Charlotte. A Different World: Emigre Architects in Britain: 1928–1958. RIBA Heinz Gallery, 1995.
Berkeley, Ellen P., and Matilda McQuaid, eds. Architecture: A Place for Women. Washington: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
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