by Jane Brown
186 Their apparent assumption that they had nothing to learn from established progressive schools, Badley’s Bedales (1893) and A.S. Neill’s Summerhill (1921), did not endear them to educational circles. Young p. 175 tells how Dorothy bought Swedish crockery and furniture at Heal’s for the juniors, all broken in a short while, ‘Neill could have saved Dorothy the money if only he had been asked. He knew better than she how destructive children can be’. Neill became jealous of Dartington’s resources, which marred their relationship. Dorothy visited Bedales in 1935 after Headmaster Curry had invited Bedales’ staff and pupils to Devon. They had nothing to do with Dora Russell’s Beacon Hill (1927) until the Russells’ marriage ended in 1934 and their children Kate and John arrived at Dartington.
187 Young p. 156 for his own arrival at Dartington; it was not the least of the school’s successes that it transformed the would-be fruit farmer into the ‘dream maker’, Observer Profile, 27th May 2001; also, a shaman ‘who sowed dragon’s teeth’ (Noel Annan), founder of the Consumers’ Association, Which, the Open University, the School for Social Entrepreneurs, etc., Asa Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur, 2001.
188 Whitney Straight’s early flying career is from Dudley and Johnson, 2010.
189 See Victor Bonham-Carter, ‘The Story of Dartington’ part 2 in The Countryman, Summer 1953.
190 Leonard to Curry, 29th April 1930, quoted in Young p. 162.
191 Maggie Giraud ed., House for Mr Curry, a delightful miscellany designed by Sue Snell, to mark the restoration of High Cross House in 1995.
192 Curry quoted in Country Life, the article and photographs of 11th February 1933 reproduced in House for Mr Curry.
193 Young pp. 163–4 on Curry’s personality.
194 The phrase is Gerald Heard’s, see note 214 below, in ‘The Dartington Experiment’, 1934.
195 Emery, 1970, for ‘The Owners and History’, especially Chapter 3 ‘The Later Holands and their Successors 1400–1559’.
196 Paul Robeson (1898–1976) was playing in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones when Dorothy saw him in late 1925. Press cuttings and reviews for Othello, LKE/BR/1–6. Robeson went to Hollywood to play in Showboat, the film of The Emperor Jones and Sanders of the River; he was too much the ‘star’ for Dorothy to call a friend but she watched his career and he next appears supporting Henry Wallace’s campaign in 1948 with Michael Straight.
197 Maurice Browne quotes from cuttings in LKE/BR/1–6.
198 Edmund Wilson to Stanley Dell, quoted in Steel p. 175; Wilson to Lionel Trilling 3rd May 1957 gives the story of his time at The New Republic in Castronovo and Groth eds., Edmund Wilson: The Man in Letters, 2001, pp. 71–71.
199 Herbert Croly to Dorothy undated but 1923/4, DWE/G/2.
200 Major Murphy to Dorothy, 5th August 1918, WDS 1260 Microfilm reel 6, 52/3/322.
201 Mark Tobey (1890–1976) was a teacher and a lively creative presence for most of the 1930s; he helped Dorothy to realise the possibilities of a community of artists.
202 Jovan Nicholson, 2013, especially p. 31 ff. for Ben and Winifred Nicholson and their friendship with Kit Wood.
203 J. Nicholson p. 35 ff., also Tom Cross, 1994, especially Chapter 12 ‘A Meeting in St Ives’ (Wallis, Wood and Ben Nicholson).
204 Ibid.
205 DWE/Arts/1 opens on 3rd November 1930 with a catalogue of paintings by the late Christopher Wood and contains letters etc., detailing Dorothy’s early collecting.
206 Ellen Van Volkenburg and Edward N. Beck eds., Miss Aunt Nellie: The Autobiography of Nellie C. Cornish, 1964, p. 128 quoted in Young note 9 p. 367.
207 Married Love or Love in Marriage by Dr Marie Stopes (1880–1958) first appeared in 1918, followed by books varying the themes of birth control, sexual health, marriage counselling and children’s welfare. Contraceptive advice was sought by Dorothy in New York and her choice of the most eminent gynaecologist in London presumably ensured this continued. Dr Stopes’s first Birth Control Clinic in London had opened by the time Dorothy arrived; soon after William’s birth the National Birth Control Council (later the Family Planning Association) was opening clinics all over the country, one of the first in Plymouth as a result of Lady Astor’s influence.
208 Straight p. 40.
209 Young pp. 221–3. Bernard Leach (1887–1958) had established his studio in St Ives in 1920 and Dorothy had asked him to come to Dartington in 1927, when he brought Jane Fox-Strangways. Leach continued to advise at Dartington but never relinquished his base in St Ives; Dorothy’s importance in forwarding his career is rarely recognised.
210 [Henry] Noel Brailsford (1873–1958) wrote for The New Republic and shared Dorothy’s interest in arms limitation and studying the causes of war, which had led him to 1130 Fifth Avenue. In his 1928 lectures he covered the League of Nations, ‘Naval Compromise and Disarmament’, ‘Debts, Danes and Rhineland’ and ‘Social Rationalization’ in Germany and America. He was trapped in a difficult marriage to the WSPU activist Jane Brailsford who died in 1937; in 1944 he married Eva Maria Perlmann. F.M. Leventhal’s The Last Dissenter, 1985, and Spartacus Educational online essay by John Simkin.
211 Clare Leighton (1899–1989) is described by her fellow engraver Patricia Jaffe ‘to have designed and engraved with her whole being, and in her writings too, the enormous physicality of her response to visual and emotional experiences comes over so strongly that she must have taught many women how to unleash a hitherto unacknowledged power in themselves’, Women Engravers, 1988, pp. 35–7.
212 Young p. 207. [Henry FitzGerald] Gerald Heard (1889–1971) was an intellectually and morally adventurous man of faiths, homosexual, and Dorothy’s most prolific correspondent and a regular visitor until he left for America in 1939.
213 Their surviving correspondence DWE/G[eneral correspondence]/filed alphabetically H.
214 Gerald Heard, ‘The Dartington Experiment’, in The Architectural Review, April 1934.
215 The Architectural Review was in its heyday under the direction of Hubert de Cronin Hastings and J.M. Richards.
216 Gertrude Jekyll’s Flower Decoration for the House, 1907, with deceptively simple arrangements of flowers, leaves and berries in glass, pewter or china jugs or vases, became the Dartington style, passed from Jane Fox-Strangways to Emily Thomas and still honoured today.
217 For the Circle philosophy and Moore, Nicholson, Hepworth and Chermayeff, see my The Modern Garden, 2000, Chapter 2 ‘Britain in the 30s’.
218 Boydell, 1996; plate 51 (from The Architectural Review) shows ‘a remodelled flat by modernist architect Serge Chermayeff with rugs by Marion Dorn, 1935’, which is Dorothy’s Upper Brook Street flat.
219 The building spree of the 1930s is concisely covered in Bridget Cherry’s revision of Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: Devon, 1999, pp. 314–19.
220 Benton, 1995, essay by David Elliott, ‘Gropius in England: A documentation 1934–1937’, pp. 107–24.
221 Impington Village College by Gropius and Fry, ‘one of the best buildings of its date in England, if not the best’, Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Cambridgeshire, 2nd ed., 1970, pp. 412–13.
222 Henry Morris (1889–1961) was intended for the priesthood but his experiences on the Western Front made that impossible for him, and he turned to education; from 1922 until 1954 he was Education Officer for Cambridgeshire. He believed that schools needed to be ‘remade’ to embrace the millions ‘who learn by practice and action’, and that ‘a consciousness and involvement with all the arts was vital to the moral character and emotional development of future generations’. See Lottie Hoare, ‘The ideas and influence of Henry Morris’ in Crafts magazine, 1999.
223 John Maynard Keynes’s letters to Dorothy with comments from Lydia Keynes DWE/G/6.
224 Lydia Lopokova (1885–1981) was an Imperially schooled ballerina who began creating roles in St Petersburg before she was twenty, touring to Berlin and Paris, where she danced The Firebird, then to New York in 1911. She came to London in 1918 with Diaghile
v’s company where ‘her grace and pathos and entrancing cleverness’ and ‘true comic genius’ captivated critics and balletomanes, including Keynes, whom she married in August 1925. See Mackrell, 2008.
225 Arthur Waley (1889–1966) mastered oriental languages while working at the British Museum, his translation of The Tale of Genji was published 1925–33, and the intimate secrets of the Lady Murasaki’s court etiquette fuelled the craze for all things Japanese. He was a prolific translator, absorbed in his work and a soothing presence. For fifty years he was the partner of Beryl de Zoete (1879–1962), the dancer and expert on Balinese and Indian traditions as well as eurythmics; she was Dorothy’s most well-informed adviser; DWE/G/11.
226 See note 106 above, Lippmann quoted by Steel, p. 151.
227 Kurt Jooss (1901–79) was admired all over Europe for his dance theatre, though he was a difficult genius as his subjects were emotionally harrowing for both dancers and audiences. Once again Dorothy’s judgement led her into a realm of pioneering excellence that was foreign in every way to rural Devon; her quiet rescue of the Jooss Company was extraordinary and accomplished without fuss or publicity. Jooss remained in England until 1949 when he returned to Essen.
228 DWE/Gardens is a sequence of eight boxes, DWE/GN/1 has the correspondence from 1927 and with these drawings, articles and photographs Dorothy’s becomes one of the best-documented gardens in England. Beatrix Farrand’s papers are in her Reef Point Gardens Collection, Library of the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley, ref. 871 Dartington Hall 1933–1938. See also Snell, 1989, and my Beatrix, 1995, Chapter 10 ‘Transatlantic Fellows, Dumbarton Oaks and Dartington Hall’.
229 Farrand correspondence in date order in DWE/GN/1–8.
230 Her Smythson diaries are complete from now until the end of her life, an impregnable and detailed record of her days; DWE/G/S7/A.
231 Young, Chapter 9 ‘A New Day for the Arts’, especially pp. 227–9; also Cox, 2005, p. 10 ff. on the character and abilities of Christopher Martin.
232 Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller patented the cotton gin in 1794, and five years later Whitney developed machine tools to make parts for muskets with such precision that they were identical and could be assembled to a system.
233 See Cecil Collins, A Retrospective Exhibition, catalogue by Judith Collins, Tate Gallery 1989; also Cecil Collins, The Dartington Years 1936–43, 1997, ed. Diana Gower.
234 Dorothy’s daughter-in-law to-be Daphne Finch-Hatton (1913–2003) and her brother Christopher (1911–50), later 15th Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham, were the children of the 14th Earl and his American wife Margaretta Drexel.
235 The Rock was T.S. Eliot’s latest work but soon eclipsed by Four Quartets, which Dorothy treasured; she called him Tom and lunched with him several times, though she cannot have found ‘the most bank clerky of all bank clerks’ (Aldous Huxley) nor the taciturn Faber editor to be forthcoming. This highlights Dorothy’s rare ability, especially in the 1930s, to admire the poetry but refuse to ‘gush’ or lionise the poet, or any other artist.
236 Dorothy is the invisible tenant of the house; she had arranged everything with Captain Peter Cazalet, married to Wodehouses’s stepdaughter Leonora, who appeared in her February diary.
237 Bliven, 1970, p. 168.
238 Coverage of Glyndebourne’s eightieth anniversary in 2014 revealed that any differences with Dorothy must have been ‘political’. Mrs Christie, the singer Audrey Mildmay (of Flete in Devon), influenced her husband ‘to do the thing properly’ and spend lavishly on the sumptuous festival ‘welcoming ticketholders like guests at a garden party’; Rupert Christiansen, ‘Aiming for the sky with their feet in the gardens’, Telegraph Saturday Review, 7th June 2014.
239 See Alan Bignell, Lady Baillie at Leeds Castle 1927–1974, 2007.
240 John Cornford was the son of Francis M. Cornford, Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, and his wife the poetess Frances Cornford, who was Charles Darwin’s grand-daughter, so he could be as actively left wing as he liked and the heirs of Victorian Cambridge would simply smile benignly at the exuberance of youth. Period Piece by Gwen Raverat (also Darwin’s grand-daughter), 1952, encapsulated the legends of ‘the city of the Darwins’. Michael Straight was ‘an innocent abroad’ in Cambridge, amusing for his glamour, money and famous racing-driver brother; Howarth, 1978, p. 227.
241 George Barker was a huntsman of some note, joint master of the Badsworth; he served in the army in WW2 and was killed in a hunting accident in 1945. Irene Rachel and her two daughters moved to a farm in Berkshire, where she died in 1978.
242 The Times 18th July 1935, p. 19, ‘Marriages, Mr Whitney Straight and Lady Daphne Finch-Hatton took place yesterday at St Margaret’s Westminster.’
243 Dorothy’s many notebooks in DWE/G/S7/D are sometimes difficult to date; ‘the practice of religion’ is clearly marked ‘SS. Manhattan Sept. 13’, a date which fits this trip and her only one on the Manhattan.
244 Howarth, Chapter 6 ‘Politics II’ introduces the players in ‘The Leftward movement of Cambridge politics in the thirties’, quoting ‘Sage’ Bernal writing in Cambridge Left, 1933, pp. 209–10, and a rapturous review of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, 1935.
245 Howarth p. 212 describes Cornford as ‘brilliant, fearless, farouche and monomaniac’, able to write ‘exquisitely tender lyric’ poetry as well as ‘savagely excoriate the bourgeois culture’ of Cambridge.
246 Mikhail [Michael] Chekhov (1891–1955), born in St Petersburg, was the nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov; there is an active Michael Chekhov Association online, which continues to arrange the teaching of his methods.
247 Dorothy had seen more of Walter Gropius during his three years in England than most people, and the elusiveness of ‘the English Bauhaus’ was a deep disappointment to her. She paid Gropius’s fee for Impington Village College. He was soon spirited away from his Hampstead friends to a Harvard professorship. In his farewell speech in March 1937 he said that he could not understand a nation that had expressed itself so perfectly in Georgian architecture but was now ‘not so keen on taking the same chance with a new style that expressed the social structure and twentieth-century way of living’, Benton p. 122.
248 The ‘mother-son business’, as she later called it, was the then contemporary reading of Hamlet, emphasising her acute concerns over Michael. After the war, in 1952 and a reading and ‘really animated discussion’ in her Shakespeare class, she ‘threw out a new idea’ derived from Irene Champernowne’s recommendation of Professor Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare, 1951, and his treatment of ‘the father-son relationship [which] opens a new vista’; this perspective made the play even more important to her: letter 24th January 1952 to Leonard, quoted in Young p. 251.
249 The Times Tuesday 4th February 1936, p. 9, ‘Notice is given that Mr Whitney Willard Straight of Woods Mews, Park Lane, W.1 is applying to the Home Secretary for naturalization’. Dorothy had applied to the American consul on 25th April 1935 to relinquish her American citizenship, but the process was not completed until 13th August 1947.
250 All the papers concerning Chekhov’s time at Dartington are in DWE/Arts/15 beginning in 1935, continuing through Files 16–27.
251 Eyre and Wright p. 156.
252 Ibid. pp. 74–8 on Sean O’Casey (1880–1964), who ‘had little to do with the English theatre’ while he lived in Devon.
253 They were kept at home to attend the wedding of the school geography master Bill Hunter at Exeter Cathedral, to entertain the ageing Prince Serge Wolkonsky, one-time director of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg who hoped to move to England, and by Leonard’s work for his first conference of agricultural economists.
254 The advent of Mischa Chekhov undoubtedly inspired Leonard’s feelings about the wife he had worked so persistently to win just ten years earlier. He said he had lived with two such people – the other presumably Tagore – and ‘they know not what they do
’ wrapped up in a world of their own imagination; letter to Juliette Huxley, November 1959, in Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 1986, pp. 236–7.
255 From ‘Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall, England’, seven-page typescript with Dorothy’s hand-written amendments, DWE/A/15/Drama 6, 1935.
256 In her 1959 memoir Inagua South (DWE) she confesses her passion for the theatre as an art ‘since the age of twenty’, i.e. 1907, as the prelude to theatrical achievements at Dartington since 1926; she could edit her early interests, for no one at Dartington knew any different, and leave out her dalliance with the Provincetown Players and O’Neill, which was painful to remember. With this introduction to the Chekhov Studio she is writing for publication and looking forward; with Inagua South she is looking back from the age of seventy-two (also for publication) when her peace of mind had obscured her sometime need for O’Neill ‘for whom dolefulness was a permanent condition’. See Eyre and Wright pp. 132–52.
257 Bloomsbury gossip said that Arthur Waley and Beryl de Zoete were ‘professional weekenders’ but Dorothy was not so censorious; H[arold] S[tanley] ‘Jim’ Ede (1895–1990), his early correspondence DWE/A/2; letters from Ben Nicholson are also in this file, offering her paintings and also telling her of the birth of his and Barbara Hepworth’s triplets for whom she eventually arranged places at the school.
258 Michael Chekhov, the Dartington Years, a film produced and directed by Martin Sharp, introduced by Simon Callow, The Michael Chekhov Centre UK in association with the Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst Trust and Palomino Films, 2002.
259 Noel Brailsford’s letter from 37 Belsize Park Gardens, NW3, is dated 11th December 1936.
260 Dorothy’s reply 21st December, DWE/G/1.
261 Frances Cornford, John’s mother, had fallen into ‘one of her worst depressions’ in 1934, which lasted for six years, hence the need for Michael’s help; see ‘Frances Cornford, 1886–1960’ by Helen Fowler in Shils and Blacker eds., Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits, 1996, pp. 137–58. Frances, whose recovery was sudden, grew increasingly friendly with Dorothy on her visits to James at Dartington, but she took James away from the school when he was eight because she discovered he had not learned to read. After a good education and a distinguished career James Cornford, who thought of Dartington as his ‘lost paradise’, eventually became chairman of the Dartington Hall Trust; he died in 2011.
