by Jane Brown
262 ‘At a memorial meeting for John Cornford, Aneurin Bevan evoked loud applause when he declared “John Cornford was a Communist and I am a member of the Labour Party. I believe that the sacrifice of Cornford, [E.C.B.] Maclaurin and the International Brigade will weld these two parties into one” – it was the age of the Popular Front and “no enemies to the Left”’; also ‘there was much talk of fraternity and solidarity’, Howarth p. 216; this suggests that Michael’s fears were in his own imagination.
263 Goronwy Rees quoted in Carter, 2001, pp. 171–2; Rosamund Lehmann, told by Goronwy Rees in 1937 that Burgess had asked him to work for anti-Fascism, replied that ‘she didn’t think it was such a shocking announcement. All the young men were going off to fight in Spain and I thought this was just Guy’s way of helping’.
264 Carter p. 130 on Rozika Rothschild’s ‘dressed-up subsidy to her son’s clever young friend’.
265 Blunt was twenty-nine, ten years older than Michael Straight, a fledgling art historian who joined the Warburg Institute later in 1937; in the August he went to the Paris Exhibition where the ‘true star’ was the small Spanish pavilion displaying Picasso’s Guernica and his etchings The Dream and Lie of Franco. Blunt’s conflicting responses, that the artist’s ‘heart was in the right place’ but ‘where is his brain? Where are his eyes?’, formed the basis of his ‘problem’ with Picasso for the rest of his career. At his death in 1983 a set of limited edition prints of The Dream and Lie of Franco were found in his belongings, treasured to his end; Carter pp. 204–5, 208. It is tempting to suppose that Blunt, finding Dorothy’s heart to be in the right place when they talked in the garden, suggested she buy her Picasso, Girl with Head on Table, painted in 1932, from Rosenberg and Helft in Bruton Street; the gallery was shortly to leave London at the outbreak of war. The painting was in the 1960 Tate Gallery Picasso exhibition, No. 128 Girl with Head on Table lent by Mrs L.K. Elmhirst; it was sold at Sotheby’s on 16th April 1975 for £27,000.
266 William Collins Whitney Foundation papers April–May 1937, DWE/US/9 explain the conversion of her annual charitable giving into this formal Foundation now organised into six categories identified by Ed Lindeman’s research as: The Arts (modern architecture, experimental theatre, indigenous American cultures); Education (experimental teaching and projects, public education); Social and Economic Planning; Peace and Freedom (international relations, cultural understanding, civil liberties, minority groups); Social Problems (housing, child labour, labour laws, consumer protection, birth control); and Research (fellowships and scholarships). The current list of grants was as usual a long one, to adult and workers’ education, the Committee on Race Relations, school leavers’ welfare and the rehabilitation of miners among the more unusual. A grant was given to a drama project in Provincetown and to the ‘holistic’ and self-sufficient Black Mountain College in North Carolina – Gropius had designed radical buildings on pilotis (not built) and the design school was created on Bauhaus lines under Josef Albers and his textile designer wife, Anni Fleischmann Albers.
267 The surviving correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt is in DWE/G/9 General correspondence R–V.
268 25th March 1937, quoted by Young p. 234, who asserts ‘She loved him, without any of the eroticism that Mischa was not keen on’; p. 368, note 33 quotes Chekhov on love: ‘its highest aspects we refer to as platonic love and romanticism; the baser, lowest end is just animal gratification’, Michael Chekhov, Michael Chekhov’s To the Director and Playwright, ed. Charles Leonard, 1963, p. 19.
269 From ‘Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall, England’, as note 255 above.
270 Young p. 233 quoting from Eileen O’Casey, Sean, 1971, p. 206; also Eyre and Wright p. 78.
271 Dorothy’s and Dartington’s role in rescuing Laban is documented in Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Rudolf Laban: An Extraordinary Life, 1998; from his refuge in Wales Laban and his protégée Jean Newlove contributed to the war effort by teaching workers to move effectively and with economy of energy, popularised as ‘Time and Motion’ study. Later, with Lisa Ullman he set up his Art of Movement Studio in Surrey, where he died in 1958. His work is carried on at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Deptford, London, in the striking and colourful new building by architects Herzog & de Meuron and Michael Craig-Martin.
272 Leonard is quoted in Young p. 236.
273 On 23rd February following [1938] Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Dorothy about a meeting of Rural Women of the World, and in her reply on 4th March Dorothy wrote, ‘Michael is very happy to be in the State Department and he is deeply grateful to you for the help you gave him... I only hope that he may be of some real use’, DWE/G/9.
274 Perry, 2005, p.84 for Michael’s meeting with Blunt; for his losing his half of the paper, p. 94.
275 Steel p. 369 for the talk Dorothy would have heard, if not at the White House.
276 The ‘green diamonds’ notebook DWE/G/S7/E/019 begins at Woods Hole on 7th August; also a previous notebook with ‘red starry’ cover, ‘what I might have done in Ship’s Hospital’ i.e. concentrate upon objects in view – the electric light bulb, the case of her travelling clock, a book binding, her glove – all realised as ‘the outer shell of protection for some fragile inner thing’; she realised ‘the need for relief from static surroundings’ so she watched the clouds through the high porthole. Mrs Eloise Sharman, 3rd August 2010, said she had never forgotten how Dorothy stayed with her in the Ship’s Hospital, and contracted mumps herself. Walter Lippmann to Bruce Bliven and to Harold Nicolson, Steel p. 374; also Bliven pp. 197 ff., on The New Republic’s editorials.
277 Beatrix Farrand to Dorothy and Leonard, my Beatrix, p.167. Her final account covered the Great Court, Forecourt, Garden front, Wilderness, Azaleas, Open Air Theatre, Rock Garden, Heath Garden, Kitchen Garden, Greenhouse, Flowers for cutting, Loggia etc., plans and paperwork $1,000 and expenses another $1,000. For a detailed description of her work see Chapter IV ‘From the New World’ in Snell, 1989.
278 Young p.234.
279 Alice Crowther was leaving for Australia where she became well known as a voice coach and speech therapist teaching at Waldorf International Schools.
280 Dorothy from the Chalet to Anna Bogue 3rd January 1939, DWE/US/10.
281 Victor, 3rd Lord Rothschild (1910–90), had inherited the ancient and beautiful Tring Park in 1935, lived there for a while but then offered the manor, park and woodlands and Walter Rothschild’s museum collection of natural history and ornithology to the British Museum as a gift; the gift was declined.
282 Her Statendam notebook is in the collection DWE/G/S7.
283 Ibid.
284 Young pp. 237–8.
285 Tagore was increasingly frail and would die in 1941.
286 The author was M.L. Haskins (1875–1957), poet, social reformer and social worker; she studied and taught at the LSE. LSE History website has a biography by Sue Donnelly, LSE Archivist.
287 See Dudley and Johnson, as Chapter 7, note 25.
288 The complete list is: household wages £67; pensions £5; £25 for eating in the White Hart; £1. 10s for other food; £1. 4s. for milk; newspapers £1. 10s; laundry £5; telephone £3. 10s; fuel/coal £3 [wood free from estate]; electricity £10; maintenance and repairs £10; wine £4; window cleaning £2. 5s.
289 Tennyson’s The Ancient Sage was first published in Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885, but reached a wider readership in Nicholson and Leeds eds., The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, 1917.
290 Political and Economic Planning adds another layer to Dorothy’s life. It had been founded in 1931 under the chairmanship of Sir Basil Blackett of the Bank of England, where early meetings were held, with Max Nicholson, Gerald Barry (later director-general of the Festival of Britain), Lawrence Neal of the school outfitters Daniel Neal & Sons, Kenneth Lindsay, Julian Huxley and Leonard Elmhirst. Weekend gatherings were held at Dartington and from 1933 to 1963 the office was at 16 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1; see John Pinder ed., 1981.
291 Israel Sieff, The Memo
irs of Israel Sieff, 1970, p. 192.
292 Nicholson, ‘PEP through the 1930s: Growth, Thinking, Performance’ in Pinder ed., pp. 32–53.
293 Kenneth Lindsay, ‘PEP through the 1930s: Organisation, Structure, People’ in Pinder ed., pp. 9–31, especially ‘Origin and Birth’ and ‘The Contribution of Dartington’.
294 Liddell Hart quoted in Cox, Chapter 2 ‘Dartington as I found it’, p. 20.
295 Young pp. 308–9.
296 The statue of Flora, ‘a later 17th century figure cast in lead’, was given to Leonard and Dorothy by the Dartington community on Foundation Day 1967, Snell p. 68.
297 Quoted in Young pp. 283–4 and comes from her lecture notes for her talks in America, which were typed out after her death, DWE/Lectures/1; LKE/USA/10.
298 Letter from Michael Chekhov in America, 25th October 1940, DWE/Arts/23.
299 Dante Sonata was first performed in London on 23rd January 1940.
300 Typescript ‘My American Talk’ from Noel Brailsford, DWE/G/1.
301 Lord Lothian died ‘in post’ on 12th December 1940.
302 That dinner was more influential than has been recognised for with presidential approval it gained for Britain – in the known, trusted and non-political Elmhirsts – the confidence of the Department of Agriculture. Wilson’s influential career in the Department (USDA) is covered in some detail in Phillips, 2007.
303 The ‘Food for Defense program’, Phillips, pp. 215 ff. Nancy Astor wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt asking to make a speaking tour on Britain’s behalf, but because of her strong political allegiance she was politely refused.
304 Natasha Litvin, aged twenty-one, married Stephen Spender on 9th April 1941 and after a fortnight in Cornwall they arrived at Dartington where she relished the rare opportunity to play on a concert grand piano.
305 All their schedules, stops and comments come from Dorothy’s 1941 diary; notes for her talks are filed with LKE/USA/10.
306 Dorothy carefully noted that Leonard was to see Sir Owen Chalkley, British consul, and Sir Arthur Salter, chief of the Shipping Mission and his colleague in PEP, and consequently it has been suggested that Leonard’s meetings had something to do with America’s decision to give the Royal Navy the infamous ‘Fifty Ships’ as a symbol of good intent; his brother, now Air Commodore Thomas Elmhirst, may have been influential. Leonard’s war work, rather secret, via USDA and PEP, let alone his influence in India, has never been explained, but post-war governments made repeated offers of a title as a reward, which he consistently refused.
307 Bliven p. 197.
308 Beatrice Straight was now twenty-seven, a successful actor with much of her mother’s independence of mind. Louis Dolivet was extremely handsome but came as a surprise to Dorothy, i.e. a complete stranger; he was possibly a friend of Michael Straight’s.
309 The Veterans Patriotic Hall has now been renamed in honour of Bob Hope, who did so much for military morale during the war.
310 Stewart Lynch, who had been appointed by Beatrix Farrand, was now unwell, and so David Calthorpe was the Hall’s gardener; Snell p. 49.
311 Todd Gray, Exeter in the 1940s: War, Destruction and Rebirth, 2004, p. 70 ff.
312 Snell p. 49.
313 Reynolds, 1996, p. 161.
314 The Ministry of Information correspondence is in DWE/Lectures 1942–1945/1/A.
315 For WEA talks, DWE/L/1/B; for Women’s Institutes and Townswomen’s Guilds, DWE/L/1/C.
316 Frances Spalding, John Piper, Mfanwy Piper: Lives in Art, 2009, p. 228.
317 Margaret Mead was well known for her early researches in the South Seas: Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.
318 Cecil Collins, as in Chapter 9, note 4, and Naomi Rowe, In Celebration: Cecil Collins, 2008.
319 DWE/A/2; Procession of Fools, The Happy Hour, two of Dorothy’s ‘treasures’ and three other paintings by Collins, with works by Alfred Wallis, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, David Jones, Bernard Leach and Lucie Rie were sent to Sotheby’s/Dartington Hall Trust sales 15th/16th November 2011 ‘sold to support the Trust’s work in the Arts, Social Justice and Sustainability’.
320 Reynolds, particularly pp. 354 ff on D-Day.
321 Christopher Martin’s work at Dartington is described by Michael Young in The Elmhirsts of Dartington, and with generosity and affection in the early pages of Cox, The Arts at Dartington 1940–1983; in a letter to the author 7th October 2012 Peter Cox wrote more of his relationship with the Martins.
322 Robert Herrick (1591–1674), ‘To Daffodils’, one of the Five Flower Songs set to music by Benjamin Britten and dedicated to ‘Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst on the occasion of their twenty-fifth Wedding Anniversary’. Herrick was a favourite poet of Dorothy’s; he was given the living of Dean Prior just to the west of Dartington in 1630, lost it between 1647 and 1660, but spent the last fourteen years of his life in the village. See also Boris Ford ed., Benjamin Britten’s Poets: An anthology of the poems he set to music, 1994, rev., 1996, p. 157.
323 Peter Cox and Jack Dobbs eds., Imogen Holst at Dartington, 1988, Imogen’s candid interview with Jack Dobbs, pp. 9–27.
324 Cox and Dobbs p. 30; also Cox, Chapter 4 ‘Working with Imogen’.
325 From Dorothy’s long hand-written eulogy, DWE/G/Roosevelt.
326 Ibid.
327 Cox p. 131.
328 Dorothy to Leonard in Bengal, 14th August 1944, quoted in Youngp. 313.
329 The quotations from her Garden Notebooks are from Snell, Chapter 7, pp. 72 ff.
330 Percy Cane (1881–1976); his work is described in detail by Snell, Chapter 5 ‘Garden into Landscape’.
331 The Gardens at Dartington Hall, p. 7; Dorothy wrote this guide in 1965.
332 In the critical conversations I had prior to writing this book, with Lord Young who died in 2002, Michael Straight who died in 2004 and James Cornford who died in 2011, I gained a single strong impression that I had to ‘rescue’ Dorothy from the powerful, perhaps overbearing men who surrounded her.
333 Eleanor Roosevelt, On My Own, 1959, Chapter 5 ‘With the U.N. in London’, p. 69.
334 ‘a lady who lived on a farm’ brought the eggs, ibid. p. 68.
335 Carpenter, 1992, pp. 221–4.
336 Ibid. pp. 226, 236.
337 Cox, Chapter 5 ‘Looking After Visiting Musicians’, especially p. 40; also Carpenter, pp. 236–7.
338 Cox pp. 28–42 quoting Dorothy’s letter of 28th January 1947 about her meeting with Anne Wood.
339 Kynaston, 2007, Chapter 7 ‘Glad to Sit at Home’, p. 176.
340 Letters Across the Atlantic, correspondence between Leonard and Dorothy and their daughter Ruth, 1939–46, letters found after Ruth’s death in 1986 and edited by her daughter Kate (Kathryn) Caddy for private circulation. The letters are affectionate but in reality, when she was back in England, ‘Ruth fought a losing battle to be close to her mother’ and after unsatisfactory relationships at Dartington she met and became engaged to Maurice Ash.
341 Louis Dolivet, The United Nations: A Handbook on the New World Organization, 1946, preface by Trygve Lie (First Secretary-General). This book and his marriage confirmed Dorothy’s faith in Louis enough to give him a significant sum for his magazine, supposedly $250,000.
342 John Wellingham in conversation with the author, 2013. His interest in Shakespeare was allied to his expertise in Baroque and Early Music, especially for the organ, which he continued to teach.
343 Diana Barnato Walker, Spreading My Wings, 1994, pp. 197–9. Whitney Straight died on 5th April 1979; Diana died in 2008.
344 Dorothy to Peter Cox in America, 15th February 1947.
345 Bliven, Chapter 13, pp. 266–71. Paul Robeson and the folk singer Pete Seeger both joined Michael on the Wallace campaign.
346 Henry Moore quoted in The Gardens at Dartington Hall, p. 16.
347 Will Arnold-Forster, the marine painter, lived at Eagle’s Nest at Zennor on the Co
rnish coast; he was the widower of Katharine ‘Ka’ Cox, Rupert Brooke’s ‘the best I can do in the way of a widow’; he died in 1951.
348 Uday Shankar was already well known in Europe as an Indian dancer, but the younger Ravi (1920–2012) became internationally famous for his sitar playing, eventually living in America.
349 Sir Miles Thomas, Out on a Wing, 1964.
350 Young p. 316.
351 Robert Herrick, ‘To Daffodils’.
352 Parker, 2014, pp. 11–12.
353 Sutherland, p. 345.
354 Frederick Gibberd, Ben Hyde Harvey, Len White et al., Harlow: The Story of a New Town, 1980, p. 244. The Elmgrant Trust had been set up in 1936 by the Elmhirsts and Beatrice Straight to give grants beyond the immediate Dartington spheres; initial funds were given to the Harlow Art Trust, chairman Sir Philip Hendy, and Henry Moore was commissioned for his majestic Family Group completed in 1956.
355 Michael Straight, On Green Spring Farm, 2004, his last book. See also Ross Netherton and Nan Netherton, Green Spring Farm, 1970, a history resulting from interviews with Michael and Belinda Straight, including Appendix G ‘A Visit from Mr Polevoy’, The New Republic 16th July 1956, a Project Gutenberg eBook online.
356 Harold Nicolson had been the Labour MP for West Leicester for ten years until 1945. He and Dorothy having politics and gardening in common were easy acquaintances and met at the RHS Vincent Square shows; orange notebook DWE/G/S7/E.
357 Kynaston pp. 391, 535.
358 Ibid. pp. 539–41 on Young’s disenchantment.
359 William Elmhirst has written of this part of his life, William & The Solar Quest, 2010, see thesolarquest-theonlyway.com.
360 Sutherland p. 354.
361 Five Flower Songs, Op. 47 (1950), see Ford ed. The poems are Herrick’s ‘To Daffodils’, ‘The Succession of the Four Sweet Months’, George Crabbe’s ‘Marsh Flowers’, ‘The Poor and their Dwellings’, ‘The Lover’s Journey’, John Clare’s ‘The Evening Primrose’ and ‘The Ballad of Green Broom’ (anon).
