by Jane Brown
Every Monday night we sew together, the children learn to darn socks and do their own mending – on Tuesdays we have Dancing Class for the older students, workers on the estate and the maids of our household. We feel very proud of ourselves for achieving the Charleston, and even Whitney [now fourteen] is no longer scornful of our efforts. Then on Wednesday evenings Mr Heuser [of the poultry department] is dissecting chickens and giving the most wonderful lessons in physiology, anatomy and biology – the children are thrilled and really learning a lot of elementary science. On Thursday evenings Boxing comes along – I wish you could see Michael and the younger ones with great boxing gloves on, trying to look fierce – Friday and Saturday are free evenings, and then on Sunday we all sit on the floor around the fire in the Music Room and either read aloud or have discussions.166
With school life in full swing in the November her diary has a note of a trip to London to see Mr Gilliatt, who confirms that she is pregnant. They spend Christmas at Dartington and then go to Lenzerheide in the Swiss Alps for ten days, returning in time for Dorothy to see Mr Gilliatt again before they are back home for the school opening on 14th January. Their house in the corner of the Courtyard is ready for them to move in, some twenty-one months since Dorothy had first gazed upon it in ruins, and now they and the school activities are at the heart of things. The Great Hall is still roofless, being subjected to a patient process of restoration, with trees on the estate being felled for the roof timbers.167 The distinguished seventy-year-old Henry Avray Tipping168 took his first look at the garden, and the potter Bernard Leach came over from St Ives with his assistant Jane Fox-Strangways, ‘the foremost lady potter in England’, Dorothy tells Susie:
[who] is going to live and work here. We are fixing up a shed for her where she will have her wheel and all her materials for pottery and designing, and both Beatrice and Michael are planning to study pottery from the ground up. It is really a beautiful craft I think, and a person like Miss Fox-Strangways puts real originality into it. Her pottery is like no other I have ever seen, and to hear her talk about form and its meaning gives one a new insight into the value of Art.169
Then, on 6th March she was overcome with ‘dreaded pains’ and the next morning her baby girl ‘slipped away’ gently. She held the tiny foetal form, ‘quite red and soft but complete and unblemished’ in a little soap dish. Next day Leonard came in to see her before lunch and found her weeping; she wrote that he ‘showed me my own weakness and, incidentally, his strength’. He said, ‘Don’t let yourself want things so intensely.’ They read the words of St John together, Christ’s answer to Nicodemus:
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.170
Leonard apparently urged her, ‘Be yourself, don’t always strive for results, for action. Learn to become yourself.’171 Unsurprisingly tears spattered the beginning of her letter to Susie written a few days later while she was still in bed: ‘I miss you dreadfully, and so often long for your companionship.’ She confesses that losing her baby was her own fault as she had been moving heavy furniture around in their new house, which hardly lessened her misery. On the other hand, Ruth, coming up to her first birthday, ‘was adorable, and just reaching, I should say, one of the really dangerous stages, when she scales heights and drops off, tries to fall out of the window, and puts everything in her mouth’. Ruth’s nursery was on the top floor of the tall house.
Of their general progress she became philosophical:
Things are going very well here, though at times we have a fearful sense of the inadequacy of it all. The possibilities of education are so vast, and the glimpses that one gets at times of what it might be make one conscious of all one’s shortcomings. But I suppose the great thing really is to make a start, and provided one can keep one’s eyes open and respond to the demands of the moment, the future will take care of itself.
She finished more cheerfully:
We are at present on the trail of two musicians for the staff, both of them composers and from all accounts intensely alive to the need to bring music home in simple ways to the lives of everyone. We hope to have a school orchestra as well as a big chorus before long and even now in our amateur efforts at chorus singing we are finding enormous satisfaction.172
The Easter holidays were spent in New York. Dorothy had reluctantly decided to part with 1130 Fifth Avenue – which had been built for her and Willard’s political ambitions – as she had an offer from a lawyer who could afford to keep it intact.173 Their new base was an apartment at 1172 Park Avenue, with a housekeeper to look after friends who stayed in her absences. It was a dull and hard-working trip, there are signs that she was feeling not at all well, perhaps not fully recovered from her miscarriage, and she had now passed her fortieth birthday.
At home in mid-May her diary shows nothing but visits to her doctor and dentist and her school duties. In late June she had the shocking news of the death of her brother Payne, who had collapsed after a game of tennis at his home at Manhasset. He was only fifty-one. Her homesickness for New York, losing 1130 and grieving for Payne made her sensitive to her loneliness in Devon, where she had not exactly had a warm welcome. Leonard had brought his ‘Socialist’ wife to the most deeply Conservative of counties, to Dartington, which had been owned by the same family for four centuries, and was now being subjected to lavish and speedy expenditure of American money. They did not deal in ‘public relations’ and were too busy to explain what they were doing, the schoolchildren could be seen ‘running wild’ in their great adventure playground rather than walking in crocodiles, and so there were inevitably lurid rumours. Leonard, in his tweeds, merged in with his farming fellows well enough, but Dorothy, expensively dressed and usually in her big American car, was seen as an alien being metaphorically clothed in dollar bills.174
The truth was Dorothy had become uncharacteristically shy, and not a little fearful. She realised that this was not the England of her pre-war visits to her sister Polly, and she had not understood how the formalities of Polly’s house parties and high society junkets at Ascot and Henley had protected her with a kind of armour plating, which she had now lost. Leonard’s urging her to ‘be yourself’ and that she should not ‘want things so intensely’, apart from being tactless to the point of cruelty to a mother who had just lost her baby, depressed her; had he no idea how much of her ‘self’ she had sacrificed? She had written that ‘we came together to England’ and it was ‘no longer her personal story’. She had merged her ‘self’ into the duopoly – the indivisible Leonard-and-Dorothy – which united their decisions about Dartington. To outsiders this seemed a fortress mentality, and Dorothy’s clothes, which she continued to buy in New York, and her car, were her defences of her frail remnant self.
The more tangible evidence of the ‘fortress Dartington’ was the amount of building of cottages and school departments that was going on – Dorothy may have joked about ‘our village’ after she and their Clerk of Works Albert Fincham had chosen the sites for some new cottages – but this amount of development could only have been carried out in a private world even in those days of an embryonic planning system.175 Dartington’s country neighbours were innately suspicious of new buildings, and the wider mood was strongly in favour of conserving England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ from too much concrete; the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, founded in 1926, had strong support in Devon. The net gain was in local employment. A school-style photograph taken on a fine day in 1927 shows no fewer than eighty-eight Dartingtonians, including two infants, one being Ruth sitting on ‘Jeff’s’ lap. An absurdly young-looking Dorothy and Leonard are surrounded by rows of forestry, farming and building men, male and female teachers and household staff. In the front row sit eight school seniors and seven juniors.
Dorothy struggled to the end of the summer term and to a first community effort, the Dartington Cottage Garden Show –
which put her and Leonard to shame as hardly anything had been done to the Hall’s overgrown garden. Mr Avray Tipping could not understand why they had not leapt into action on his recommendations, and Leonard had explained:
It is quite impossible to do everything at once; and as you know, with a gang of 200 men on construction work of one kind or another, with a school into the bargain, it has not been easy to find the time and leisure which are essential if one is to take the right kind of interest in garden reconstruction… I have insisted from the start that the bread and butter end of this experiment must come first, and that we are not an ordinary country house for entertainment.176
Tipping was not used to coming second after ‘bread and butter’, and after he had renovated the tiltyard terraces and planted good yew hedging he closed his ‘professional connection’. Dorothy resolved to write to Beatrix Farrand.
Their summer holiday was in Spain, with Whitney, Beatrice and Michael but not little Ruth. For a while Dorothy’s energies were renewed, but when school started she soon tired, simply with the amount she had to do. On hearing that Nancy Astor was speaking in Totnes she invited her to Dartington, but Nancy’s schedule was too tight. The rebuff hurt more than it should, for she needed allies. Early in 1928 she made a mercy dash to New York, accomplished in three weeks so spending little more than a week there, because Beatrice Fletcher had written to say that her mother Marraine was ill. Marraine Bend, not a lady to reveal her age, must have been over eighty; she had been Dorothy’s adoptive mother for more than twenty years, and now they were together for the last time. What remained of her visit was spent with her Committee on Commitments, for far from devoting her resources to one big project – she gave Leonard all he needed for Dartington – she still maintained her charitable giving of $100,000 a year.
The year’s causes illustrate her thinking – Carrie Chapman Catt’s Women Against War, the Museum of Natural History’s project on American Indians at Pueblo Village in New Mexico, Barnard College’s summer school for women workers in industry, the League of Women Voters, the progressive Bennington College in Vermont, and her Willard Straight fellowship at the New School for Social Research. Miss Bogue listed ninety appeals for the current six months, page after page headed ‘My dear Mrs Elmhirst’, recalling meetings or friends in common, or simply forwarding their worthy cause. They reflect Dorothy’s unfailing loyalty to the places and people she knew – Chinese Famine Relief, German Student Exchange (John Rothschild’s introduction of the new Youth Movement into American universities), the Bulgarian Folklore School in New York, the Edward MacDowell Colony for artists and musicians at Peterborough, New Hampshire, the Arnold Arboretum at Brookline, Massachusetts, the Long Island Biological Association, George Washington’s Sulgrave Manor in England, the Actors’ Fund, the Red Cross, kindergartens, bible societies, cancer research, the Willard Straight Agricultural School in the Philippines, Pioneer Youth of America, mass education for the Chinese, co-operative banks and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Her Committee – Herbert Croly, Edouard Lindeman and Ruth Morgan – usually met in Dorothy’s absence; their decisions were collated by Miss Bogue and Dorothy authorised the grants for each session.177
Back at Dartington, 1928 only merited a Collins Diamond Diary, a modest object which recorded her doctor’s appointments and activities with the children, her own and the school’s. In June they escaped to Aviemore, Nairn and the Gairloch for some golf and fishing. On 29th June Dorothy saw Mr Gilliatt in London who confirmed her pregnancy. This time she would be careful. Anna Bogue and Ruth Morgan visited Dartington in July, and in August she and Leonard sailed from Newcastle for Bergen, for a month in Scandinavia which included some time at an Oslo conference on internationalism. In September she was clearly feeling better and shopping at Heal’s for her new retreat. To her great joy they had managed to buy an Alpine (or Adirondacks) style chalet overlooking Whitsand Bay at Portwrinkle on the Cornish side of the Tamar. The Chalet, with a pretty wooden balcony and upper storey of fir logs, was built in 1908 for Lady Beatrice Carew Pole; it was secluded and quiet and allowed her to sit in peace and gaze out onto the ever-changing sea.178
Once again, with her baby growing inside her, other desires weave themselves into reality. ‘From the earliest days at Dartington,’ she wrote, ‘we have tried to infuse our life with the elements of theatre… one day we resolved to invite a touring company to give a performance here.’ Friends had mentioned Maurice Browne playing in The Unknown Warrior, and Dorothy found the text immediately and read it, finding it ‘the most profoundly moving of all the war plays’. She was so deeply affected that she ‘could not rest until it had been given here’.179 Browne was in his forties, disillusioned with soldiering in the South African War, a poet, bookseller and actor/producer in America, reduced to nine happy months in a shack on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco until his mother sent him his fare home. Fate had brought him The Unknown Warrior role, and fate conspired – as his mother lived in Devon – to arrange his meeting with the Elmhirsts. It was rather a replay of the birth of The New Republic, with Dorothy perceiving another’s passion reaching out to her own, and her quiet response. There was her love of the theatre, and her adventure with the Provincetown Players who were part of the Little Theatre movement, and so, she discovered, was Maurice Browne; with the American actress Ellen Van Volkenburg he had started the Chicago Little Theatre, putting on Rupert Brooke’s play Lithuania. ‘Little Theatre’ was the guardian of the ‘eternal verities’, of beauty and ‘its articulation in art’ and the players’ service was ‘not lightly to be given, nor to a light cause, nor for profit’.180 Miss Van Volkenburg, a Pre-Raphaelite beauty and experienced as a director, was keen to work at Dartington, but the flamboyant Browne, in teddy bear fur coat and gold earrings, might be less easily settled.
About ten days after their first talk in November, Browne reported that he had seen a Sunday night run-through of a ‘wonderful’ play called Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff, with an actor called Laurence Olivier playing the lead role of Captain Stanhope. Robert Cecil Sherriff was an insurance salesman who wrote plays to raise funds for his Kingston-upon-Thames rowing club. Journey’s End was based on his own experiences in a dug-out at Saint-Quentin on the Western Front, and he felt it was his best yet. Browne said it was ‘difficult’, meaning it was too serious a portrayal of the hopelessness of war and that no commercial West End theatre would touch it – would the Elmhirsts put it on? Dorothy knew immediately that they would, but Leonard cautiously asked for some costs – being a theatrical impresario had not been included in their great project, as far as he knew! Browne came up with the Savoy Theatre and addressed Leonard and Dorothy as ‘My dears’, in the way Rupert Brooke had written to him and Nellie; ‘everything settled, Journey’s End to open around 21st January’ – the start of a six months’ lease at £400 per week all included.
Journey’s End did open at the Savoy Theatre on 21st January 1929, making theatrical history. Browne was the producer, it was directed by James Whale, and Stanhope was played by Colin Clive, as Olivier was committed elsewhere. The critics found the first night ‘flawless’ and wrote rapturous reviews. Almost everyone connected with the play was working in memory of someone maimed or killed in the war; the audiences sensed this and as so many felt the same the play’s success grew by word of mouth until it was confirmed a ‘smash hit’.181
At Dartington Dorothy had retired into her pregnancy and a family Christmas. Then it snowed, and snowed, and they became snowbound. It was not until a Sunday in mid-February that they managed to get to London with Jane Fox-Strangways, who was off to Egypt, and Marjorie Wise, who stayed with Dorothy while Leonard returned home. Dorothy and Marjorie saw Journey’s End on Monday the 25th, with no fuss, as no one knew that Dorothy was their fairy godmother. On the Tuesday afternoon she felt ‘signals of disturbance’ and went into the nursing home; she noted a ‘friendly visit’ from Mr Gilliatt at 5.30 p.m., his return at 8.30 p.m. when she was sedated and the
birth of her baby son at 8.50 p.m. He weighed 6 lbs. 4 oz., had dark hair, a wide brow and tiny pointed chin and she called him Bill. The next day she wrote, ‘Can’t sleep from sheer happiness – what blessedness to have a boy.’ Leonard, she noted, was ‘quietly happy’.182
‘Bill’ was baptised William Knight Elmhirst at Easter in the Old St Germain’s church as they were all staying at The Chalet. His godparents were Beatrice Straight, now fourteen and a half, Leonard’s brother Richard, Louise Croly and Maurice Browne, the last two being ‘over the sea’. Dorothy noted Easter Sunday as ‘a day of peace and joy with the grandparents’ – William’s middle name was for his grandmother Mary Knight Elmhirst, which Dorothy added ‘suggests romance and poetry and adventure and high surprise’.183
At the end of the summer term, and less than six months after William’s birth, Dorothy and Leonard set out for India, taking Michael, now nearly thirteen, with them. Michael remembered the trip as the first time he had been alone with his mother and stepfather, and for the discomforts they encountered. From the ship at Bombay they travelled by train to Tagore’s estate near Bolpur in West Bengal. Naturally Leonard wanted to show Dorothy the Institute for Rural Reconstruction, Shriniketan at Surul, which he had established on her scholarship in the early 1920s, and then they were Tagore’s honoured guests at the ashram at Santiniketan, a beautiful place with its marble-floored prayer hall. Tagore was approaching seventy, with the appearance of a white-haired prophet of great spiritual beauty, his presence was hypnotic. His worldly honours were laid aside and he preached the virtues of education and enlightenment to his community and the wider listening world.184 Dorothy and Leonard were both busy and absorbed, leaving Michael to the mercies of boys of his own age who were not spiritually inclined. Michael’s abiding memory was that there was only one water closet, which he was allowed to use only after Tagore had completed his toilet. He recalled his parents as uncaring. ‘At times my stepfather was remote and my mother naïve.’185 It seems more likely that Dorothy was half-stupefied in waves of post-natal depression brought on by the alien surroundings and diet and lack of bathrooms. At Nice on the return journey they found a letter from Victor Elmhirst waiting for them; he had been left in charge at Dartington and things were not going too well.