by Jane Brown
There were bad reports about the school. It had always seemed puzzling that Dorothy, usually so open-minded and thorough in her researches, had disregarded the experience of other English progressive schools – notably Bedales in Hampshire and A.S. Neill’s Summerhill – and gone her own way with Dartington. She must have been conscious of this, and perhaps fearing her independence of mind might appear as hubris, they had asked the school’s doctor for a report on the children. He had noticed symptoms of fatigue, which he thought due to lack of any rules about rest periods or bedtimes; he thought periods of quiet reading would be more beneficial than Dorothy’s lively Question Club sessions and sing-songs. Even more hurtful was a report from visitors from her revered Teachers’ College at Columbia University which indicated that Dewey’s principles had not been successfully translated into the school’s life, and it was vital that they appointed a professional and experienced headmaster. This paragon would have to be found, so in the meantime Victor Elmhirst and John Wales were acting heads.186
In the September of 1929 the school reopened with twenty-five pupils between the ages of eight and eighteen. Michael Young recalled how his introduction had been the sight of a ‘big boy’, Whitney Straight, on his back under a Model T Ford: ‘He gave me a ride in it, reversing at speed up perilously steep fields as though that was what the Ford was made for.’187 (Michael Straight, more reliable on cars, said it was a Riley 9, with which Whitney became an enthusiastic competitor at hill-climbs.) Cars and motorbikes were allowed for the seniors and Whitney was a good advertisement, steady and responsible and settled into his English life, too absorbed in his passions for speed and jazz to be worried about his unconventional home. He had earned some local fame by turning up at Haldon airfield, a newly opened flying school, proffering a £1 note and asking for as much flying as that would buy. Haldon’s owner, William Parkhouse, put Whitney to work driving a tractor with a roller crushing flints on the runway, and taught him to fly so that he had earned his first pilot’s licence just after his seventeenth birthday, and soon bought a De Havilland Gypsy Moth.188
Serendipity had stepped into the search for a headmaster. The companionable Marjorie Wise had returned to America, to Philadelphia where her sister Ena was married to the head of Oak Lane Country Day School, a twenty-nine-year-old Briton called William Burnlee Curry. Curry was presumably willing, and Leonard and Dorothy liked the sound of him, and planned to see him in America. For the time being they were embroiled in the plans for Dartington’s consolidation, the second stage of development, as their project had outgrown their sole charge, Leonard’s single-handed management and Dorothy’s sole financing in four short years. Now, in 1929, Dartington Hall Limited was set up as a private company with a share capital of £65,000, with Leonard as chairman of the Board of Directors and Dr W.K. ‘Bill’ Slater as managing director. The company was to manage and promote the commercial departments, the farms and orchards, the textile mill and Staverton Builders’ contracts, each under a departmental manager. Later the Dartington Hall Trust was formed as a charity vested with the estate and its maintenance, including the Hall, and with responsibilities for education and research. Dorothy was a trustee, and their meetings assume regular places in her diary and frame her activities.189
They discovered that Mr Curry, as Dorothy steadfastly called him, while he became ‘Bill’ to others, had degrees from London and Cambridge, had taught at Bedales and gone to his headship at Oak Lane, a progressive day school run on John Dewey’s theories. Dorothy warmed to him when she knew that Oak Lane had a special relationship with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and also with a young modern architect, William Lescaze, thus giving the pupils two most desirable extra perspectives. She found both Currys, William and Ena, to be ‘extraordinarily fine’ human beings. The financial organisation of the Trust allowed Curry’s appointment as ‘Director of Education to the Social and Educational Experiment at Dartington Hall’, at a salary of £1,000 a year.190
Headmaster Curry demanded a new house and insisted on bringing his own architects, the Howe & Lescaze Partnership from Philadelphia. They built his very expensive and glamorous ‘celestial house with wings’ as Dorothy called it, referring to the blue exterior finish on some walls which ‘on a fine day match the sky itself’. She thought it ‘clean, stark and beautiful’ and wondered ‘whether in a few years we shall regard every other type of architecture stuffy, suffocating and artificial’.191 The interior was spacious, with chairs designed by Mies van der Rohe, a fitted kitchen complete with Aga cooker, guest and staff rooms and sleeping terraces. Two garages housed the motors that the headmaster owned at various times, vintage Rolls-Royces, a Bentley and the huge Hispano-Suiza that was to be used in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Curry delighted in ‘the special clarity’ of his house, and told Country Life, ‘Serenity, clarity and a kind of open-ness are its distinguishing features, and I am disposed to believe that they have important psychological effects upon the occupants. Of this, however, it is too early to speak confidently.’192
Before too long Headmaster Curry was seen to be a resounding success, the numbers of pupils soared into the hundreds and Dartington Hall School fulfilled the trustees’ hopes. The style, charisma and particularly the laughter – ‘he talked so well, laughed so much, sometimes deep, sometimes high, at his own jokes even more loud and long than at other people’s’ – of the headmaster marked him out as the star in the Dartington firmament.193 Inevitably he had usurped Dorothy’s role, and the clause in his contract that demanded complete freedom from interference ‘in all matters of educational administration’ seemed aimed directly at her. Ena Curry became one of Dorothy’s closest friends, one of a small literary discussion group that took the place of her beloved Book Class in her English life. Her relationship with the headmaster was always visibly correct, appointments were made through their respective secretaries for their frequent morning meetings, and for his invitations to business lunches or dinner with important guests. It has to be admitted, though no one may have uttered the words, that Dorothy’s dream school had been wrenched from her grasp.
Eight: ‘The Yeast in the Leaven’, the Arts Come to Devon194
Once more, consolation came out of the blue, this time from the old grey stones of Dartington. The builders working on the porch of the Great Hall had uncovered a carved ceiling boss of a white hart couched on a huge red-petalled rose, the rose of Lancaster. The hart was chained with a golden coronet around its neck. Leonard’s researches into Dartington’s history revealed that it had been the home of John Holand, or Holland, a nephew of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, into whose mouth Shakespeare had put his ‘scept’red isle’ speech in King Richard II. Coincidentally there were newspaper reports of the ‘Wilton Diptych’ being acquired for the National Gallery – this was King Richard’s travelling altarpiece, and there on the gilded panels were angels wearing the same white hart badge.195
There was more to come. On behalf of Whitney, who was now curious about his forebears, Dorothy had sent to New York for the solid volumes of Whitney pedigree which her father had commissioned. Melville’s Ancestry of John Whitney had identified the Lord Marshal, who orders the joust between Harry Bolingbroke and the Duke of Norfolk in Act 1, Scene 3, to be in reality Robert de Whitney, who died in battle in 1402. This Robert de Whitney was the real King Richard’s Knight Marshal but he was also Sheriff of Hereford where the Whitney lands lay, and so naming him in the play would have exposed his partiality for Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford and his liege lord. In all probability they were not the first Whitneys to come to Dartington, which was a comfort, and this discovery warmed Dorothy’s passion for Shakespeare and his plays into life. She had found, where the hill rose on the far side of the tilting ground, her favourite outlook to where ‘the land in the distance seems to take the form of soft green waves, silently rolling in’, Gaunt’s ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’.
Maurice Browne, one of William’s godfathers, w
as absent from the christening because he was in America persuading Paul Robeson to play Othello in London. Robeson had been successful in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in Greenwich Village, enough recommendation for Dorothy. She had been to one of his Albert Hall concerts of spirituals, her favourite was ‘Steal Away’, and Michael Young remembered that Robeson sang spirituals in the evenings at Dartington when they were rehearsing Othello. Peggy Ashcroft was Desdemona; Dorothy noted her ‘most beautiful voice’ and that ‘physically she and Paul Robeson made an astonishing picture’. With Journey’s End transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre, Othello opened at the Savoy on 19th May 1930, pioneering Shakespeare in the commercial West End. The reviewers applauded a brave production.196 Audiences were good at first but then faded away and the play came off in June. Journey’s End also came off in June after six hundred performances – ‘Messrs. Sherriff and Browne have good cause to congratulate themselves upon the last eighteen months,’ purred the Evening Standard on 9th June. Browne boasted he had made a fortune; he celebrated rather too well and blotted his copybook by ‘outing’ his backers, ‘the couple who do good by stealth’ whose identities everyone longed to know.197
In America that May, Herbert Croly died a disillusioned man who had been ‘drifting slowly off into the ether of mysticism’ in the footsteps of the elusive Alfred Orage. Croly’s hopes of the post-war revival of The New Republic had foundered in falling circulation figures and new rivals; as Edmund Wilson recently arrived from Vanity Fair pointed out, ‘The editors, who started out as gay young free thinkers, have become respectable to the point of stodginess... they are also very much at odds with each other.’ Wilson never minced words and had already told a friend, ‘When you become a regular editor at the NR, you draw a large salary and never go near the office, but stay home and write books.’198 Had Croly’s work on Willard Straight created this impression? Croly never came to terms with Dorothy’s leaving, and her continued financial support of the paper was not enough; his letters to her have the sadness of a lost soul. ‘I would give anything to have the right and opportunity to do something for your protection,’ he had written, with a little consolation ‘that you are fully capable of protecting yourself. For you are not only brave and generous but you are wise and strong... and incorruptibly independent.’199
For Dorothy an even worse blow came in late October when Harry Whitney died, aged fifty-eight. Her glorious elder brother had given her joy and comfort and her education into the ways of the world. There was poignancy in his passing: she remembered how people remarked on his wasted abilities, how Willard’s friend Grayson Murphy had written from France saying that Harry should be with the Red Cross – ‘He could have done great things in developing the entente between our country and our Allies – I should hate for anyone as fine as Harry to be out of it all.’200 Now, at his end it turned out that Americans loved him for being a great sportsman; his polo, his sailing, his racing successes and the manner of his success had been good for the nation and they were lauded in long obituaries of praise. His expectedly quiet family funeral was overcome with more than a thousand mourners, from stable lads to senators, who crowded into St Bartholomew’s church. Harry was buried at Woodlawn in the Whitney plot. Gertrude came home and shut herself into his room for days on end; Dorothy, who remained in England, cabled:
My heart is with you all it has been a great experience to have such a generous warm hearted and loyal brother my love to you dear Gertrude you have been a good companion bless you for it.
At Dartington the profits from Journey’s End funded the drama under the lively influence of Nellie Van. Beatrice Straight, seventeen in August 1931 – ‘charming and obsessed with theatre and dancing, movies and lipstick’, in her brother Michael’s opinion – had never wavered in her acting ambitions. She served her apprenticeship with Nellie, and together they put on an open-air production of Milton’s Comus (as Rupert Brooke had done at Cambridge) and Woman of the Vaux, a play about Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, the Georgian actress and playwright and favourite of the Prince of Wales. Nellie and Beatrice travelled to Seattle together, to the Cornish School of Arts for additional training for Beatrice and to recruit artists for Dartington. Dorothy had mourned her school for a moment, and then found her new vision: prompted by images of the past, the ‘white hart’ and Shakespeare, King Richard’s knights, be-wigged Jacobeans and graceful Georgians, she saw that once again Dartington’s Courtyard could be, not the filthy farmyard they had found, but the backdrop to colourful and creative lives, the working lives of the painters, potters, actors, dancers and musicians who would teach and perform there.
The puppeteer Richard Odlin and dancer Louise Soelberg were the first arrivals from Seattle. Richard Odlin and Nellie Van set about converting the sixteenth-century barn at the entrance to the Hall’s Courtyard into a theatre. Louise Soelberg taught dance and was soon married to Richard Elmhirst. The painter Mark Tobey arrived, trailing his considerable reputation as an abstract artist of mercurial personality.201 Tobey was forty-one, skilled in Chinese calligraphy and a convert to Baha’ism; Dorothy was fascinated and enjoyed his company. ‘Today we have been to three galleries with Mark,’ she reported home to Leonard from London, ‘he has discovered for himself and for us a young English painter who is “the real thing”. His name is Ben Nicholson – in a moment of weakness I bought two.’202
She had caught the phrase ‘the real thing’ from gallery talk, it was the grail for Ben Nicholson and Christopher ‘Kit’ Wood in their landscape painting. One of the Nicholson paintings was Cumberland Landscape (Hare Hill) painted in 1928 from Bankshead, where he lived with his wife Winifred and their son Jake; Wood was staying with them and had painted a similar view, and when he thanked them he wrote, ‘I am absolutely on the verge of the real thing after what I saw and learnt at Bankshead.’ That summer they had all gone to Cornwall, to Feock and St Ives, where Nicholson and Wood had found Alfred Wallis, who painted his primitives on card and odd pieces of wood with ‘the restraint of colour and the sense of movement of a master’.203 Dorothy soon acquired Winifred Nicholson’s Fishing Boat, Feock and The Island, St Ives, but she really treasured Winifred Nicholson’s flowers – Winifred had found ‘flowers the perfect subject to combine her interest in colour with the aspiration to give a spiritual dimension to her art’. Dorothy went on buying Winifred’s flowers – including A Nursery Posy, Flowers from Malmaison and Allwoodii Pinks in a Glass Vase until she owned seven or eight. Dorothy’s other Ben Nicholson was his ‘cubistic’ Charbon, one of his finest paintings.
In August 1930 Kit Wood had died in tragic circumstances aged only twenty-nine. Ben Nicholson wrote to Jim Ede, ‘We did try to help him – tried and tried & Winifred especially gave him one of the most beautiful affections I have ever seen.’204 Gallery owners and Wood’s friends were anxious to establish his reputation by selling his paintings, and Dorothy was invited to a preview in the November, which she visited with Jane Fox-Strangways, and then made a return visit with Leonard, when they bought Pony and Trap, Ploare, Brittany for £450. This was about three times as much as she usually paid, there was apparently some confusion over the price, and they were given two Frances Hodgkins watercolours ‘which they had admired’.205 Pony and Trap, Ploare was always to hang in her music room, and Dorothy bought more of Kit Wood’s works, his Crocuses in a Flower Pot, Dancing Sailors, a watercolour of Chelsea showing the bridge and Lots Road Power Station, a charcoal and chalk drawing of Monte Carlo and Fish in a Basket, which she had in her bedroom.
In far-away Seattle the personable Miss Cornish, ‘Miss Aunt Nellie’ to her pupils, was so fascinated by stories of Dartington that she came over to see for herself, and noted that on her first morning:
... we were invited into the dining room for breakfast. A battery of huge platters under silver covers were aligned on the massive sideboard. With Richard Odlin as my guide, I discovered under these lids delectable kippers, lamb chops, and American ham and eggs. A butler who looked and playe
d the part served us very formally and very politely.
This butler, over six feet tall, was Walter Thomas, who made many such impressions; he was supported by two footmen, a cook and kitchen maids and four housemaids. Thomas had been trained in the household of the Marquess of Bute, and Dorothy paid him £120 a year. His soon-to-be-wife Emily, a clever needlewoman who had come from Ludgrove preparatory school, had arrived at Dartington for the first time in the bleak darkness of a winter’s night, and Thomas had taken her under his wing. In addition to these indoor staff there were also two chauffeurs for the several motors and four gardeners growing fruit and vegetables for the table.
After her breakfast Miss Aunt Nellie’s time (she noted ‘the whiff of English comedy about it all’) was spent ‘visiting the activities, including the newly-equipped dance school where Louise Soelberg taught her classes. There I became acquainted with her fourteen-month-old daughter Eloise, with whom I could play only when her very strict nanny graciously permitted it.’206 The strict nanny was Miss Jefferies, as the marriage of Louise and Richard Elmhirst had been short-lived, and Eloise had been gathered into Dorothy’s nursery with Ruth and William. They were soon joined by Dorcas Edwards, whose mother Bridget taught at the school, and all four were brought up together. In Dorothy’s mind her nursery was now full, some of her joy at William’s birth stemming from her relief that she had given Leonard a son, and since then she had sought advice and was attending a birth control clinic.207 Michael Straight felt that his mother and stepfather found other people’s children easier to relate to than their own – for a strange child in distress Dorothy had a tendency to light upon one of her own children’s favourite toys; Leonard insisted on being called ‘Leonard’ or ‘Jerry’ but never Papa, Daddy or Father. He was detached from them, while Dorothy sometimes discounted them – Michael recalled, ‘One of the disadvantages of the Hall as a home was that Whitney, Beatrice and he never knew who might be in their bed.’208