Angel Dorothy

by Jane Brown

  But it was not just her garden; in herself Dorothy had moved on, yet again. Her wartime philosophy had been resolved as, ‘when one thinks an end has come, then there is a new beginning – there is no end that is not also a beginning’. Months of wayward jaunting across an unfamiliar America, at the apparent whims of a nameless officialdom, had left her feeling profoundly grateful to be home. It appears that in convincing her audiences – forty-one times over – of the virtues and values of life in England she had convinced herself. Despite the dips back into her old New York life, she now felt she belonged at Dartington. Her private philosophies, her vows to live in the present, appreciate everything in her surroundings and identify the spark of the divine in the people around her, all lightened her step. If asked about that spark of the divine she would have named her daughter Beatrice playing Viola; she would have to admit that Mischa Chekhov had been deposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt whom she believed was the leader of the free world and the apostle of international goodwill. And what about the man nearest to her, what about Leonard? Their American journeys had been graced by warm welcomes and generous hospitality but for all that they were journeying among strangers, across vast distances in the dark and the cold, and they had been alone together for longer periods than at any previous time in their marriage. For Dorothy this had brought Leonard closer than perhaps ever before, and she valued his stability and talent for lightening the direst circumstances. As they resumed their English routines, weekdays in London where Leonard was working and weekends at Dartington, she was both chastened by her former inability to appreciate him and surprised that he had become so precious to her. In her diary she noted the things they did alone together, a walk in Hyde Park, a visit to the theatre, she savoured these moments knowing that he had to leave for the Middle East in the middle of August.

  She saw Daphne and her grand-daughter Camilla regularly in London, but nothing of Whitney until he was free to come to Dartington on Friday, 21st August. On the Sunday he accompanied her to church – a new beginning? – followed by lunch with Bridget D’Oyley Carte at Coleton Fishacre. Whitney was already destined to return to flying duties in North Africa, and it seemed that circumstances saved him, for on the Tuesday his friend Prince George, the Duke of Kent, to whom he had been ADC, was killed along with his colleagues when their plane crashed into a Scottish hillside.

  Another new beginning had already been made, for no sooner were her talks from America filed away than she was preparing talks on America to be given in England. The Ministry of Information (MoI) – responsible for ‘domestic morale’ – had realised that the promised arrival of one million American soldiers into England, and Devon was to be one of the most militarised of counties, could be an unmitigated disaster. ‘There is no limit to the harm that is capable of being done if relations between the American soldiers and the local inhabitants go awry,’ warned the Ministry directive. It was not just a clash of cultures, as General Eisenhower told the Pentagon, ‘for in allowing any friction to develop between ourselves and our Allies we are playing entirely into the hands of our enemies’. He further regarded ‘that to bring the US soldier into touch with the British private home would increase the effectiveness of the combined forces as allies’.313 So Dorothy’s second campaign began in the late summer of 1942 and ran through to 1944. She conducted it alone, driving her black 1939 Ford saloon, only taking extra petrol coupons when it was really necessary, until she discovered the Women’s Voluntary Service Car Pool in Plymouth for long journeys. Working for the MoI Officer in Plymouth she spoke of ‘Our American Allies’ and ‘Our Friends the Americans’ to new recruits, WVS volunteers and Civil Defence Wardens in training, at Topsham, Dawlish, Tiverton, and on 27th September, a Sunday afternoon, to the inmates of Dartmoor Prison. She was understandably nervous about this last date, and assured by her MoI Officer, ‘The combination of what you have to say and your personality... will be entirely acceptable.’314

  Through the autumn and into 1943 her targets were broadened and more demands were made: on 7th November, after lunching with Nancy Astor in her patched-up home, she found herself speaking in Plymouth Council Chamber with the Lady Mayoress in the chair, and taking part in a Brains Trust. Two days later in her garden she praised the autumn colours, ‘God’s Day of Days’, and two days later still, when she remembered the Armistice, noted ‘a perfect day’. The Brains Trust must have gone well for she was co-opted for another the following March, the ‘brains’ advertised as Lady Astor, Mrs Elmhirst, Harold Nicolson MP, Colonel Clement and Professor Arthur Newell.315 To close they sang ‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord’.

  With the appropriate passes she found her way into a number of ‘stone frigates’, HMS Impregnable, the Signals Training base at Devonport (who requested a return visit), the Artificers Training base at Torpoint, and also Glenholt at Crownhill (a dismal place, a former naturist camp) with a new talk on ‘Co-operation with US Personnel’. ‘American Viewpoints’ was her talk to the Wrens (WRNS) who ran HMS Foliot, the ‘very comfortable’ transit base for landing craft crews. Her name was added to the Voluntary Speakers’ Panel which brought requests from schools and youth clubs, the WEA (she remembered her first meetings with Albert Mansbridge and his dream of setting up a country-wide educational organisation and here it was in action), the Women’s Institutes, never to be left out, and the Townswomen’s Guilds. Whether it was the prospect of the handsome young GIs with their money, silk stockings and chewing gum, but a rash of Americanism broke out, seminars, day schools, whole ‘American’ weeks. She spoke on ‘Women in America’, and took days schools in her stride, ‘Society and Politics’ in the afternoons, ‘Education and Culture’ in the evenings. She enjoyed speaking on ‘The Arts in America’. She took along her large map of North America and whenever possible she showed slides of the photographs that Leonard had taken on their tour, of the Smoky Mountains, the Tennessee River, the Colorado River, neat New Hampshire, tumbling Niagara, cattle grazing in Idaho, wheat on the plains, cantaloupe and strawberries growing in California. She was meeting a wider cross-section of British people than she had ever encountered, standing up and speaking in schools and village halls all over Devon and Cornwall; for Thanksgiving in November 1942 she gave a talk, followed by the traditional turkey dinner, at Totnes Senior School, where Leonard was on the Board of Governors. In the local papers it was constantly noted that Mrs Elmhirst gave ‘another of her popular MoI talks’ and sometimes she confided to the women of Bickleigh, Broadhempston or East Portlemouth how in America she had found ‘a touching sympathy’ for the women of Britain. She still noted the war news as the days passed, and could often comment on places she had once visited but were mysteries to most of her listeners. She was not shy of her favourite topics, for instance William Beveridge’s proposals for national insurance, and his Five Great Evils – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.

  Two small photographs are stuck into the front of her 1943 diary, of Michael and Belinda’s home in Virginia, and of her with their baby son, David Willard, born the previous October. Michael had volunteered and was piloting B17 Flying Fortresses; he was about to publish his first book, titled Let This Be the Last War, a plea for negotiation rather than annihilation, and unenthusiastically reviewed.

  Was it another landmark that Dorothy awoke on 3rd April and wrote ‘Wedding Day’ in her diary, when for so long it had been her September wedding that she marked? With Leonard she walked beside the Dart among the wood anemones and the daffodils. On 14th April Tom Eliot came to lunch. On Saturday 15th May Dartington celebrated its First Foundation Day, a festival, part pageant with music and dancing, part speech day, at which she and Leonard presided and which became a fixture in the calendar. John Piper came for four days in mid-June, perhaps at the prompting of Frederick Ashton for whose ballet The Quest he had just designed the scenery and costumes, perhaps in search of a commission, and certainly in the company of Stephen and Natasha Spender. Piper’s paintings of the Gre
at Hall in his picturesque and ‘stormy’ style made famous in his studies of Windsor Castle the year before were outshone by his description of his experience, embellished in a letter to Osbert Sitwell:

  Dartington was wonderful. The most Godless place I have ever been in; queues for meals and rota washing-up; hundreds of bad musicians with red ties and flannel bags, H.N. Brailsford, several failed artists (though art is not quite the thing) and dozens of girls talking in whispers and either on holiday from unartistic mothers or escaping from doing factory work, or deciding whether they were conscientious objectors.

  Piper gossiped with Stephen Spender and enjoyed Natasha’s piano playing ‘in a great over-restored Hall with good taste white and green glass windows and rush mats from Heals’. He continued:

  Dorothy Elmhirst is a much maltreated and very intelligent woman who, unlike her poseur of a husband, retains an attractive American accent, and ought to (and would with encouragement) kick over the traces and throw everybody out on their ears. The whole thing is indeed an interesting survival, very much dated. There ought to be a Batsford book written about it in the ‘British Heritage’ Series, with coloured photographs of the bronzed inmates and the beautifully hideous rolling red-earthed fields that surround it on all sides, punctured by the concrete walls and flat roofs of the houses all around that were designed by the now-forgotten famous architects of the early thirties.

  Some of this comes strangely from one who was fully involved with the delightfully recherché Shell County Guides and John Betjeman and Faber, and whose own Oxfordshire was published by Batsford. Maybe it was the sight of Dorothy’s redundant dining room and being forced to café-style meals that unnerved Piper; according to his biographer Frances Spalding, there was also something Freudian about Piper telling his wife Myfanwy of the love among the bushes, of ‘every path in the garden the scene of 100 illicit and very unhappy affairs’, when ‘an affair, or something akin to an affair’ was unsettling his own home.316

  Two months later, in early September of 1943, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead visited Dartington. Mead was married to the Cambridge anthropologist Gregory Bateson but she was also working for Roosevelt’s agency the Office of War Information to explain the military and civilian societies to each other. She was the official ambassador for fraternising whereas presumably Dorothy’s role was perceived as merely amateur. Dorothy was fresh from addressing eighty people, mostly women, at the Chartered Insurance Institute in Plymouth on ‘Home Life in America’, and she had, as usual, done her homework reading Mead’s And Keep Your Powder Dry, an Anthropologist Looks at America. It is to be hoped that Mead was as well prepared; at least it seems she was visiting Dorothy and not Dartington, in view of her much publicised interest in the sexual politics of primitive societies.317

  At the end of September Dorothy and Leonard allowed themselves a heavenly five days visiting the cream of Cornish gardens including Carclew, Trebah, Penjerrick, Glendurgan and Tregothnan. They had no petrol but instead went to Falmouth by train, then resorted to ferries, rowboats, bicycles, hitching lifts and finally a taxi. Dorothy returned to ‘a heavenly day’ in her own garden and a trip to Westonbirt with Hiram Winterbotham, who did have some petrol, coming home to a musical evening in the Great Hall with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. They had come to Dartington at the request of Imogen Holst, who had just arrived to cheer the later months of the war with her music. It was a passing of the flame, for as the music soared so the art studio closed with the departure of Cecil and Elisabeth Collins for Chelsea; John Piper had helped to arrange a London exhibition for Collins at the Lefevre Gallery, so was his remark about the ‘failed artists’ just a tease?

  Cecil and Elisabeth Collins had come to Dartington at the start of the war, Cecil as assistant to Hein Heckroth in the Art and Design Studio, taking over while Heckroth was interned, and Elisabeth willingly helping wherever she could, often with the apple and potato harvests. Collins not only painted, he thought and wrote, and his essay, The Vision of the Fool, with the accompanying paintings of the Fool in various guises are acknowledged as his most important works. ‘The Fool rejects modern society (including the depictions of war),’ he wrote, ‘[and] represents that profound fertile innocence’ from which we have fallen – ‘The Fool was there at the beginning of life and thus can offer a whiff of paradise to fallen mankind.’ Dorothy bought several Fool paintings, the cross-legged, cross-gartered Happy Hour Fool with his jousting tent, and the Procession of Fools. Conversations on Shakespeare’s fools – Jacques’ ‘I met a fool i’ the forest. A motley fool’, Lear’s Fool and the Clown Feste in Twelfth Night, these were an intrinsic part of Collins’s inspiration and Dorothy’s delight. The Fool allowed her to believe that Dartington’s ancient stones and trees would survive to foster new life.318

  She noted the day of his Lefevre Private View in her diary but for some reason did not make it. Collins wrote of his disappointment on 5th February 1944, ‘I had looked forward so much to showing you the exhibition, especialy [sic] you, who have understood, and helped me during these recent years... by giving me sanctuary... how I miss the garden! Especialy[sic] now, living in the vast ruined desert of this city.’ On 23rd February the St James’s area was bombed and the gallery damaged, but somehow the delicate drawing of Procession of Fools and others belonging to Dorothy survived; in March she wrote to Collins, ‘I am afraid you have been suffering great anxiety over your pictures, but it is good to know, isn’t it, that they have all escaped and that my own four treasures are here at Dartington? I called for them ten days ago... and brought them back by hand.’319

  In early April she sent flowers for Dartington’s church, which had become her habit, and she attended the Easter service. An Easter Sunday lunch party included their friend Philip Hendy from Temple Newsam, Cicely Martin and Chris Martin’s young assistant Peter Cox; Chris Martin was not well enough to come and it was his failing health that concerned Dorothy in these weeks. Another lovely spring had come to South Devon, with carpets of white violets, primroses and the early blossoms, but also the United States 4th (IV) Infantry Division, ‘the Ivy Boys’ with their lumbering transports heading for the beaches of Start Bay to practise assault landings. They were part, and a large part, ‘of the largest amphibious operation in history’, shrouded in secrecy as General Eisenhower and his British counterparts attempted to dupe the Germans into expecting the invasion much further to the east. Who could have imagined that a vast invasion force could be mustered along the tortuous coastal lanes of Devon and Cornwall? Dartington was immediately ready to help and their Welcome Club saw more and more Americans. Dorothy and Leonard probably knew more than most people of what was happening, especially from Basil Liddell Hart, but Dorothy wrote nothing in her letters or her diary.320

  On 1st June, a Thursday, her youngest son William Elmhirst, now fifteen, arrived in London and she rushed to meet him at Euston. On his own initiative he had decided to come home, crossing the Atlantic in a convoy to Liverpool. She was so pleased to see him and so thankful for his safe arrival that on the Sunday she spent most of the day washing his clothes.

  On 5th June, ‘Rome is ours!’ D-day, 6th June, was Leonard’s fifty-first birthday, and like the rest of England they only learned that the invasion was launched from the streams of aircraft overhead and the sound of the guns. For Dorothy the memories came flooding back: the Ivy Boys were so like the young Doughboys she had joked with as she gave out coffee and books at Camp Upton twenty-seven years ago. It was impossible to know how much to believe of the newspaper reports of the landings and they were constantly in her thoughts, until in mid-July she noted that Commander James Van Allen came to lunch. Then she learned of the 4th Division’s landing at Utah Beach and their perilous progress through the marshlands of the Cotentin Peninsula.

  On the first Friday in August came a crisis over Chris Martin’s health and he was taken into hospital at Exeter. There, after an operation, he died on the Sunday afternoon. Dorothy wrote her tribute for
News of the Day for 9th August recalling how he had found the ‘brilliant individuals’ Tobey, Jooss, Nellie Van and Richard Odlin and harnessed their creativity into the Arts Department. In the late 1930s, when ‘the Courtyard was the centre of an intense life’, she wrote ‘the heart that added human meaning to it all’ was Chris’s, and his vision had carried the name of Dartington Arts into a wider British society.321

  She plotted the progress of the Ivy Boys noting ‘tremendous US advances in Normandy’ and that they liberated Rennes; on 23rd August she noted ‘Paris freed’, and – twenty-six years on from Willard’s joyful moment – the people were dancing in the streets once more. With the end in sight her energies faded, she struggled with the approach of autumn, her war had exhausted her. The departing US army are much in evidence, they join in the carol singing and on Christmas Day they provide and serve lunch for everyone in the Great Hall. Perhaps ‘Our Friends the Americans’ and ‘Co-operation with US Personnel’ had been worthwhile after all? One way and another she seemed to have graduated, with honours, for being in England and coping with the war, more than coping, making her positive war effort; her flowers for the church in the spring, and now the chrysanthemums and hollies she sent for Christmas marked her diploma status, for it seems she had once committed one of the higher crimes of rural society by taking flowers and putting them in the church unheeding of the Flower Ladies’ sacred rota. Now all was forgiven, at least in the earthly realms, and she could attend the Sunday service as an accepted lady from the big house rather than a foreign upstart.