by Jane Brown
Percy Cane, still a regular as her garden guru, would have been pleased with that. After the beech and cherry blossom, the rhododendrons were her joy. She and Leonard (or was it Will Arnold-Forster?) snatched an April weekend in Cornwall to see them in their glory at Penjerrick and Carclew and other gardens. On 1st May a jaunt the other way, to see the Stevensons’ collection of rhododendron species at Tower Court, Ascot, and on to Wisley, where many of the Hooker hybrids have come to rest. Garden open day at Dartington was 15th May, which became a regular fixture. At the end of May she flies to New York, where Biddy is waiting to take her to see her Broadway play The Heiress and meet the new man in her life, Peter Cookson who is playing the romantic lead, the part played in the film by Montgomery Clift. Daisy Harriman comes to tea – they must have much to talk about as they cannot have met for years. Daisy was America’s heroic Minister in Norway at the start of the war and now – at seventy-eight – she has a high profile as a Democratic campaigner. Or perhaps it is Dorothy campaigning on behalf of Michael, as Henry Wallace is leading the nominations as the Progressive on the Democratic Party ticket and some months of expensive campaigning loom. Michael’s wife Belinda is ill with tuberculosis and in hospital and so Dorothy plays grandmother-in-chief to their sons David and Mikey as well. With Belinda recovering she leaves at the end of June, with hardly time to draw breath before a crowded musical month at Dartington, with Imogen Holst’s production of Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb and the summer school for string players. Dorothy sees Donald Sinden as Hamlet in London, making no comment, and David Lean’s film of Oliver Twist. The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s performance of J.B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways appears in her diary, perhaps as a treat after Dorcas Edwards’s interview at medical school, or possibly because William has expressed an interest in drama school? In America, Henry Wallace is acclaimed in Philadelphia as the Progressive Democratic candidate – is Michael Straight in line for political office at last?
After an August trip to Paris she comes home exhausted and retires to the Chalet. Leonard’s father Papa Elmhirst ‘died this a.m.’ on 6th September, so they go north for the funeral on Wednesday 8th. The following week Ruth and Maurice leave Heathrow; they are to spend a year in America while Maurice studies at Yale; Ruth is expecting her first child so Dorothy makes a mental note that she will have to fly over early next year. With all, or most, of her children occupied elsewhere she gives herself over to William Shakespeare, seeing in quick succession Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. This is Sir Barry Jackson’s second and last year as director at Stratford and they are lively productions, Robert Helpmann’s gaunt if not emaciated Hamlet lounging against Ophelia’s enormous crinoline, and Anthony Quayle and Paul Scofield vying for mastery in Othello with the young Claire Bloom as Desdemona. This season confirms Dorothy’s preference for seeing her Shakespeare in Stratford, where she is well attuned to Elizabeth Scott’s modern Memorial Theatre and she enjoys variations in sets and costumes as long as the language is given the priority.
Britain cheered up a little in 1948 with the Wembley Olympic Games, which do not feature in Dorothy’s diary, and the trumpeting, or perhaps modest piping, for the Festival of Britain planned for three years hence. This rising mood among the young and younger meant that the life of many a sixty-something, grey-haired grandmother became subsumed into her family’s desires and activities and Dorothy was no exception. Her days become filled with pleasing one or another of those closest to her: it is a more subtle sort of sacrifice than in earlier years but it is unending, and even insidious as she is deluded by love and duty – or convenience – into squandering her naturally fading energies.
Shakespeare and her garden, rare moments of luxury at Elizabeth Arden’s salon in Mayfair and more frequent sessions with Irene Champernowne at the Withymead Centre are about all she has for herself. Her motherly loyalty to Dorcas Edwards and Eloise Elmhirst is unfailing; Dorcas begins her medical studies at Bristol in September, Dorothy will be there whenever a mother is required and Dorcas always comes home for her holidays; Eloise, known as ‘El’, well and truly abandoned by her father Richard Elmhirst, who found it necessary to become an American citizen and serve in the Pacific war, is studying agriculture at Moulton College at Northampton. Dorothy drives to and fro in all weathers to Northampton, and then to remote farms in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire where Eloise is working. Richard, ‘Richie’, has come home (with a citation for bravery at the Battle of Iwo Jima) and settled in deepest Scotland to run farm holidays for city children with his new wife Morna Haggard. Later in that September Leonard arrives home most probably from India, as his return is closely followed by visits from Dr Mukherjee, director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and his son Santos, and a few days later the dancer Uday Shankar, the brother of the sitar-playing Ravi.348 Leonard, who is fifty-five now, has been away a great deal and busier than ever as the current president of the Royal Forestry Society along with all his other duties, which now include a place on the organising committee for the Festival of Britain. On 10th October Dorothy notes ‘a quiet Sunday with Jerry’ as a rarity.
When Sir Miles Thomas had joined BOAC earlier in that year he had written of finding that the chief executive at Stratton House in Piccadilly was ‘a dynamic, well-nourished enthusiast’ named Whitney Straight.349 Whitney’s trajectory in the airline and aero-engine business was only ever upwards from now on; his gallant war and his skill at driving very fast cars, along with his bonhomie made him immensely popular in international business and political circles, circles which held no charms for his mother. Dorothy’s policy over his affair with Diana Barnato Walker was to listen sympathetically when she was needed; Whitney and Diana’s son Barney Walker had been born in the spring of 1947 and when she met him as a toddler he was immediately enfolded into her affections.
In November President Truman achieved a miraculous re-election, overcoming all his rivals, and the beaten Henry Wallace retired to his farm in South Salem to work on poultry genetics. Michael and Belinda are busy restoring their Green Spring Farm in Virginia, Michael plans to write novels, and he is moving The New Republic and its profitable stable-mate Antiques to new homes in Washington, and disposing of his father’s Asia magazine and one called Theatre Arts in the process. Dorothy’s year ends quietly with ‘Jerry’, as she notes in her Garden Notebook for December:
J and I saw, in the light of the moon, the cherry [Prunus] subhirtella autumnalis in its fragile delicate bloom. These moonlight nights have been quite unearthly – absolute stillness. Mild softness in the air – and the white roof of the Barn Theatre glistening like snow.
Dartington at least is in ‘such a state of harmony’ as she has never known; is it the load slipping from her shoulders? Dr Bill Slater, their original managing director, has retired and Peter Sutcliffe has succeeded him, ‘a great success’. Her pet Estates Committee, made up of representatives from all departments of Dartington life, is taking over executive responsibilities, ‘all pointing in the direction of decentralizing controls’. The whole is becoming a federation of individual departments, a miniature of the United States of America.350
Thirteen: The Time of Few Flowers
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the summer’s rain;
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew;
Ne’er to be found again.351
February of 1949 found her in chilly New York to meet Michael, who whisked her off to Jamaica in a rather touching attempt to entertain her by visiting his and Whitney’s friend from the 1930s, Ian Fleming, and Fleming’s new neighbour Noël Coward. They had St Valentine’s Day drinks at Coward’s newly built villa Blue Harbour; he and Graham Payn were only ten days into their first visit to the completed house and were still in raptures over the view from their veranda, Coward admitting to almost bursting ‘into tears of sheer pleasure’. They all went rafting on the Rio Grande, with Fleming and his lov
er Ann Rothermere, gliding downstream between hills ‘befeathered with bamboo and bright with flowers’ (the description is Fleming’s) on the narrow wooden rafts made for carrying bananas down to Port Antonio. The trip took several hours, stopping for fishing and swimming, an ‘enchantingly languid... elegant and delicately romantic adventure’ (Fleming again).352 Dorothy enjoyed the rafting, and a cycle ride the next day, and she just made it back to New York in time for the birth of Ruth’s daughter, Kathryn, on 20th February. She remained till the end of March, helping Ruth, seeing little Willard Dolivet to his first school – Biddy was in Baltimore with The Heiress – and seeing for herself Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, just opened on Broadway.
All the programmes for the 1949 Stratford Shakespeare Festival are in her collection – it is a satisfying ‘company’ year with Quayle, Gielgud, Godfrey Tearle and Tyrone Guthrie boxing and coxing at directing and acting – Macbeth, Much Ado, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, Othello and the little known Henry VIII – with the younger Jill Bennett, Robert Hardy and Harry Andrews. She manages to see them all during the summer before the big event of the year, when she and Leonard and William set out in their pre-war big black Ford V8 – lunching at Lyme Regis, dining at Petworth – for Newhaven and the car ferry to France. They make purposeful progress via Chartres and Dijon, arriving in Stresa on Lake Maggiore for Leonard to make his opening speech to his International Conference of Agricultural Economists on 20th August. The conference drones on for eight days, too much for Dorothy and in a mood to clash with her romantic memories of the lake and Isola Bella, though she says nothing of this, and so she and William divert to looking at her favourite churches in Verona, Padua and Venice. Dorothy encounters the Spenders, Stephen and Natasha, briefly in Venice.353 The long drive back through France evokes more memories than she cares to dwell on, nor speak of, and ends in a rough Channel crossing. More memories surface with the news of the death of Almeric Paget, her much-loved brother-in-law, and to avoid the jealousies between her two families which arise in these situations she goes to stay with Whitney and Daphne for the funeral.
Ruth, Maurice and the infant Kathryn had come home from America in the summer, staying for a while at Dartington before they decided to buy a farm in north Essex. It was no secret that Ruth wanted to be well away from the influence of Dartington, but now the journey from Devon to Essex and back again all along tiresome A-roads becomes part of Dorothy’s life. She is deeply aware that Ruth feels the least valued in her mother’s affections and so perhaps the journeying is a kind of penance, as Dorothy takes charge of Kathryn for long stays while Ruth is engrossed in the restoration of her house. The rewards are that little Kathryn and her grandmother become the best of friends, and Ruth has a beautiful home. Maurice too is discreet, as witnessed in the architect of Harlow New Town, Sir Frederick Gibberd’s gleeful account of the birth of the Harlow Art Trust:
A stranger called, asked to see the General Manager, and in the course of their conversation suggested that he might show him and his wife round the town. It turned out that the stranger was Maurice Ash – at that time living close to Harlow and having business interests in the town – [and he] suggested that a substantial sum might be provided by the Elmgrant Trust to launch a scheme for providing art for the town.354
Maurice had also suggested Sir Philip Hendy, director of the National Gallery and now married to Cicely Martin, as the chairman, and Henry Moore, who lived at nearby Much Hadham, as a supporter of the Harlow scheme, connections that Maurice had acquired directly from Dorothy. Maurice’s ‘business interests’ were connected to his father, the contractor Gilbert Ash, who was to build Gibberd’s butterfly-shaped, nine-storey ‘tower’ block, The Lawn, cleverly set in the midst of seven great oak trees on the edge of Mark Hall North neighbourhood housing in Harlow.
On a chilly Tuesday in mid-January, 1950, Whitney sees Dorothy off from Heathrow – is this purely chivalry or is there an edge to their talk as he ushers her through his company’s VIP lounge? Whitney is concerned about the amount of family money that Michael has spent on the Wallace campaign and on moving The New Republic operation to Washington and he wants the American family trust broken so that Michael is no longer in control. Dorothy’s trip is mostly taken up with her first visit to Michael and Belinda’s Green Spring Farm in Fairfax County, northern Virginia. The farm dates from the settling of Tidewater Virginia in good King George III’s golden days, a pretty colonial house with a smallholding, where Beatrix Farrand had been working on the garden.355 Leonard joins her for a week and together they break the news to editor Bruce Bliven that they intend to find a buyer for The New Republic, and then they visit the family’s attorney Milton Rose for advice about trusts for Dorothy’s grandchildren. She has to face up to losing the last remnants of her American life, but she says nothing, and finds comfort in looking after Willard Dolivet while Biddy is engrossed in rehearsals.
They are home in time for the General Election on Thursday 23rd February, a dispiriting affair. Labour won with 315 seats to 298 for the Conservatives, resulting in the narrowest of working majorities, and prompting Harold Nicolson to comment ruefully of his former colleagues that ‘they cannot carry on with a Socialist policy when it is now clear that the country dislikes it’. It was Labour’s obsession with the nationalisation of steel and other industries and utilities that ‘the country’ was wary of, an obsession that seemed to elevate dogma above simple human needs. Dorothy’s only notes on her feelings about the politics of this time are in an orange-covered notebook, made as she sat at the back of a seminar chaired by Sir Stafford Cripps (with whom Leonard had been to India): ‘young people don’t know the Labour Party’, ‘a tension exists between the trades unions and the Party’, ‘Labour has no principles, only tactics and no future’ and the shop floor had no use for the Trades Unions Council where ‘only activists and communists had voices’.356 These were needle-pricks to the heart of one who had supported and believed in trade unions for forty years, since she had marched down Fifth Avenue with their demands for improvements to factory working conditions. Her precious ideal of unions seemed hijacked by vandals in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Labour’s lack of principles – and worse, ‘a void where there are no morals or faiths or loves’ – was bound up in Aneurin Bevan’s mantra that ‘steel represented the culmination of phase one of Labour Rule’ and that if they blenched or held back on nationalisation ‘Labour would lose its very soul’.357
The orange-covered notebook suggests that Labour is losing Dorothy, and though she says no more, her disillusion can be plotted through Michael Young’s actions. Young, no longer her ‘Youngster’ but in his mid-thirties and author of this, his second election-winning manifesto for Labour, had ‘slipped in’ one piece of creative thinking concerning another of her favourite causes, ‘a commitment to introduce a consumer advisory service’ and he added that ‘no one on the National Executive Committee made anything of it’. A month after the election Young spoke to the Fabians of the Socialist way of life as a ‘brotherhood’, with the basis in family life, a family supported against disruption ‘under the impact of modern forces’, and of restoring ‘a sense of community’ for those living in cities.358 This surely reflected his upbringing at Dartington, drawn into Dorothy’s fold, and he remained close to her; he was a Dartington trustee, and the name of his political friend the ‘rising star’ Anthony Crosland appears in her diary. Young became disillusioned, nothing was done about consumer rights and the testing of products, he left the research office in the summer and later in the year he set off on a world tour. Dorothy’s sympathies for Socialism in Britain seemed to leave with him.
On the Sunday after the election there had been a celebration for William’s twenty-first birthday. He was still undecided about a career and although none of Dorothy’s children had any need to work idleness was not an option. William had grown up in the shadows of his dynamic half-brothers, let alone the brilliant ‘Youngster’, and undoubtedly his months at
Betteshanger Colliery had left their mark on this privileged but neither academic nor overly confident young man. He was in London and undergoing Freudian analysis, this at the suggestion of Michael’s wife Belinda who was in analysis herself as a process in her qualification as a child psychologist. Dorothy admired Belinda’s work, and she felt equally proud of William’s courage in his search for self-knowledge, but she did not tell them of her own talks with her Jungian therapist Irene Champernowne at Withymead, which were carried on quietly beneath the financial patronage that she and Leonard gave to the work of the clinic and its staff.359
Early in May, on a Monday, she went for tea to Diana Walker’s house in Chelsea for her first meeting with her grandson Barney Walker. Stephen and Natasha Spender’s daughter Lizzie was born later in the month, and as something of a surprise – their meeting in Venice had marked (almost) the moment of Lizzie’s conception – Dorothy was added to the list of Lizzie’s godparents, with Elizabeth Bowen, Laurens van der Post, Muriel Gardiner Buttinger and Lucille Curzon.360 For Leonard’s birthday on 6th June, Imogen Holst and her students gave a first performance of Britten’s setting of Five Flower Songs, singing on the lawn outside the open windows. The Songs were commissioned by Ruth as a Silver Wedding present to her parents – Maurice Ash had been at Gresham’s at Holt at the same time as Britten (and Donald Maclean).361
In America at the end of June President Truman ordered his troops to defend South Korea from attack from the north, the consequences unimagined, but neither disturbing Dorothy’s summer. Michael arrived with his son David sporting a complete cowboy outfit, with Stetson and studded boots, which astonished everyone; the cowboy went to the Chalet with his grandmother while Michael spent a week in London. For the second year running he attended the Apostles’ dinner to meet his old Cambridge friends, the usual purpose of old boy dinners. It would have been in character for him to want to tell them how he had stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s questioning about his well-known liberal views and connections to Henry Wallace. The HUAC did not count Cambridge in the 1930s, nor had he enlightened them. Dorothy was completely sympathetic over the hated HUAC.