Angel Dorothy

by Jane Brown

  Dartington’s busy summer was dominated by the Made in Devon exhibition for which Peter Cox and his colleagues collected from over seventy lenders, objects ranging from Plymouth porcelain to traditional edging-tools; the more unusual being violins by Arthur Richardson of Crediton, cow blankets intended for New Zealand farms, each farm with its own design, the botanical drawings (as yet unpublished) of the Rev. William Keble Martin’s Devon wild flowers, and books from Charles McNally’s Dartington bindery.362 Made in Devon ran for five weeks attracting eleven thousand visitors; as it was a local foretaste of the national 1951 Festival of Britain Leonard gave Herbert Morrison a conducted tour, and it was opened by Dorothy’s friend of thirty years, Albert Mansbridge.

  Their August holiday was a tour – via Stratford (Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and King Lear), Southwell Minster, Eloise at her farm in Lincolnshire, the Hull ferry and Durham – to Edinburgh where they were the guests of Gerald Barry, director-general of the Festival of Britain. They heard Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s recital on her first appearance in Edinburgh, saw Thomas Beecham conducting Ariadne auf Naxos and lunched with Hans and Cissy Oppenheim, who now lived in Scotland. They arrived home in time for the start of ‘Johnny’ Johnson’s Gardening Course, now an annual feature in her diary, followed by the PEP Executive and the Harvest Festival – then a few days in bed, which she now needed after every spell of intense activity. Her autumn was quiet, lots of Kathryn Ash, Barney Walker to tea in London, two days in November devoted to Whitney, and in early December she gave lunch to Ben Britten – a peace-making, and she had given him money for his opera Albert Herring. All was sweetness and light there now, but not elsewhere; she had dreaded the day when, as her own brothers’ conflicting opinions had torn her family in half, Whitney and Michael would disagree, bitterly, and she feared that day had come, or would come in April when a family conference had been arranged. She had held at the back of her diary a tiny printed cutting of the words of John Donne:

  No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.

  On 4th February 1951 Dartington gave a farewell concert for Imogen Holst. Imogen’s music making had more than fulfilled Dorothy’s dream of enriching community life, the shyest of people had found a confident joy in singing under her direction and their harmonies had thrilled the old stones. But after eight years Imogen was exhausted. ‘You will realise,’ she confessed, ‘that when one is always teaching amateurs and future professionals who are still immature, one needs to be constantly criticized on one’s own music by someone who one knows is a better musician than oneself.’ She had come to feel isolated, as for ‘all the blessings of South Devon’ there were not ‘many musicians better than me at that time’. She moved to Aldeburgh as Britten’s musical assistant, which was her idea of heaven.363

  The spring conference was devoted to Victor Bonham-Carter and his book The English Village; he was appointed Dartington’s official historian.364 Immediately afterwards, in early April, the family conference convened, with Whitney, Biddy, Michael and their lawyer Milton Rose; both Leonard and William were in the house. Dorothy’s presence was Lear-like, her court was held in her elm-panelled sitting room, vases of scented narcissi and blossom placed beside each comfortable chair, with her offspring making their entrances and exits in varying shades of temper. Whitney had forewarned her of his case and now he stated it forcefully; he was horrified at the huge sum given to Louis/Ludovic – whom he had met once, if that – for his United Nations magazine, he insisted that The New Republic’s drain on the family resources must cease, and he complained that the lawyers drawing up the new trust for Dorothy’s grandchildren had not been fair to his daughter Camilla, who was the eldest.365 His lawyers had suggested a figure to compensate him and to meet this it was inevitable that The New Republic had to be sold to Gilbert Harrison, and – as the real shock – Dorothy’s home at Old Westbury, her home for all of her life and her father’s legacy, had also to be sold. William Elmhirst, who was twenty-two at the time, remembers that he and his half-sister Biddy really wanted to save Old Westbury for their mother and themselves, but it was impossible.366

  The meeting broke up, Whitney leaving immediately. There was an irony that her children’s demands had really caused Dorothy’s neglect of The New Republic; Bruce Bliven had written tactfully that her support had become ‘impracticable’ after Michael’s Henry Wallace hiatus, that he was unwell himself and wished to retire, and that Michael was not equipped to be the editor.367 Gilbert Harrison, impeccably liberal and a fighter for veterans’ causes, was an excellent prospect; his wife-to-be Anita McCormick Blaine even more so, as she had financed the successor to Dewey’s Laboratory School in Chicago and other educational causes that matched Dorothy’s own. There was a small hitch in that they had to marry so that Anita’s McCormick fortune could be used by Gilbert Harrison to buy the paper – shades of Dartington’s history repeating.368

  The business done, Dorothy set out to mend the rifts and hurt feelings; she met her grand-daughter Camilla, just home from school in Switzerland, for lunch in London, and then Daphne for tea. In a quiet moment, out of Camilla’s hearing, Daphne may have told her mother-in-law that she was pregnant (after a gap of fifteen years), the confirmation of her and Whitney’s mended marriage. Dorothy knew from her visits to Diana’s house in Tite Street that Whitney’s was a presence there, but she said nothing. Biddy had gone to Essex to see Ruth, who was not at the conference, and then home to America. For the rest, Michael, Leonard, Maurice Ash and Dorothy had their attentions diverted to the imminent opening of the Festival of Britain, and Leonard took them around the South Bank site.

  On that misty and cold but thankfully dry Ascension Day morning Leonard and Dorothy were in their seats in St Paul’s Cathedral by ten for the Festival Service. Dorothy does not say what she thought of the ceremonial gloriously restored, the aisles glittering with gold braid and mayoral chains, the well-polished Scouts and Guides, and the Royal Procession of Gentlemen-at-Arms, Yeomen Warders, Trumpeters and Heralds costumed as if on their way to the Red Queen’s garden. Gerald Barry found it all ‘richly moving’; they finished by singing ‘Jerusalem’ and then the National Anthem, but he and others quickly realised that this was not for ordinary mortals as the choir and the State Trumpeters soared into the descant ‘that seemed to shiver the fabric of the building’.369 King George VI stood on the cathedral steps with Prime Minister Attlee, Winston Churchill and ‘Lord Festival’ Herbert Morrison, to declare the Festival open to a vast crowd that stretched as far as the eye could see. Then the glistening, jingling Household Cavalry reformed into the Royal Procession back to Buckingham Palace. In the evening Dorothy and Leonard were in the Festival Hall for the opening concert, another outburst of patriotism, ‘Zadok the Priest’, Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’, Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance No. 1’, Vaughan Williams’s ‘Serenade to Music’ and the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’. The BBC commentator Audrey Russell thought it ‘an evening of elation and exhilaration’, and ‘the quality of sound was astonishing’ from the players of five symphony orchestras and the massed choirs, their words ‘actually intelligible’.370

  The next morning they were all out again for the King’s opening of the South Bank Exhibition and the Pleasure Gardens; Dorothy found works by ‘her’ artists, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, taking centre-stage, and the sleek modern interior design that she had championed twenty years earlier had come into its own. The Festival earned no notebook, nor even comments in her diary, it was Leonard’s stage as a council member, and she settled into her role as his consort.

  A distant happy memory from forty-seven years before, if she was counting, surfaced at the end of term in July when Michael, Belinda and Camilla joined them for a motor tour to Paris, Évreux and Angers and Pyrénées-Atlantique; she noted cathedrals, crusader castles and Basque ballets. Back at home Dartington gave a party for the British Council, Stratford was in patriotic mode with the trilogy of Hen
ry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V, with noble performances from Harry Andrews and Michael Redgrave upstaged by the debut of Richard Burton as Prince Hal and Henry V. Dorothy visited Compton Wynyates and Charlecote with the Liddell Harts as Leonard was off to Chicago to prepare for his agricultural economists’ conference. Winston Churchill was returned as Prime Minister on 26th October, and Dorothy left for New York the following day – purely a coincidence, though she was never a Churchill fan. At Old Westbury she spent days ‘going through old trunks’, this depressing task lightened by the presence of her grandson Willard Dolivet, whom she took to the Natural History Museum and on a visit to Cornell. Leonard joined them for Thanksgiving and Willard’s birthday, his eighth, on 25th November.

  Little can be said about the beginning of 1952 except to chronicle the events: Daphne gave birth to a daughter Amanda at the end of January, King George died at Sandringham a week later, Eloise Elmhirst was married to John Sharman on 9th February and they made their home in Northumberland; on the 15th the streets of London were draped in black for the King’s funeral, the shuffling, slow-marching procession passing silent crowds in great contrast to the Festival opening of only ten months before; people were saddened by the loss of their wartime King, and fearful for the young woman who had to succeed him; Dorothy was no royal watcher but she was deeply sympathetic. And all the time she was dealing with the laborious transatlantic business of selling The New Republic and Old Westbury – endless letters, phone calls and trips to her London lawyers. The toll this was taking is partly revealed in a Good Friday letter she wrote to Irene Champernowne at Withymead, whom she had been seeing regularly throughout the winter: ‘I realize with great joy that new life has come to me, and it has come from you – Easter will be for me a day of infinite gratitude for knowing you – and for being able, here and there, through my contact with you, to glimpse something of the Holy Spirit.’371

  Easter was spent at the Chalet, and Amanda Straight was christened a few days later. Is Dorothy’s ‘new life’ in part her acceptance, her faith, for she has become a regular at church, often at Rattery with the Bridgettine community at Syon Abbey? At Dartington the summer is musical, Leonard goes off to his Chicago conference in mid-August, Dorothy is left with Coriolanus, Macbeth and The Tempest at Stratford.372 Then the blow falls, two words in her diary on Sunday, 7th September: ‘Willard died’. Two words that opened the oldest of wounds, but struck anew with the sharpest sorrow; this time it was her darling grandson, whom she so loved, eight years old and drowned in a boating accident.373 She flies off to New York to comfort Biddy, eventually coming home to her garden:

  December – Tremendous rain here – the English oaks still have their copper foliage and are wonderful with the sun shining through; a disaster has befallen Ghond [the mature Monterey pine] – two days ago Mr Johnson noticed a crack in the trunk, then last night on Christmas Eve, about 11 p.m. – Jerry and I, from the study, heard the fatal sound of its fall. Despite the rain Jerry went out with a lantern and found half the tree gone – no harm done to any other trees – these trees seem to know how to fall – but oh, it is crushing to lose so much of our noble Ghond.

  In February she was airborne again, for the apparent completion of The New Republic and Old Westbury sales. Back home she religiously notes ‘our Wedding’ now on every 3rd April, but she seems to spend a great deal of time in bed, including at Easter. She is in London for the Queen’s Coronation (in the crowd) and for Britten’s Gloriana (in the audience) and a week later they show the film A Queen is Crowned at Dartington. Another week and it is Foundation Day, and then on 23rd June she notes the birth of Biddy’s baby, a first son for her and Peter Cookson. A ‘very dull’ Taming of the Shrew at Stratford, a visit to Compton Verney, Peggy Cripps’s wedding to her African lawyer Joe Appiah, Christopher Fry’s Ring Round the Moon, Mr Cane in the garden, and visitors Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss from Dumbarton Oaks – this a first and last echo of Beatrix Farrand’s hope that the Oaks and Dartington think of themselves as transatlantic fellows.374 Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday begin her autumn delights, followed by Tom Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk in London, Antony and Cleopatra and Redgrave’s King Lear at Stratford, and the autumn colours at Westonbirt Arboretum on the way home. She made a special note of listening to the carols from King’s College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve. Little Kathryn Ash and Dorcas Edwards – the latter now triumphantly ‘Dorcas, M.B., Ch.B.’, as Dorothy notes – are there for the holiday.

  Dorothy is sixty-seven in January 1954, and she needs her Dextrosol energy pills and more frequent rest days. Beside her favourite chair is a memorial volume of photographs of Biddy’s beautiful little Willard. With The New Republic safely in Gilbert Harrison’s hands, and Old Westbury gone, she hardly murmurs when the Park Avenue apartment is sold and she is reduced to being a guest in America. As Leonard usually goes to India in January she is free to visit Michael and Belinda in Virginia and catch up on the Washington political gossip, as she loved to do when she was young.

  May 1954 – Two really warm days – tea out of doors – cotton dress on – joyful! – this is the peak of the year when each day brings a deeper realization of beauty. The beeches – a maze of quivering green – as we sit on the Loggia and look through these screens of beech, one behind the other, as far as the eye can see.

  1955 began with three weeks at Michael and Belinda’s Green Spring Farm; she was back home when a month later, on Friday 18th February, her diary noted ‘first attack’, followed by a second two days later. Leonard was away, it had snowed and she forbade any fuss. Fortunately Peter Cox disobeyed and phoned William in London, who sped down to Devon bringing their friend Molly Underwood – and Dorothy later admitted that Molly’s nursing her through her ‘worst attack’ on 28th February saved her life. Dorothy’s diary did not fail – with her youthful enthusiasm she filled in her Line-A-Day ‘as if her life depended on it’, which it now probably did – as she kept herself aware of comings and goings. She attempted to get out of bed and promptly fainted, and on 14th March she was in Torbay Hospital under the care of the cardiologist Sir John Parkinson. Leonard who had come home, Michael who had flown over and Ruth and William were her only visitors.

  From then on the small landmarks counted; ‘up in chair’ on 28th, ‘up for lunch’ on 31st, and ‘first walk’ on 1st April. A week later she was home for Easter, rejoicing in the ‘first real spring day’. Her slow steps to recovery are reminiscent of 1924 and that earlier breakdown. Baths, three on consecutive days because they were an unbelievable luxury, were followed by ‘dress today’ on 21st April.375 William, home from drama school, had been in constant attendance but now he had to leave. In her Garden Notebook for May she wrote: ‘After three months of illness I am back in the garden sitting – with Jerry – everything so late this year that even today the beeches are only just in leaf, and as always they seem to be the great experience of Spring.’

  For long weeks she was denied her own bedroom, which was up two flights of stairs, and she remained in her sick room beside the Courtyard, a revelation of Dartington’s daily life, as she described to Peter Cox:

  I have come to feel the pulse of the Centre in quite a new way – watching people come and go all day long – hearing voices from my window, seeing the shadows on my ceiling of figures passing to and fro, waiting for the comforting sound of the old bell striking seven in the morning, and enjoying all the community services that start early in the day and continue till nightfall. It is wonderful to feel such a throbbing life in the Courtyard and, though inactive, to be able to take some part in it all.376

  On Sunday, 22nd May, she walked to the summerhouse, but William had to bring her back in the wheelchair. She was recalled to life; she noted the election on 26th May, the Conservatives returned to power with Anthony Eden as Prime Minister, without comment; she made a brief appearance on a wet and cold Foundation Day on 11th June, and was able to return to her own bedroom at the end of July, her Courtyard life over.
The Summer School of Music played beneath her windows in August, and on Mr Cane’s visit she was able to catch up with the modifications to the Open Air Theatre; in mid-September Leonard gallantly escorted her to Stratford for Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth and All’s Well That Ends Well; they came home via Oxford, seeing Daphne du Maurier’s September Tide at the Playhouse, then a gentle drive through the Cotswolds. Mrs Nancy Lancaster came to lunch, a feather in the garden’s cap, and then – in early October – ‘I drove for the first time to meet Jerry, and worked in the garden’.377 In a rather shaky hand she wrote at the back of her 1955 diary, ‘In reverence and gratitude I should like to testify to all the loveliness that life has given me.’

  Her doctors advised her to avoid the worst of the English winter and so in early 1956 she and Leonard made their first trip to Harbour Island in the Bahamas: ‘this must be the loveliest of all coral islands in the world – a jade sea, a long white beach, hundreds of birds, perpetual sunshine and clear, warm starlight nights and peace – almost beyond understanding,’ she wrote to Peter Cox. She was caught in the spell of their ‘sweet little cottage’, Alma their gentle maid, ‘so much time to read’, time to observe and time together; their chief sport was tempting the humming birds with pieces of fruit – ‘we have such a good time’.378 She had come to the end of a long series of partings and losses, and now here was Leonard, staying with her till the end. She learned to smile patiently through his slow-burning stories and oft-repeated jokes, even to love the repetitions. Of her many notebooks the most poignant is one marked ‘For Jerry, something of what I have learned in this year of grace 1955’.