The curious parable of Dartington

I spent last weekend in south Devon at Dartington, the former estate of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, and now a charitable trust. I know the place quite well because my father was more or less adopted by the Elmhirsts when he was 14 and I spent four years there as a teenager while he was writing Dorothy and Leonard’s biography. He described it as his best book and I was pleased to see it on display behind the reception area at Dartington Hall, a Grade I listed building that is now a hotel, among other things.

I’ve always thought the story of Dartington would make a good parable about the folly of left-wing idealism. When the Elmhirsts bought the estate in 1925, Dorothy was one of the richest women in the world, having inherited $15 million at the age of 17. Her first husband, Willard Straight, died of Spanish flu in 1918, and she met Leonard, the son of a Yorkshire farmer, when he was studying agriculture at Cornell. He was an ardent fan of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and, inspired by his ideas, the Elmhirsts bought Dartington with a view to creating a kind of socialist paradise in which people would work with their heads, hands and hearts. To paraphrase Orwell, it quickly became a magnet for every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

My father’s parents — an Irish artist and an Australian musician — sent him to a succession of third-rate boarding schools, where he was beaten and bullied. But an Australian grandparent offered to pay for him to attend the school the Elmhirsts had set up at Dartington as part of their progressive experiment. The next four years, from 1929 to 1933, were the happiest of his life, as Dorothy and Leonard took him under their wing and introduced him to a life of luxury.