Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall by Anna Neima

Abstract

It would be hard to imagine a more interdisciplinary enterprise than this study of Dartington Hall, particularly considering this study’s wide range of sources. Founded in 1926, Dartington was a spiritual center, a school, and a center for the arts. Its fascinating story has broader implications for religious thought, education, and many artistic activities, particularly the interplay between private and public ones. It still exists as the Dartington Trust but in a truncated form. In a sense, the rest of the world, England in this particular case, has caught up with it.The great country house in Devon, famous for its Hall, was acquired by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst. She was an extremely wealthy American and he the son of a Yorkshire parson, deeply influenced by Rabindranath Tagore after having spent time in India. Her money made everything possible. Devon was a conservative county, but now the closest town, Totnes, is well known for being a center for the counterculture. Dartington and its culture faded in the 1980s. Yet in many ways, it accomplished its mission.The original impetus seems to have an effort to attain a higher level of spirituality. Neima in her excessive use of footnotes provides a running bibliography with extensive references to her academic sources. This study is extremely rich in context but not as rich in content. The Elmhirsts were religious questers, but Neima offers comparatively little information about their quest and the extent to which it was successful. In their attempt to live better lives in some sort of religious context, they established what became a well-known progressive boarding school, to a degree notorious for its nude bathing and, probably largely unjustly, for underage sexual activity.Dartington Hall had a raft of distinguished alumni, including Michael Young, subsequently Lord Young of Dartington, who wrote a biography of the Elmhirsts, founded the consumer publication Which?, and drafted the Labour Party manifesto that played a crucial role in winning Labour the 1945 election. More detail would have been welcome about the school’s curriculum, its difference from more traditional education, and its graduates. It certainly offered a more rural experience than did most other boarding schools.Neima tells us much more about the arts at Dartington Hall. The Hall played a crucial role in advancing the performing arts—theater, music, and dance. It had an important progressive influence on the course of the arts on the national level and was surprisingly successful in erasing the barriers between popular and elite art. In the theater, the dominant figure was Michael Chekhov. It was also highly influential in other areas, ranging from architecture—with connections to such exiled figures as Walter Gropius—to pottery, boasting Bernard Leach, perhaps the best known potter of the time.To its credit, particularly during World War II and immediately afterward, Dartington Hall’s artistic activities provided an important model of what the state should do on a much wider scale in subsidizing the arts, as it did regarding the establishment of the Arts Council right after the war. It also supported greater coordination between national and local interests. In effect, the private philanthropy of the Elmhirsts, sometimes seen as paternalistic, was eventually replaced by local and national authorities. Given that a few of Dartington’s enterprises were businesses, it faced continual pressure not to lose money.The school, to some observers the best-known aspect of the enterprise, closed in 1987. The Dartington Trust, however, still undertakes creative activities in Devon. Neima might have supplied more detail about how Dartington Hall’s myriad operations actually functioned in its heyday. Nevertheless, she has provided an important and illuminating study of an institution founded almost a century ago that has had a significant and highly commendable impact on English life.