A Hundred Years At Dartington

Still Here

Soundart Radio is pure Dartington. It roots are in its local communities although it also has an international reach. Its motives are entirely altruistic. It carries no intrusive advertisements. It believes in the arts – music, radio art, spoken word – as an essential ingredient in life, not as an add-on. It has educational aspects in the courses it runs for young people and, of course, its studio is located on the iconic Dartington Estate.
It also stands as the only existing direct link to the late lamented Dartington College of Arts, one of the great educational establishments of the 20th century. The college was closed in an uproar of disbelief, national and international protest in 2010. Soundart was the brainchild of two students, Lucinda Guy and Nell Harrison. For their Third Year Public Project they decided to launch a radio station. Other Public Projects were very diverse, some at home, some abroad, and all with the same brief – namely to devise ways of taking arts skills into a public arena, to meet and overcome whatever administrative issues came along and to produce a viable product. Lucinda and Nell had to deal with a multiplicity of technical and equipment needs; they needed to research and obtain the necessary broadcasting license; they had a deadline. They got good marks. Soundart Radio went on air on the very day in 2006 that the closure of the College of Arts went public, a bitter-sweet landmark. It was initially an student-based experimental radio station. Three years later it became the community radio station for Dartington and Totnes with a community license and regulated by the national body Ofcom. It has been broadcasting ever since. It is still experimental. Nell has moved on but Lucinda with her partner Chris Booth as studio manager, is still there, plus a team of volunteers.

The Beginning…

Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, a wealthy American heiress and a Yorkshire curate’s son from a landed family, purchased the Dartington Estate in 1925, just one hundred years ago. They referred to their activities on the Estate as an “experiment”. They were what the Oxford academic John Bramble referred to as “anti-bourgeois bourgeois” – critical of modernity and its worst excesses but with a belief that alternative paradigms could be developed which, in time, could be influential. Reform rather than revolution. This kind of manor house modernism had many American and British precedents significantly including the artists’ colony at Ascona, Switzerland. Few such ventures, however, had the practical and wide-ranging reach of Dartington – small scale industries, estate housing, progressive education, crafts, forestry, agriculture and, running through all like a spine, the arts.

Inspirations

Many strands led to Elmhirst Dartington. Undoubtedly Dorothy’s considerable fortune was the initial enabler. But the two of them were caught up in a web of new and innovative ideas typical of liberal progressive thinking of the time. Educationally they were influenced by the American reformer John Dewey who saw education itself as a social matter rather than simply learning things deemed to be Good For You. He was a strong believer in democracy and made a contribution to the idea of what later became known as student-centered learning within progressive schooling.

Dartington Hall School opened in 1926 on such principles not unlike A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School or Homer Lane’s Little Commonwealth. These schools were sometimes known as “free schools” because of their non-authoritarian ambience and exercise of student liberty – nothing whatsoever, incidentally, to do with Michael Gove’s ideologically motivated so-called free schools of the Cameron-Clegg era of 2010-15.

Tagore and a fixer-upper

The Elmhirst Dartington Estate was to be a working estate. The mix of education, work, the arts and community was crucially influenced by Leonard’s Indian friends Narayan Tilak and Rabindranath Tagore. Leonard understood the importance of employment in a locality – unlike some alternative communities which were simply gatherings of idealistic well-off people with minimal connections with the outside world. The restoration of the decrepit Dartington Estate provided employment which was welcomed by the local communities especially during the 1930s when much of the Western world was experiencing depression and mass unemployment. Restoring the Great Hall, the Courtyard, the various buildings and the gardens was a mammoth task. Other Elmhirst initiatives included a Tweed Mill, farming and forestry, a building and construction company, and various other small scale enterprises. The arts were seen as central to this project of rural regeneration and some internationally known practitioners spent time at Dartington.

The best of times

In the fourteen years up to the Second World War Elmhirst Dartington, despite employing and involving local people, was a relatively quiet, insular affair. Peter Cox, who was to become the college’s first Principle, wrote that Dartington “resembled the world of an Italian Renaissance court”. After the war, however, its activities gradually went up a few gears. Years before the term “community arts” was coined something not unlike it was happening at Dartington. But most significant was the opening of the College of Arts in 1961. Not only did it attract students from an ever-widening catchment area – including all parts of the country – but it also introduced a discussion that rumbled in the background for years, an issue that was to prove fatal. If pre-war Dartington was powered by forms of patronage, post-war Dartington increasingly came into the area of welfareism – some funding from the state reflecting, of course, political shifts in the country. State contributions were necessary in creating courses such as teacher training and most students had grants from the state for their two years at the college, the nearby teacher training facility at Rolle College, Exmouth, providing a third year – a clunky arrangement but one that attracted state funding.

Outside influences

Dorothy Elmhirst was never sure that this was the right thing. Would state involvement in the form of bureaucracies and funding encroach on Dartington’s independence? Leonard was more pragmatic and was convinced of the value of the college and worked closely with Principal Peter Cox to get it going.
The public-private dilemma was never entirely solved. It was to the fore in 1990 when the college nearly closed and in 2010 when it actually did. The rescue operation of 1990 involved partnering with a much larger institution, the University of Plymouth, which then overlooked and controlled college finances. To the University’s credit it kept very much in the background. Students were none the wiser, but staff and any sense of ambitious planning certainly felt the constraints.

There yesterday, gone today

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the 1990s was the founding of the Schumacher College at the Old Postern, devoted to courses on ecology, regenerative food and farming and new ways of living consistent with putting the planet first. It turned out to have a shorter life than might have been imagined.
As to other enterprises on the Estate, in an article in the Totnes Review of 2007 local historian Walter King produced compelling evidence that over the years many of them had closed due to mismanagement. I quoted King’s findings in my book about the college;

…the sell-off of Staverton Construction (annual turnover in 1974 over £10 million, and then with a rich order book for the future); the short-term existence of the Merchant Bank for the South West of England (1979-1995) which was influenced by the Mondragon cooperative in the Basque country – a beacon of collective endeavor; the loss of Dartington Textiles; the sell-off of extensive forestry lands in 1983; the collapse – in a particularly nasty 1987 tabloid scandal of one of the Elmhirst’s very first and most cherished ventures, namely Dartington Hall School; Dartington Hall Tweeds – dissolved in 1989; Staverton Joinery sold in 1990 (annual turnover £15 million); the chequered history of Dartington Glass – merged with (or taken over by) Wedgewood in 1982, bought out of liquidation in 2004 by Enesco Ltd. and again bought out by its managers in 2006.

Exit stage right

The ghastly irony of all the asset stripping and selling off of valuable businesses was that Dartington entered the 21st century with growing debt. A new CEO at Dartington, Vaughan Lindsay who came in 2004, was astonished by the shambles he inherited. By the early 21st century Dartington’s portfolio looked somewhat bare. Appeals were seen around the estate, including the loos, for great ideas to be done at Dartington. It was remarked that this was a sign of the times: one couldn’t image the Elmhirsts running out of ideas…As it turned out it was not long before the most public-facing enterprises had gone. Schumacher College closed in 2024. Likewise the internationally famous Summer School of Music which had been going since the 1950s. The very successful Ways with Words literary festival also hit the dust. And, of course, the college of arts closed in 2010 under the fatuous pretext that it was moving to Falmouth University.

Changing attitudes

It is fair to ask: what is left? And maybe – what kind of future may there be? To answer these questions we first need to establish what is the material basis of Dartington in the 21st century. If Elmhirst Dartington was based to a greater or lesser extent on patronage and post-war Dartington compromised with welfare-ism, then Dartington of the late 20th and early 21st centuries increasingly found neoliberalism – free market, unregulated monetarism and entrpreneurialism – as its economic and cultural background. This chronology – patronage, welfare, neoliberal – reflected prevailing socio-political cultures of their times. Since the demise of the college, the jewel in Dartington’s crown, the rationale of estate, its identity and activities has been uncertain – mainly because Elmhirst Dartington, the oft-cited ethical benchmark, simply doesn’t match with the age of marketing, target audiences, accounting and business-facing values and entrepreneurialism.

In name only

Most of the Elmhirst culture is gone although “our founders” are constantly cited in publicity. Increasingly this feels nostalgic. The genuinely experimental, innovative contemporary arts practices typical of the college are, likewise, not hugely in evidence. On the other hand you can hire the Great Hall for weddings, host conferences, book in the whole family for “family events”, take in tours and talks and so on. The medieval courtyard, Great Hall and restored buildings are matters of heritage now. They used to be places of work and creative activity albeit rather picturesque.

It would be wrong to suggest that the whole Dartington venture has been swamped by 21st century soullessness. There is a year-round programme of films in the Barn Cinema plus a small number of concerts and workshops, as well as conferences and talks that look interesting enough although pronouncements on matters such as social justice have a slightly dissonant ring in opulent surroundings with fees to match. On the other hand in the likes of a murder mystery weekend and a White Hart quiz night there is more than a whiff of the business-facing in Dartington’s enterprises.

In the post-1980s encroaching culture of accounting, cost-effectiveness, commercial viability and monetarizing just about everything, Elmhirst ideals began to seem quaint. It has frequently been heard that Dartington no longer had “Dorothy’s chequebook”, a kind of dismissive apologetics which omits to recognize that the Elmhirsts actually had a responsible and tightly controlled attitude to the finances required for their various projects. They seeded enterprises, they phased out full funding slowly, and certainly did not fling about cash recklessly. They were not stupid. But they were motivated by ideals that were separate from money and by no means dominated by it. Present day Dartington, with its deeply challenging financial constraints, is a now white elephant, a folly which no one in their right mind would initiate in the hard-nosed 21st century.

2025 and on

In its centenary year its existence sometimes seems precarious. The low esteem in which the Trust (fairly or unfairly) was held over the destruction of the college has proven hard to shake off. Word on the street (or today’s equivalent – social media) is rarely complementary. A Facebook friend of mine, an ex-student, wrote: “To be honest, I can’t speculate about anything good coming from the estate ever again, as long as it is in the hands of an incompetent trust that is responsible for the demise first and foremost [of] the college”. This is perhaps a little unfair as all the members of the Trust who oversaw the end of the college have now moved on. But it does illustrate the depth of feeling that remains.
Others see the whole situation as a “neoliberal coup”. The notion that the Elmhirsts “must be turning in their graves” is not uncommon. More measured analysis points out that the under-valuing of the arts in an increasingly unsympathetic culture makes it difficult for all educational establishments in subjects such as theatre, dance, music, writing or visual arts. At a time when another music course is close to biting the dust (Cardiff) this is a fair point. An ex-theatre student articulates this problem: “Things can resurrect but I wonder now if Dartington could do so. With the arts in a real dilemma these days I think I would think twice if I were able to train”.

One Dartington lover who went to school there observed: “The Trustees have no money. There is no Dorothy Elmhirst with bottomless pockets. The value is a thousand acres of farmland and some interesting buildings, some of which would be better off demolished, some of which deserve maintenance grants. It leaves a quite glorious history behind, a true and valiant attempt at liberty. Leonard Elmhirst’s experiment will not be forgot. But its near-term future is to go back to sleep as good pasture by a good river”. A more hopeful note is struck in the following: “There is still hope for a future of some sort at Dartington, but it would require people (and trustees) to fight and make it happen. A new vision, a new energy, a new future. It may take a while for the right people to appear…[but] the land may need to sleep awhile”.

A return to learning?

Might Dartington ressurect it’s arts college? A few years ago I was involved in an attempt to run short courses in arts subjects. All was ready to go, course leaders were appointed, all it needed was advertising. The Trust pulled the plug at the very last minute and the courses were scrapped. Again, it is fair to say it was not the same Trust as this in office today. But this fiasco does not inspire confidence.

Right here Right now

Today’s Trust consists of people in finance and politics, a Conservative peer from the worlds of marketing and property, A Labour peer as Chairman, a one-time managing director in a consultancy company, a marketing and communications specialist, some of who have been Chairs of high level companies and academics. Not an artist among them but a lot of business-facing experience. Perhaps this accounts for the swingeing decisions that have marked recent years – notable closures, the loss of significant enterprises including job losses.

What fixes this?

I see only a limited number of options. To simply carry on the present situation is surely a poor solution – if it is a solution at all. The estate could, of course, be put on the market although who would buy it outside the world of oligarchs is a moot point. I guess its name could be changed to the Muskington Estate at which point the Elmhirsts would not merely be turning in their graves – they’d be spinning out of control. Apparently when the college’s future was in the balance a group of ridiculously wealthy Russians wanted to buy Dartington. The plan was to let the college remain but outside term time the whole place would be vacated for its new owners to junket and entertain their posh mates. Bizarre, yes. But perhaps a solution needs to be off-the-wall, outside the box or whatever the current business jargon is.

The best scenario would be, as one of my respondants suggested, an injection of new vision and energy. This would take time and whether or not it could emerge is probably a matter of faith. The solidly official-looking establishment figures that now make up the Trust, scrambling to rationalise the debts and refusing to listen to anyone outside such as the Save Dartington Group – which tried and was rebuffed, are unlikely to do what management wisdom suggestes a few years ago: “appoint an oddball”. One perhaps hopes…

Soundart Radio shows the way in microcosm. It is deeply rooted in the community, engenders enormous loyalty as is seen in its number of volunteers and people who present programmes for free. It scales it activites to the achievable without losing sight of its considerable ideals. It deals in the human scale. The studio it now occupies was fitted out by Chris Booth plus volunteers. Its space – the old student bar – is a modest size and reasonably easy to manage. Its organisers derive no status or money from their positions but stand as an ethical touchstone. Whatever happens to Dartington, Soundart should be a sitting tenant as the only surviving link to where it all came from.

As a footnote to all this, for some years I have thought that the best solution would be for the estate to be taken over (or given to) the National Trust or maybe English Heritage. Such a sell-out to the public sector might well give die-hard Dartingtonians apoplexy. And, of course, it may be impractical or unworkable – to which the obvious retort would be: “and at present…?”

Sam Richards is an English writer, composer, improviser, jazz pianist and former folk music collector and performer. He moved to Devon and the Dartington College of Arts in 1968. He has composed and performed extensively in avant-garde and experimental music and taught at Dartington College of Arts and also at the University of Plymouth until 2018.