Dartington at 100: an inside view of how the “profligate orphan” survived 

 

Ivor Stolliday was secretary – loosely equivalent to chief executive – of Dartington Hall Trust between 1992 and 2004. In an edited version of a previously unpublished essay*, he reflects on the myths and reality behind the “Dartington experiment”, which this year is celebrating its centenary.

Uncovering some of the acrimony, division and huge deficits that featured in the Dartington story up to 2007 when he wrote his paper, Stolliday’s paper provides useful background to the turbulence of the past two years in which the charity has pushed through deep cuts to safeguard its future.

By Ivor Stolliday

Before I came to work at Dartington in 1992, I was already living nearby, due my job as chief executive of Television South West, the regional TV company. After it failed to retain its franchise, I discovered Dartington and, like so many others, I became an enthusiast for its activities, a frequent visitor and an amateur student of if its mysteries. Mysteries there were indeed.

I knew the basic story of the founders Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. I knew about their vision and her money and of their extraordinary creation of the Dartington experiment. But the money remained opaque and unfathomable. Surprisingly often, this would come up in random conversations in my local pub.  I heard amazing stories. Sometimes these were of almost limitless wealth. At other times I was told that all the money had gone and the place was broke. It was all very mysterious.

In 1992 I was appointed secretary of the Dartington Hall Trust, the charity set up by the Elmhirsts in 1931 (six years after they had purchased Dartington) to run the estate and develop it in the manner they wanted. [The title “secretary”** was deliberately ambiguous. It gave Stolliday certain powers over the way Dartington operated but ensured that control remained with the board of eight trustees.]

While the Elmhirsts were alive the money was always ‘found’.

With the job of secretary came chairmanship of Dartington’s trading activities. I was the line manager to its charitable activities too. I was also in charge of the money. Now, perhaps, I would be initiated into the mysteries. It took a while however for this to happen.

What passed as my job interview was held in a motorway hotel in Taunton, this venue being chosen to ensure the attendance of the then chair of the trustees, John Pontin, a Bristol-based businessman. The other two people at the meeting were Kate Caddy, the Elmhirsts’ granddaughter, and Maurice Ash, their son-in-law and Kate’s father. Ash had been Dartington’s chair until 1983 and retained a strong influence, even though he was no longer on the board. The interview consisted largely of a discussion with Ash about two key issues – the relationship of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to Buddhism and the problems of the green movement in Germany. That seemed to do. I felt that it would have been vulgar and intrusive to talk about the money.

Getting to Work

I started work and the mystery remained. Were we rich or were we broke? Whichever one it was, why did the behaviour of the place, its habits, seem to lurch from one to the other, from startling penny-pinching to expenditure on pet projects that would shame the average oil sheik.  The finances were not readily accessible. The finance officer had suffered months of serious illness and had died, young and tragically. Other managers had constructed elaborate financial systems of their own, in different parts of the organisation. This was not done out of malice. It was simply to suit their local purposes and, in at least one major area, to prevent the trustees from finding out where the money was and spending it.

Much of the burden of unravelling the accounts fell to the new finance officer, Mark Howell. We worked long and hard at it. We found accounting arrangements, and indeed bank accounts, of a complexity that would have impressed an advanced international financial manipulator. The only difference was that there was very little money to manipulate. We found that while there was little enough cash there was, at least, a modest stock-exchange portfolio and no debt. There was too little income and a history of deficits, but it could, we reasoned, have been worse. Indeed, as further digging made clear, it had been.

While the Elmhirsts were alive the money was always ‘found’.  In the early years, the expenditure on the building- up of the estate and its ventures was lavish. Between 1925 and 1936, almost £2m*** was spent on Dartington, equivalent in 2025 prices to about £100m – enough now to buy a couple of Gulfstream jets or in more prosaic terms to build a 500-home estate.

The effect, in a sleepy, poor rural area, as the South Hams was then, was seen as both glorious and probably devastating, depending on one’s point of view.  Those who found new work, better pay and undreamed-of opportunities balanced those who resented the impact of new, foreign money and allegedly ungodly practices. ‘Dorothy’s cheque book’ became the stuff of legend. The records of the early years show no evidence of penny- pinching. Who else would have decided to furnish the new Dartington School entirely from Heal’s?

Losses on the rapidly multiplying ventures were seen as the necessary price of unusual experiment, or as a way of subsiding good jobs in an area where they were needed. Financial return was not the only, or even the main, criterion of success or failure.  But this way of operating could not continue.

…a poor orphan with profligate habits

The cracks began to show.

Among those who were the beneficiaries of the largesse, the leaders of the various ventures, there were jealousies, intrigues and rivalries that would have been familiar to members of a medieval court. Worse, tensions grew about the money, with Dorothy’s American family becoming resentful of the lavish dispersal of their patrimony. They took legal steps to try to constrain her expenditure on what they saw, perhaps understandably, as a barmy venture in some damp and remote corner of England. The money was still there, and still flowed when needed, but it was never quite the same as in those Arcadian early years.

Nevertheless, until her death at Dartington in 1968, Dorothy met the substantial annual deficits. As a lifelong trustee, she made large donations to a separate charity, Elmgrant, to which the trust then made application for a grant. Thus the wheels were kept turning. [Elmgrant still exists as grant-giving educational charity and with a close relationship to the trust.] After Dorothy’s death Leonard left Dartington in 1972 to re-marry and live in the US, dying two years later.

The founders left no adequate endowment. The charity’s modest stock exchange portfolio was subject to the volatility of the markets at that time and to recurrent predation by the trustees seeking to meet deficits. Dartington’s finances were in a bad way, with deficits on all activities and substantial debt. It was a poor orphan with profligate habits. In 1971 Dartington showed a deficit of £198,000 (about £2.4m in 2025 prices), of which more than £115,000 (£1.4m) was attributable to the school. It had an overdraft of £371,000 (£4.6m). There was an investment portfolio of about £2m (£25m) but that was being rapidly depleted. The trustees knew they were in a hole, and carefully recorded their conviction that ‘something must be done’– a conviction to be repeated many times in later years, usually without any clarity about what the ‘something’ might be.

…and repeat

The same pattern was repeated, almost too often to chronicle. A crisis was recognised and discussed, various strategies were considered, few decisive decisions were taken, then more money was committed both to existing and new ventures. That pattern clearly owed much to Leonard, who had engaged Dartington, and its resources, with almost any venture or activity that took his fancy. Thus, as well as the educational and arts ventures, (which were troubled and costly enough), the building and glass companies, and retail and catering, Dartington owned a failing knitwear factory, a printing firm, a firm making porcelain gifts, the tweed business, a plant hire company and much more. This is to say nothing of the costly educational ventures in Yorkshire and Sicily, and the catastrophic finances of the school.

End of Empire

The habit of being rich and powerful was too hard to shake off and, at some level, the trustees could not admit to themselves and each other that the organisation that they loved and which had once been almost limitless in its reach, and huge in its influence, was now enfeebled, divided and almost broke. The parallel with the end of empire is hard to avoid. The 1970s and 1980s were a wretched time for Dartington. The trustees descended into acrimony and fighting among themselves, for the succession, for resources for their pet projects, for personal dislikes and jealousies, to the point that they seemed incapable of agreement on anything.

This led, eventually, to one faction invoking the law and the Attorney General against the other, and thence to the longest inquiry into a charity ever conducted by the Charity Commission, the government regulator. It was inconclusive but made management of Dartington immensely difficult for all the seven years that the investigation lasted. For example, no property could be bought and sold without the commission’s consent.  This was in addition to the legacy that the trustees had largely created for themselves. It was an organisation with tentacles everywhere, no clear focus and no logic to its activities.

Stumbling

The show limped along, with the school running particularly large losses until its closure in 1987. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the charity’s deficits never fell below £100,000 per annum –about £430,000 in 2025 prices – and in some years were much larger. At the same time its overdraft fluctuated between a few hundred thousand pounds and up to £850,000 (£3.6m).  In addition, individual businesses owned by the trust had borrowing of their own, for which Dartington was guarantor.

In most cases, most of the time, those businesses were at, or were close to, their own borrowing limits with the bank, and frequently required loans from Dartington which it made from its own overdraft. The major exception was the glass company, which produced regular profits, but which was always hungry for investment.  Despite this grim context, the trust created its own regional merchant bank, Dartington & Co, to make its resources and expertise available to others. It was nothing if not brave.

Keep on keeping on

How, then did it survive? The answer lies in several actions to scale back its activities. The first was the closure of the school in 1987. Whilst this was seen at the time, and for long after, as an almost unbearable loss, a blow to the soul and spirit of the place, it drew a line under the school’s huge deficits which had grown to more than £300,000 a year (about £1m in 2025 prices). Also within the trust’s suite of educational activities, expenditure was also reduced by the virtual ending of adult education – formerly a major theme –and the reduction in the cost of the College of Arts [set up in 1961 and closed in 2008] as it was steadily incorporated into further, then higher education, and funded primarily by the state.

However, the sale of the businesses, also opposed by many, was probably the single factor that produced the greatest benefit. The first major sale was of Staverton Contractors, the trust’s own building company, which had grown to be the largest in the region, and which had haemorrhaged money on a continuing basis, with huge annual losses. Leonard had always opposed its sale, on the bizarre grounds that the nation needed a building industry and it was Dartington’s role to provide one. After his death, its sale in 1975 to the JT group (which quickly turned it from loss to profit) brought John Pontin to Dartington, to become a trustee (from 1980) and chair between 1984 and 1997.  He, in turn used his own charitable funds to make grants to the trust, and thus, to some degree replaced ‘Dorothy’s cheque book’ for some years, further easing the financial burden. I believe Pontin remains the largest private benefactor of the charity since the Elmhirsts.

Cash flow

Perhaps the most vital business sale was that of Dartington Crystal, formerly Dartington Glass. The divestment in the early 1990s was, for once, a business coup for the trust. One trustee, David Parkes, led the negotiations and gained a remarkable price for the company, almost certainly more than it was worth. The money enabled Dartington to clear its debts and re-build a modest, if still inadequate, investment portfolio.

The final key to the charity’s survival and potential recovery – as seen from the vantage point the early 2000s – has been the trust’s substantial real estate. From the early 1990s Dartington cut back dramatically on land and properties, so depleting its assets to fund its deficits. By the time Pontin left Dartington in the 1990s he was able to claim, with some justice, that Dartington had become richer in every year of his tenure. It had benefited steadily from the continuing rise in house and land prices, and from the ownership of development sites. It had used this as a cash machine to pay the bills.

Although more modest deficits continued throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s there was no return to debt. Maintenance of the estate, long deferred, was steadily increased. Large public grants, via the lottery and other charitable sources, were sought and won, reversing a long tradition that Dartington, out of pride, would never ask for money.

Solid foundations

With a new century it was possible to see the emerging shape of a new Dartington, perhaps more modest and realistic in its aspiration, willing to work with outside bodies, and redefining its role. It might, just might, be possible to do things that would be of great benefit without demanding almost limitless resources.  What, then, are we to make of the persistence of the myths? The stories that tell of Dartington as either fabulously wealthy, or ruined and robbed? Behind the myths’ survival may be that they have an appeal that trumps reality. Dartington seems to fulfil some strange but necessary psychological function for some of those who follow it and feel, however unreasonably, that they have some stake in its affairs.

Easy target?

They need it as gown opposed to town – which it never was – or as the location of an Arcadian golden age, from which blessed state the current management has fallen, far and irredeemably. The trustees, little seen and less known by many, are a handy peg on which to hang the ills of the area, the sadness of individual lives, and all manner of things that might be felt to be wrong with the world. In some ways Dartington may have made this too easy. By not having a single, or clear, focus, or one main activity for which it is known, the trust has long been a blank canvas upon which those who know it and are unhappy may project and paint their unhappiness. It can thus be held responsible for almost anything. Parallel examples are few. Most organisations are less vague, so get blamed for fewer things.

With hindsight we can discern what we now judge to be serious mistakes and patterns that did not serve Dartington well, but that is true of any organisation, or indeed of our own lives, if subjected to this kind of scrutiny. We know that, at the time, many worked hard and did their best to serve a unique and special place, and shared its vague but beguiling vision.  Best of all, it is still there, and still has enough, even if only just enough, resources to make a difference in a world dominated by the corporate and the state.

Long may it do so.

Notes:

*Originally titled “Dartington’s Money”

**While Stolliday’s title was eventually later altered to include the words “chief executive”, the ambiguity over control was resolved only in 2004 when he stepped down from the top job. Stolliday’s replacement was Vaughan Lindsay, a former McKinsey consultant, who not only was called chief executive, but came with the explicit brief of taking of day-to-day management.  (Stolliday stayed on at Dartington during Lindsay’s tenure to work on another project connected to the organisation’s future, leaving the organisation in 2007.)

***Source: The Elmhirsts of Dartington, Michael Young, p 299

**** The financial numbers in Stolliday’s original paper have been converted into 2025 prices using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator.

Thanks to Kevin Mount for help in preparing this article.