Dartington Hall’s feature length film

One hundred years of Dartington Hall’s history is being captured in a feature length film.

Its producer Peter Nicholson has more knowledge than most about the place. His grandfather John Wales helped to found Dartington Hall School and his mother, Mary Bride, was Dorothy Elmhirsts’s secretary for several years until Dorothy died in 1968.

I spoke to him at his family home in Week where I had a sneak peek at the rough cut of the documentary which will be premiered at The Barn Cinema next year.

How did the project – funded by grants – become a reality?
“It really evolved out of discussions with Marian Ash, Dorothy’s granddaughter, and Lucy Duran, a former pupil and daughter of Spanish Civil War refugees who found sanctuary here in the 1930s and that we were coming up to 100 years since Leonard drove up the drive and found the place.

I’ve always wanted to make a film about Dartington but it is such a complex narrative that it’s always been quite overwhelming but also the funds have never been there from Dartington because its been in a cyclical financial pickle really for the last 40 years. Post Dorothy’s money, they have always struggled and either sold off land, art or property or all three , but not addressed the structural problems underneath, which is finally what the current team are doing. I think they are doing the only thing they can do and are very committed to turning it around and making is sustainable. Dartington has always evolved. I look after the artworks there now, which is something my mum did.

Each member of the Elmhirst family is fascinating– especially the three children from Dorothy’s first marriage to Willard Straight.”

It was a rollercoaster

There’s a film to be made about them it sounds like!
“Yeah – I call it the heiress, the actress the flyboy and the spy!” Peter joked. “Whitney – he’s a film on his own. I’ve footage of him – at 14. He had a plane which he kept at Teignmouth airfield and used to fly over the gardens , dive bomb his mother and land nearby and walk through the gardens to have tea with his mum and stepfather. Beatrice became a very successful actress and Michael, the youngest, was the sixth man in the Cambridge spy ring.”

This is news to me…
Peter explains. “He was recruited by Anthony Blunt (curator of The Queen’s pictures) at Cambridge and spied for the Russians while working in the American State Dept for a period pre-war. He stopped and confessed. I don’t know how he got away with it but he had friends in high places. He was the one that exposed Blunt.”

Peter has the great fortune of being able to use film shot by Dartington’s ad hoc – and later Government commissioned – film unit. Leonard, Mark Tobey, Peter’s grandfather and others had 16mm cine cameras with which they captured the work going on around the estate, from the restoration of the Great Hall to the farming and forestry enterprises, and the beginnings of Aller Park school.

“There was a whole bunch of rusty film cans rotting away in the basement of the Barn which are throwing up incredible treasures.  In the 60s somebody – and I don’t know who – had the foresight to show Leonard the films and record him commentating on them. It’s a doubly good whammy – the footage and then Leonard with his passion and insight. It’s never been heard before and only a fraction of the archive film has been seen before.”

Peter has interviewed pupils such as Heather Williams, Anne Curry ,and evacuee Sheila Guy, who escaped the London Blitz, as well as pothers like Pam Gorman, who lived and worked on the estate
post War.
‘They are all grand dames and all incredible,” laughs Peter.

So the archive, the voices of Leonard and Dorothy, interviews with locals connected with the estate, specially shot footage of the grounds, and actors reading passages from diaries are being combined into a feature length documentary which tells the story of what was, what is and what will be at Dartington Hall.
The film unit was a breeding ground of major talents, like Richard Leacock who went on to work with documentarians Robert Flaherty and then D A Pennebaker, and Tom Stobart, who filmed the
1953 Everest expedition with Edmund Hillary, John Hunt and Sherpa Tenzing. Peter himself went through school at Dartington to become a BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winning filmmaker.

The material that’s not included will be available in 2026 as a free resource online for anyone to view, and many of the films made about industries will go to the British Film Institute.

I asked Peter why this story – well known here but not perhaps everywhere – would be of interest to people who’ve never heard of Dorothy and Leonard.
“Because it was such a unique place, there is absolutely nothing like it . Leonard got a lot of ideas from Tagore in India on rural regeneration and Dorothy came with ideas about education and the arts. As Michael Young says in the film, Dorothy was a wealthy woman longing not to be, and she vowed to get rid of all of her money in her lifetime trying to do good things. It was that
combination of ideas and inspiration, coupled with enormous wealth, which allowed them to experiment.”

only a fraction of the archive film has been seen before.

Lord Young, who was a former pupil and latterly a Trustee for 50 years , was the architect of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto while at Dartington; Dorothy financed three huge arts surveys around
the country which were the precursor to the birth of the Arts Council. As Peter says, Dartington has aways been a rollercoaster, and the film will reflect that.

“It was a rollercoaster for Dorothy and Leonard – the opposition they faced, the War coming meant pupils were leaving – it’s always struggled. And had golden eras too.”

Peter is working on the film while also progressing with the sympathetic restoration of the Elmhirst’s private apartments, which will become a heritage centre and a gallery showing the remaining art works held by the trust. “We still have over 800 art works, a beautiful modern British collection which people can’t see – yet. The ground floor and first floor will become a guided tour and at least one room dedicated to visiting exhibitions.”

The documentary will tell the story of the Elmhirst’s practical Utopia warts and all, including the closure of Foxhole and the art college.

A date for the premier will be announced next year.