Dartington Hall

Dartington Hall

The Dartington Hall Trust, near Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom is a charity specialising in the arts, social justice and sustainability.

The Trust currently runs 16 charitable programmes, including The Dartington International Summer School and Schumacher Environmental College. In addition to developing and promoting arts and educational programmes, the Trust hosts other groups and acts as a venue for retreats.

Dartington Hall estate

Entrance to the Great Hall

The Dartington Hall Trust is based on a 1,200 acres (4.9 km²) estate near Dartington in south Devon. The medieval hall was built between 1388 and 1400 for John Holand, Earl of Huntingdon, half-brother to Richard II. After John was beheaded, the Crown owned the estate until it was acquired in 1559 by Sir Arthur Champernowne, Vice-Admiral of the West under Elizabeth I. The Champernowne family lived in the Hall for 366 years.

The hall was mostly derelict by the time it was bought by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst in 1925. They commissioned architect William Weir to renovate the buildings, restoring the magnificent hammerbeam roof on the Great Hall.^[1] Inspired by a long association with Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan, where Tagore was trying to introduce progressive education and rural reconstruction into a tribal community, they set out on a similar goal for the depressed agricultural economy in rural England.^[2] In 1935 The Dartington Hall Trust, a registered charity, was set up in order to run the estate.

The estate comprises various schools, colleges and organisations, including Schumacher College, The Arts at Dartington, the International Summer School of music, Research in Practice, Devon School for Social Entrepreneurs and the Cider Press Centre. In North Devon the Beaford Centre, set up as an Arts centre by the Trust in the 1960s to bring employment and culture to a rurally depressed area, continues to thrive. Until June 2010 the estate was also home to Dartington College of Arts, prior to the College's contentious merger with University College Falmouth.^[3][4]

The Hall and medieval courtyard functions in part as a conference centre and wedding venue and provides bed and breakfast accommodation for people attending courses and for casual visitors. The cinema and the White Hart Bar and Restaurant are used by estate dwellers, residents from the surrounding countryside, and visitors alike.

In May 2010, Sotheby's sold a group of 12 paintings by Rabindranath Tagore, which were gifted by Tagore to his friend Leonard Elmhirst.^[5]

In Autumn 2011, The Trust proposed the sale of additional artworks by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and others, again at Sotheby's^[6]. The sale generated criticism from local people, former pupils at the school and college, and friends of the Elmhirsts ^[7], who voiced concerns about deaccessioning of the Trust's art assets.

Dartington International Summer School

Dartington International Summer School is a department of The Dartington Hall Trust. The Summer School is both a festival and a music school, with teaching and performing happening on site all day, every day. Participants spend the daytime studying a variety of different musical courses, and the evenings attending, or performing in, concerts.

The Dartington Gardens

Autumn in the gardens

The gardens were created by Dorothy Elmhirst with the involvement of major landscape designers Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane and feature a tiltyard (thought actually to be the remains of an Elizabethan water garden) and major sculptures, including examples by Henry Moore, Willi Soukop and Peter Randall-Page. There is an ancient yew tree (Taxus baccata) reputed to be nearly 2000 years old and rumour has it that Knights Templar are buried in the graveyard there, although there is no evidence to substantiate this.

Former activities

Dartington Hall School

Dartington Hall School, founded in 1926, offered a progressive coeducational boarding life. When it started there was a minimum of formal classroom activity and the children learnt by involvement in estate activities. With time more academic rigour was imposed, but it remained progressive and had mixed success educating the children, sometimes the more wayward ones, of the fee-paying intelligentsia. A noted alumnus was Lord Young, a founder of Which? and the Open University. Lucian Freud attended the school for two years, and his brother Clement Freud was also a pupil at Dartington.^[8] Oliver Postgate,^[9] Martin Bernal and Ivan Moffat are also noted alumni.

At its peak the school had some 300 pupils. However, with the advent of state-based progressive education, the death of its founders, and the appointment of a new headmaster who was at odds with the school's philosophies and subsequently generated a significant amount of negative publicity, the school suffered a dramatic drop in recruitment. Despite the efforts of those who cared about the school, it finally shut its doors in 1987. After the school's closure a number of staff and students set up Sands School which still carries some of the principles that Dartington once had.

The editor and writer Miriam Gross wrote an interesting account of the school, and of her time there, in the May 2011 edition of Standpoint magazine.^[10]

Dartington College of Arts

Main article: Dartington College of Arts

Dartington College of Arts was a specialist arts institution based at the hall from 1961 to 2008, with an international reputation for excellence, focusing mainly on the performance arts. In 2008 it merged into the University College Falmouth, relocating to Falmouth, Cornwall.

Gallery

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

References

1. ^ Snell, Reginald (1986). William Weir and Dartington Hall. Dartington Hall Trust. ISBN 0902386107. 
2. ^ Sen, Amartya (28 August 2001). "Tagore and His India". Nobelprize.org. http://130.242.18.21/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/tagore-article.html. Retrieved 25 October 2011. 
3. ^ Steven Morris (28 December 2006). "Battle to save celebrated cradle of cutting edge art". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/dec/28/arts.highereducation. Retrieved 5 February 2011. 
4. ^ Anthea Lipsett (10 March 2008). "Last-ditch attempt to halt Dartington merger". Education Guardian (The Guardian). http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/mar/10/highereducation.cutsandclosures. Retrieved 5 February 2011. 
5. ^ Sotheby's to Sell Tagore Collection of The Dartington Hall Trust, artdaily.org. Retrieved 12 October 2011.
6. ^ Sotheby's unveils a group of Modern British art from the Dartington Hall Trust Collection, artdaily.org. Retrieved 16 November 2011.
7. ^ Row as Dartington Hall auctions off its treasures guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 16 November 2011.
8. ^ "Sir Clement Freud". telegraph.co.uk (London). 16 April 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/5163084/Sir-Clement-Freud.html. Retrieved 23 December 2009. 
9. ^ "Oliver Postgate: Creator of 'Bagpuss', 'The Clangers' and 'Ivor the Engine' who turned children's television into an art form". The Independent (London). 10 December 2008. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/oliver-postgate-creator-of-bagpuss-the-clangers-and-ivor-the-engine-who-turned-childrens-television-into-an-art-form-1059366.html. Retrieved 1 May 2010. 
10. ^ Gross, Miriam (May 2011). "An Experimental Education". Standpoint. http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3875/full. Retrieved 25 October 2011. 

Further reading

• Anonymous, Dartington, Webb & Bower, 1982
• Bonham-Carter, Victor (1970) [1958]. Dartington Hall: the Formative Years 1925-1957. Dulverton (Somerset): Exmoor Press. ISBN 0950013390. 
• Punch, Maurice (1977). Progressive Retreat: a Sociological Study of Dartington Hall School, 1926-1957, and Some of its Former Pupils. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521211824. 
• Young, Michael (1982). The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the Creation of an Utopian Community. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0071009051. 

External links

• The Dartington Hall Trust
• Dartington Hall
• The Arts at Dartington
• Dartington International Summer School
• Dartington Hall School alumni website
• The Dartington Hall Trust, Registered Charity no. 279756 at the Charity Commission

Coordinates: 50°27′06″N 3°41′38″W / 50.4518°N 3.6938°W / 50.4518; -3.6938