Dartington Hall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dartington Hall, near Totnes, Devon, England, is a medieval hall 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 renovated the buildings, replacing the magnificent hammerbeam roof on the Great Hall, and set about their goal of introducing progressive education and rural reconstruction into what was then a depressed agricultural economy. In 1935 the Dartington Hall Trust, a registered charity, was set up, and it has run the estate since that time.
The estate has been the site of many events, conferences, and social experiments, certainly since the Elmhirsts renovated the place with this vision in mind and hosted a variety of social and artistic groups to work there; however, there is a growing controversy over the decision by the Dartington College of Arts to merge with and relocate to Falmouth College.
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[edit] 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 learned by involvement in estate activities. With time more academic rigour was imposed, but it remained progressive and had good 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 also attended the school for two years, but mostly played truant. At its peak the school had some 300 pupils. However, with the advent of state-based progressive education, the death of its founders, an increasing number of 'wayward' pupils [and staff], and finally a major scandal involving the headmaster and his wife, the school suffered a dramatic drop in recruitment. Despite support from the Trust , the closure of the school was inevitable, and it finally shut its doors in 1987. Its alumni website indicates a vibrant society with some 4000 former pupils listed.
[edit] 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.
[edit] The Dartington 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 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.
The estate comprises various schools, colleges and organisations, including Schumacher College, Dartington College of Arts, Dartington Arts, the Summer School of music, the Cider Press Centre and High Cross House (open to the public). 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.
The Hall now functions as a conference centre 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.
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[edit] References
- Anonymous, Dartington, Webb & Bower, 1982
- Young, Michael, The Elmhirsts Of Dartington, The Creation Of A Utopian Community, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982
[edit] Further reading
- Bonham-Carter, V. Dartington Hall: The Formative Years 1925-1957. (Phoenix Press 1958; Exmoor Press 1970)
