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.
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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 is a department of The Dartington Hall Trust. The Summer School is both a festival and a music school. Participants spend the daytime studying a variety of different musical courses, and the evenings attending (or performing in) concerts. In addition to instrumental and vocal masterclasses, there are courses at various levels on subjects such as composition, opera, chamber music, conducting and improvisation. Examples of themed courses include Berio's voice theater, one page score composition, Indian music, Bach on the harpsichord, roots of samba and Afro-Brazilian music. Tutors have included composers such as Luciano Berio, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Brian Ferneyhough and Julian Anderson.
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.
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 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.
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