Dartington Hall
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'Dartington Hall 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 bought by 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 hammer beam roof on the great hall, and set about their goal of introducing rural reconstruction into what was then a depressed agricultural economy. In 1935 the Dartington Hall Trust, a registered charity, was set up and they have run the estate since.
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.
Dartington Hall School, founded in 1926, offering a progressive coeducational boarding life. When it started there was a minimum of formal class room acitivity, the children learnt by involvement in estate activities. With time more academic rigour was imposed but it remained progressive and it 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. At its peak the school had some 300 pupils. However, after the death of Dorothy Elmhirst and the departure to America of Leonard Elmhirst, the founders' guiding hands were no longer available. The school suffered several scandles, including inappropriate photographs of the headmaster's wife in The Sun, and then the drowning of a pupil in a pond. There was a turnover of headmasters, financial crisies and reputedly trouble with drugs. Pupil numbers fell to 50. In April 1977 the closure of the school was announced. It was a sad end 51 years of education. Its alumni website [1] (http://www.dartingtonhallschool.co.uk) indicates a vibrant society with some 4000 former pupils listed.
The gardens feature an amphitheatre and nice sculptures. There is an ancient yew and rumour has it Knights Templar buried in the graveyard there.
The estate comprises various schools, colleges and organisations, including the Schumacher College, Dartington College of Arts, Dartington Arts, the Summer School, a Steiner school, a sawmill, and a textile company. In Torrington, North Devon, there is the associated Dartington Glass. The colleges have a history of socially informed work which has recently been curbed in order to expand the estate's reputation as a business.
The Hall now functions as a conference centre and provides Bed and Breakfast accommodation for courses and casual visitors. The cinema and the excellent White Hart Bar and Restaurant are used by estate dwellers, residents from the surrounding coutryside, and visitors alike.
Bibiliography: Dartington, Anon, Publ. Webber & Bower 1982. The Elmhirsts Of Dartington, The Creation Of A Utopian Community, Michael Young, Publ. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982