South Devon’s Thoroughly Modern Patron[esses]

During the Interwar years South Devon enjoyed the patronage of two American heiresses: Dorothy Elmhirst (née Whitney) and Peggy Guggenheim.  The historic estates they inhabited became sites of experimentation, creativity and subversion. The larger and  famous project was Dartington Hall. Less well-known is activity that took place over two consecutive summers at Hayford Hall on Dartmoor.

Dorothy Whitney

Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst (1887–1968) was born in Washington DC and at 17 inherited a fortune following the death of her businessman and philanthropist father, William C. Whitney. Over her life time Dorothy was a pioneer in progressive education and benefactor of the arts, feminist, and pacifist causes as well as social and labour reform. She lent financial support to alternative education and scholarly research at Cornell University, where she met her second husband Leonard Elmhirst. Leonard was inspired by a long association with Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan, where Tagore was trying to introduce  a radical curricula and rural reconstruction into a tribal community. Dorothy and Leonard set out on a similar goal for the depressed agricultural economy in rural England by resurrecting the derelict 14th century Dartington Estate as a site for the arts, experimental land management, rural skills and crafts and education. Dartington of the 1920s and ‘30s is described as a blend of influences: Ascona, Bloomsbury, Summerhill, the Bauhaus and Jung, plus Owen and Ruskin without the egalitarian socialism but with the Indian influences of Tagore and Narayan V.Tilak relating to community and spirituality.

Dartington Hall in state of dilapidation when the Elmhirsts moved there in 1925, DHT Archives

Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst at Dartington Hall, 1967 DHT Archives

Peggy Guggenheim by Man Ray, 1924

Eight miles from Dartington on Buckfastleigh Moor is Hayford Hall. Under the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim the Hall inspired modernist experiments of a more anarchic nature. Peggy (1898-1979) inherited part of the Guggenheim fortune aged 21 but was keen to differentiate herself from her socialite circles from a young age. At 22 she found a job at an avant-garde bookshop, The Sunwise Turn on 44th Street and began her love-affair with bohemian art, spending most of the following two decades in Paris. During the summers of 1932 and 1933 Guggenheim rented Hayford Hall and hosted a literary salon with her British partner John Holms; Djuna Barnes, who wrote her masterpiece Nightwood at Hayford; Antonia White, British author best known for her convent novel Frost in May; and Emily Coleman, whose novel The Shutter of Snow was based on her own experiences of madness and institutionalization. A collection of essays about the two summers was published in 2005 entitled Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics. Editors of the collection, Podnieks and Chait suggest that a specifically female kind of lived modernism emerged at Hayford Hall. They argue that the writers ‘challenged the sexual, textual, and spiritual mores of the day, both in life and on the page’.

 Hayford hall, Dartmoor

I discovered this part of Hayford Hall's history when my horse started living at the next-door farm. I was drawn to estate because of the interplay between exposure and enclosure as Moor mingles with shaded tracks and bluebell woods. Similarly, Hayford Hall: Hangovers... points to a sense of the tamed and the intractable as one of the attractions of the estate to Guggenheim and Holms*.  Coleman described Hayford as 'a dream place, a lovely, heavenly poetic garden, a Paradise, far from nowhere, deep in the trees beneath the moor'.  However, the landscape delivered tragedy as well as played muse. Whilst pony riding on Dartmoor Holms fell and fractured his wrist. Despite being reset in Totnes, the bones failed to realign and the following year he was advised to have corrective surgery. Holms, a heavy drinker died whilst under anaesthetic. Peggy described him as the great love of her life from whose death she never fully recovered.

Seventy years on, the legacy of the modernist enterprises in South Devon is mottled. On the surface, the scope and scale of the experiments can hardly be compared: one a wildish playground for a small literati; the other an established arts destination on a 1200acre estate. Today, however, Dartington Hall estate is more up-market business park than radical enclave. Since the Elmhirsts died the Trust has been addled by scandal and management troubles.  Bit by bit, it has been argued, the art has been taken out of Dartington. Protestors at the close of Dartington College of Arts in 2010 made the case when they removed the letters "a-r-t" from local Dartington road signs. Dartington Hall School declined after a drunken student fell to her death from a boarding house window, and pictures of the head master were found in a porn magazine. The school closed in 1987 and the Foxhole building will soon be an old people's home entitled 'The Abundant Life Project'. In the recent budget cuts, the summer music school lost its entire £600,000 grant from the Arts Council. The cottage industries: Dartington Glass, Tweed Mill and Pottery closed or moved and now trades a pricey shopping centre.  Perhaps most symbolic of the Trust’s departure from its original mandate is the sale of its art collection. In the 2010, 12 paintings by Tagore sold for £1.4 million at Sotheby’s, and key works by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Alfred Wallis will soon go under the hammer. By contrast, the legacy of the art and lived experiences at Hayford Hall has only recently started to receive critical treatment. In particular, the one completed piece, Nightwood is considered a powerful and complex work, and one central to the wider project of reassessing ‘minor modernists’.

I cannot find documentary evidence that Guggenheim and Elmhirst corroborated during their time in Devon in the early ‘30s.  However, it is hard to imagine that the millionaire daughters of two influential American families/foundations were unaware of each other’s presence in a quiet corner of England. Under the patronage of two visionary women, South Devon's natural and built environments gave rise to experiments in art and living that are yet to be fully appreciated.

*Recently Hayford Hall has come under renewed scrutiny for providing inspiration for Conan-Doyle’s Baskerville Hall (corrected as being Brook Manor a few miles down the road).  Owners of Hayford Hall have played on such speculation by erecting a pair of Great Danes at their gateway, which on close inspection prove to be tombstones to pets.

 

Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics, Eds. E. Podnieks and S. Chait, 2005