ABOUT THE FOUNDERS OF THE DARTINGTON HALL TRUST

Dorothy Elmhirst (1887-1968) came from a wealthy American family. Her father was William C Whitney, Secretary of the Navy under Grover Cleveland. Orphaned at 17, she inherited a fortune and was soon supporting social causes such as suffrage and the Women's Trade Union League. Throughout her life she was, to an extraordinary extent, actively and financially involved in encouraging the arts, progressive causes and helping individuals.

Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1975) was born in Yorkshire and attended Repton and Cambridge. In 1915, he volunteered for the YMCA in India and Iraq. In 1917, Leonard became the private secretary to Sam Higginbottom, an agricultural economist who had founded an agricultural college in Allahabad.

After World War I, Leonard attended Cornell University studying agricultural economics. He met Dorothy Whitney Straight in New York in 1921. After a long courtship, during which Leonard returned to India to work as an agricultural advisor to Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal, Dorothy and Leonard were married in 1925. They purchased Dartington Hall the sameyear. It was to become the confluence of their interests;an educational experiment that sought to integrate art and culture with science and agriculture and in so doing, to regenerate the rural economy. The benefits of this integration were to be available to all members of the Dartington estate in a remarkably open and adventurous quest for human improvement.