Modern Dartington Hall began in the mid-1920s when Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst purchased the estate from the Champernowne family that had owned it since Elizabethan times. Dartington actually dates back many centuries before the Champernownes – to 833 when it appeared in the registers of Shaftesbury Abbey.

 

The Elmhirsts embarked on their dream, a programme of rural regeneration involving small-scale local industries, farming, horticulture, crafts, progressive education and the arts. Throughout the 1930s and throughout the Second World War they pursued these aims. Some of this history is detailed in Sam Richards’ book where it serves as a pre-history of Dartington College of Arts which officially opened under that name in 1961. Richards gives a fascinating account and evaluation of the Elmhirst project and its points of overlap with other Utopian communities, the educational ideas of John Dewey, Homer Lane and A.S.Neill, the social ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, and the practices of artists in all artforms.

 

The College of Arts was a unique and successful experiment in higher education. It connected with the general world of the arts in so many different ways that it is impossible to exactly quantify its effects and influence. It was, beyond a doubt, the heart and soul of the Dartington enterprise.

 

The College moved with the times. In the 1960s it was highly progressive for its era, especially in theatre, dance and visual art. By the time it closed, its courses and their contents looked very different. It had refined and redefined some courses, as with the music degree being given over entirely to the contemporary, but had also brought about new subjects such as Performance Writing and Arts and Ecology.

 

If any strands typify Dartington’s courses across the board they might include a willingness to experiment and pioneer approaches not generally found elsewhere, and, above all, a focus on the dynamics of context. One course had context in its title – Art and Social Context, but the Theatre degree from the mid 1970s through till 1990 had a third year out in communities – one in Rotherhithe, nest to London’s East End, and one in Stonehouse, Plymouth, both challenging contexts for theatre making. For a while the Music Department had a house in Bristol where students stayed when on placement. However, “context” did not only mean places, physical contexts. It could also refer to personal context – the place an artist’s work had in their own life – or social or political context. And, of course, it was often found that these interacted.

 

The closure of the college was a tragedy. Some aspects of its courses were transferred to what is now Falmouth University, but few people seriously entertained the idea that Dartington College was “going to” Falmouth. At best it was a pragmatic idea calculated to make it feel like all was not lost.

 

The book engages with some of the reasons why the college closed – and there were some. But as the book concludes: “valid-sounding excuses do not ultimately clear individuals and organizations of complicity. Quite the opposite. In the end the excuses are lame. Dartington College needed real belief in its ethos on the part of those in positions of power, something lacking in anyone who felt the college could be replaced by Falmouth University. It needed a spirit of refusal coupled with an ability to survive in a minefield. It was a rare combination of qualities and it was not on offer.”