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local church on the main road. They preferred the privacy of their own home. Martin, Leonard noted, seemed to think from then on that the devil had moved his headquarters from Moscow to Dartington Hall. Perhaps most of all, the locals resented Dorothy, a wealthy American. She didn’t quite conform to the protocol of socializing with wives of the surrounding estates and the local aristocracy. She had her own workload and was as busy with her plans to create a suitable household and to develop the arts as Leonard was in putting up structures to house them.
    In the first couple of years, the Elmhirsts and their strange goings-on alienated the local community leaders. Dartington became thefocal point of gossip over such trivialities as the children bathing nude in the river or mixed-sex showers in the school dormitory.
    Outside reaction led the newcomers to turn inward. Leonard brought his three brothers, Pom (who became Dartington’s legal adviser), Vic, and Richard, from Yorkshire to cut down trees, clear the undergrowth, remove the Victorian shrubberies and weeds, and strip away the formal flower beds from the sunken garden, or tiltyard. A dramatic landscape of terraces emerged from beneath a worn out surface and blended into a wider river valley. The great trees planted by the Champernownes stood tall and grand. Sweeping views materialized. The gardens were shaped to blend with surrounding countryside. The industrious Elmhirsts and experts from England and the United States helped in the rebuilding. Roofs went on, walls were fortified, new structures erected. The combined effect of Leonard’s vision and Dorothy’s garden creations was to establish an estate that had more grandeur than at any time in its thousand-year-plus history.
    In 1927, the Elmhirsts put on their first major play at Dartington, The Unknown Warrior , which had achieved success in London. It was performed in the solar, the restored meeting room near the equally restored great hall.
    In between inviting actors, musicians, artists, dance troupes, philosophers, and writers to visit and “perform” at Dartington, Dorothy managed to have two children with Leonard, Ruth in March 1927 and Bill in February 1929. She also worked with Leonard on education plans, which were set out in a rather lofty, philosophical prospectus, where learning was to be associated with practical experience. For instance, a teenager could learn about the business of poultry farming in a poultry project. It was called learning by doing. The “school” was to be self-governing. There was to be no discipline—a reaction to the rectitude that both Dorothy and Leonard experienced at school. The curriculum was to flow from the children’s own interests, which turned out to be haphazard and less rewarding than supposed.
    Whitney, at age 15 in 1927, found he had to learn Latin to enter Cambridge. Beatrice never learned to spell, and Michael Straight complained in old age that his grammar was poor. In fact, none of the original students, who along with the three Straights included fourteen local and other kids from poor backgrounds, could spell or do algebra or geometry.
    By contrast they attended lectures by speakers such as Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and A. S. Neill and had visits from T. E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw. A teacher, Wyatt Trevelyan Rawson, taught Freudian psychoanalysis and interpreted dreams for the children in class. Michael Chekhov taught drama. H. N. Brailsford, the socialist writer, stayed at Dartington for six weeks during the autumn term of 1928. Consequently, the more intellectual students in the early teens, such as Straight, were semiliterate and innumerate but capable of grasping the big, persuasive ideas of the time. They comprehended a bit of Freud and the broad principles of Marxism-Leninism despite being unable to articulate them on paper with grammatical clarity. In September 1929, Michael Young (later, Lord Young of Dartington), a “pauper”