Monthly Archives: November 2024

Utopian community

Dartington, Devon: Henry Moore ‘Memorial Figure’, Dartington Church and Hall

Dartington Hall, north of Totnes in Devon, celebrates its centenary as a community in 2025.  It’s a magical place, where people of talent have created, educated and influenced life and culture in Britain and beyond in all manner of fascinating ways.

It grew from the vision of Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) and his wife Dorothy (1887-1968), who purchased the decrepit estate, with its grand house dating back to 1338, to found a charity dedicated to encouraging all forms of art, sustainable agriculture, social science and peace.

Dorothy Elmhirst belonged to the Whitney family, which had settled in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and became fabulously wealthy after Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, transforming the economy of the slave-based cotton industry in the Southern states.  She inherited $15 million dollars at the age of seventeen.  She and her husband wanted for nothing, and sincerely wanted to make the world a better place.

Leonard was descended from a long line of Yorkshire gentry.  After service in the First World War and subsequent study in the USA, he met the Bengali poet, artist, social reformer and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and followed him to India as his secretary.  Together they founded an Institute of Rural Reconstruction in West Bengal.

When Leonard and Dorothy married in 1925, Tagore, who had travelled extensively in England, encouraged them to invest in the ideas of the Chinese-based Rural Reconstruction Movement and may have suggested Dartington Manor as a suitable site.

The Elmhirsts lost no time in improving the estate, employing the architect William Weir (1865-1950) to restore and adapt the existing buildings, including the Great Hall which had stood roofless for over a century.  Dorothy Elmhirst worked with the garden designers Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane to transform the gardens.

The weaver Elizabeth Peacock created the wall-hangings for the Great Hall between 1930 and 1938.  The architect Walter Gropius adapted the interior of the Barn Theatre in 1935, in preparation for Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton, to start the Dartington Theatre School the following year.  The Henry Moore sculpture ‘Memorial Figure’ was installed in the grounds in 1947.

A cluster of practical and educational projects grew up and were placed under an umbrella organisation, the Dartington Hall Trust, in 1935.  All of them have adapted over the years, and some have closed down or moved away – the progressive Dartington Hall School (1926), the Dartington Hall Film Unit (1945), the Dartington International Summer School and music festival (1953), the Dartington College of Arts (1961), Dartington Glass (1967;  divested and renamed Dartington Crystal 1986) and the ecology-focused Schumacher College (1990).

The roll-call of prominent artists and innovators associated with Dartington is remarkable, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s initial visit in 1926.  Paul Robeson rehearsed his 1930 production of Othello at Dartington.  The potter Bernard Leach was involved in Dartington from its earliest days and taught there from 1932.  The influential dancer and teacher Rudolf von Laban arrived from Nazi Germany in 1938 and contributed to Dartington programmes until 1951.

The composer Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, taught at summer schools between 1942 and 1951.  Benjamin Britten conducted his cantata St Nicolas in the Great Hall in 1949, the year after it was completed, and Igor Stravinsky visited the 1957 Summer School.

One of the most influential figures associated with Dartington was the sociologist and writer Michael Young, latterly Baron Young of Dartington, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old pupil at the School in 1929, was a Trustee for fifty years, 1942-1992, and wrote the history of the Trust, entitled The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the creation of an utopian community (1982).

The Dartington estate is a delightful place to visit, whether for a few hours or a few days, either to attend an event or simply be there:  Visit Dartington Trust: events, courses, walks, food and drink & more.

Victory over Blindness

'Victory over Blindness', Piccadilly Station, Manchester
‘Victory over Blindness’, Piccadilly Station, Manchester

If you’re running to catch a train on the approach to Manchester Piccadilly station you may have to swerve out of the path of a line of soldiers in First World War uniforms.

The seven life-sized bronze figures are blind veterans, each following the leader by placing their hands on the shoulders of the man in front.  The leader wears a patch over one eye, suggesting that he may have sight in the other eye.

The group is a cast of Johanna Domke-Guyot’s statue ‘Victory over Blindness’, deliberately placed at ground level to engage the attention of passers-by, as a reminder of the sacrifices of the soldiers blinded in combat by artillery or gas.

Ms Domke-Guyot has experienced partial sight-loss since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994.  She chose to mount the group without a plinth “…because it means that a disabled or blind person can access it.  I want people to touch it;  I want it to be a people’s artwork.”

The original statue, completed in 2015, is located at the Llandudno Centre of Blind Veterans UK, which subsequently commissioned the Manchester cast, unveiled in 2018.

The charity, for a long time known as St Dunstan’s, was co-founded in 1915 by Sir Arthur Pearson (1866-1921), the first proprietor of the Daily Express, who had himself lost his sight through glaucoma.  Under its original name, The Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Care Committee, the charity aimed to provide sightless veterans with vocational training so they could live independent lives.

Sir Arthur’s 1919 memoir was entitled Victory Over Blindness: How it Was Won by the Men of St Dunstan’s.

The Blind Veterans UK website Blind Veterans UK, Rebuilding lives after sight loss – Blind Veterans UK portrays the continuing work of the charity in helping blinded veterans, irrespective of whether they lost their sight in action, to “regain their independence and live the life they choose”.

Wagon hoists

Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds
Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds

The centrepiece of Leeds’ Wellington Place development is called Tower Square, because its unlikely landmark is a rare survival of Victorian railway technology, one of a pair of towers that housed hoists to move freight wagons up and down between the now-demolished viaduct approaching Central Station and ground level.

Built in 1850, the Leeds Central Wagon Hoist is now celebrated.  Thanks to the developer MEPC investing £1.5 million the derelict Grade II listed rarity has been turned into a free-entry mini-museum which tells the story of the defunct railway line and the vanished passenger station that closed in 1967.

This Yorkshire Post feature illustrates how much the site has changed – Leeds Central Station: What remains of Leeds city centre’s ‘other’ train station (yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk) – and the attractive displays inside the tower are enlivened with a soundscape of departure announcements and passing trains.

As far as I can discover, there are only two other surviving wagon hoists in Britain. 

One is easily viewed from Platform 8 of Huddersfield railway station.  Attached to the Grade II listed goods warehouse dating from 1885, this hoist is supported by cast-iron Doric columns and it seems that the lifting equipment remains.  An urban-explorer report dated 2015 shows the spacious empty interior but the photographer either couldn’t find or didn’t recognise the interest of the hoist:  Report – – LNWR/LYR Goods Warehouse, Huddersfield – April 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk.

The other, also listed Grade II, is at Goole in East Yorkshire:  Coal Wagon Hoist, Railway Dock © David Dixon :: Geograph Britain and Ireland.

There are archive images of other wagon-hoists, no longer in existence, at –

The only moving-image footage I can find to show a wagon-hoist in action is a twenty-second clip in a documentary about freight transport in Sheffield:  Sheffields railway in the 60`s – YouTube (start at 5:12).  This footage, apparently dated 1966, lacks a title or credits, and explains why, with hindsight, the well-intentioned modernisation of archaic operating practices didn’t stand the test of time. Railway goods sheds and stations aren’t given as much attention as passenger stations, civil engineering works and rolling stock, but they are amply covered in John Minnis and Simon Hickman’s The Railway Goods Shed and Warehouse in England (Historic England 2016), free to download at Goods Sheds 140pp.indd (historicengland.org.uk).