| Activity | Founder-Trustee of The Dartington Hall Trust (1931-1974)
Honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University 31 October 1970.
Leonard Elmhirst was the second of nine children born to a Yorkshire parson. Leonard read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1915, he accepted a position serving with the YMCA in Mesopotamia and India, and subsequently became the private secretary to a Presbyterian missionary administering an agricultural college in Allahabad. After World War I, Leonard attended Cornell University in New York, studying new, scientific methods of farming. He received a degree in Agricultural Economics and in 1921 was hired by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore to direct an agricultural school in a small village that was besieged by monkeys and mosquitos. Tagore, however, could not pay him, so his salary and many of the operating expenses of the school were paid by the progressive philanthropist, Dorothy Whitney Straight, whom Leonard had recently come to know.
Leonard married Dorothy Straight in 1925, and they purchased the near derelict estate of Dartington Hall the same year. Both Leonard and Dorothy became trustees at Dartington Hall when the first Trusts were established in 1931. Leonard’s experience with the American system of agricultural experiment stations and co-operative extension services influenced the laboratory role of Dartington agriculture and forestry in Devon.
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