Conception

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In the mid-1960s, rural North Devon remained a relatively remote part of the country, the link road from the M5 to Barnstaple being still a thing of the future. The Dartington Hall Trustees took it into their heads to attempt to replicate in the region some of the regenerative initiatives the Elmhirsts had inspired in South Devon some forty years earlier. With the guidance of the designer Frank Thrower, they engaged sixteen glass blowers from Sweden to form the core of a glassmaking business in Great Torrington and to impart their skills to local people.

But, in the Dartington tradition, a job was not enough and the Trustees wished at the same time to establish an arts centre in the area. They found a large house with substantial grounds in the nearby village of Beaford and proceeded to recruit John Lane as its founding director. Both he and his wife Truda had been art students at the Slade and, with a teaching diploma from London University’s Institute of Education, John had worked both in schools and at Bretton Hall College of Education in Yorkshire. Harland Walshaw, a subsequent director at Beaford, told me what an unorthodox and inspiring teacher John had been at his school.

The Beaford Arts Centre opened at Greenwarren House in 1966, but John had the vision to conceive that, in an area with poor infrastructure and communications, what was needed in the main was not a centre to which people would travel, but rather a hub from which events and activities could radiate into the towns and villages round about. In so doing, he set a pattern for rural arts centres up and down the land. John would have it that:

It began with a whimper: there was a house … but little else: no chairs, no desk, not a telephone, even a typewriter.

Be that as it may, he in no time organised a festival featuring more than thirty events all over North Devon tailored to a wide variety of tastes. Early adherents also recall with affection concerts in the house itself and craft classes in the outbuildings.

A large property needed a purpose greater than simply housing administrative offices and the occasional event and, in association with Devon County Council’s education department, Greenwarren House became a base for residential courses for schoolchildren, the row of small wellington boots in the entrance hall becoming a much-loved feature of the place. In 1969, John founded Orchard Theatre, a touring repertory theatre company with Andy Noble as its first artistic director. Two years later, he instigated a photographic project to record a traditional way of rural life that was already beginning to disappear. For the first year, he engaged a young photographer, Roger Deakins, who would go on to become an Oscar-winning cinematographer and attain a knighthood. The project was then taken on by James Ravilious, who over the next 17 years was to create almost 80,000 negatives, mainly of the world between the rivers Taw and Torridge, and also start collecting an “old archive” drawn from the albums of local people, which now comprises some 7,000 images dating mostly from 1880-1930.

John Lane was also instrumental with others in establishing the Plough Arts Centre in the former drill hall in Torrington, a separate, building-based venture to be managed separately, but in cooperation with Beaford.