Incorporation
Beaford was initially run as a department of the Dartington Hall Trust, but in 1980, while I was engaged in incorporating the Trust itself, I was asked to form a separate charitable company to take on the control and management of Beaford, albeit with continuing financial support from Dartington. Thus began my association with Beaford, which was to continue directly for more than twenty years and indirectly until the present day.
John Lane had been appointed a trustee at Dartington in 1974, but then assumed the chair of Beaford’s steering committee and so became the first chairman of the new company. I must have joined the Beaford board at an early stage, for I was appointed its vice-chair in December 1984. John then persuaded me to take on the chairmanship in May 1987. This, I was to come to realise, was to permit him, while remaining on the board, to have greater freedom to criticise the work of his successors as director. John and I were to remain friends right up until the time of his death in 2012, but he stayed on the Beaford board until 1997 and it was almost inevitable that we would find ourselves increasingly at variance, given the essential need for me as chairman to support and defend each director in office, unless and until I had genuinely good reason to do otherwise.