North Devon Trust & Foundation
In or around 1980, at the behest of Michael Young, the sociologist and social and political activist ennobled in 1978 as Baron Young of Dartington, the Dartington Hall Trustees decided to extend their commitment to the north of the county by establishing the Dartington North Devon Trust. As it turned out, this was to involve little more than employing a person, giving him with an office and a bit of support and leaving him to generate such additional projects as he felt able.
The first director, Dr. David Davies, was a man of both distinction and resource – a geophysicist who, after working as a seismologist in both Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had edited the journal Nature for several years before coming to Devon. His arrival coincided with the period during which the government through the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) was investing extensively in youth training schemes and, in no time, David set up a network of workshops throughout the region. As a capable amateur musician, he also made his presence felt on the local arts scene and became a valued member of the Beaford board. Sadly, he was all too soon attracted to move to Yorkshire for work with Michael Young on another of his projects.
His successor, Michael Gee, proved to be a thoughtful and cultivated person, but without David’s dynamism. With the closure of the MSC in 1988, youth training was no longer an option and the North Devon Trust came to initiate several disparate projects concerned with community mediation, saving Devon’s apple orchards, helping fund children’s music lessons and, for a time, maintaining an interpretation centre at the Braunton Burrows. For a year or two, Michael also organised a small arts festival in Lynton and Lynmouth.
Quite early on, John Lane had replaced Michael Young as chairman of the North Devon Trust. No doubt frustrated by the conditions attaching to public funding and the necessity for ambitions to be tailored and trimmed to the ever-changing pattern of Arts Council and other external policies, he presented a paper to the Beaford board in March 1988 that advocated seeking an endowment to make the Centre self-sufficient and thus permit it to adopt whatever policies it chose in a completely free and independent manner. This was surely a dream of Utopia and events were to prove that, even after it had the benefit of significant endowment, Beaford would continue to rely substantially upon public, charitable and commercial funding for both its core and project costs
Much to his credit, however, John took the opportunity of the sale by Dartington of the Torrington glassworks to make the case to his fellow trustees for an endowment fund to be set aside for North Devon. But he also saw it as a chance to enforce a merger between Beaford and the North Devon Trust and this, much to John’s irritation, I felt strongly obliged to resist. Besides the fact that an arts centre was an inappropriate home for some of the Trust’s disparate range of projects, the salary of the director was markedly out of kilter with pay levels affordable in the arts sector. However, Diana Johnson worked with Michael Gee on a paper exploring ways in which the two organisations might cooperate and I, albeit reluctantly, agreed to accept the additional burden of joining the board of the North Devon Trust.
Thus it was that, at the end of 1991, the Dartington North Devon Foundation was established with an endowment of £500,000 for the support of Beaford and the North Devon Trust. A stipulation was attached that the Foundation should for an initial period of at least five years maintain the grants previously made by Dartington to Beaford (£25,000) and the Trust (£35,000), although Diana and Michael had estimated that at least £800,000 would be required for this purpose. However, I had in the course of the negotiations secured the major concession that the freeholds of Greenwarren House and Orchard Theatre’s premises in Barnstaple should be assigned to Beaford.
The first trustees of the Foundation were to be John Lane for the Trust and myself for Beaford, with an independent chairman in the person of John West, formerly regional director of Barclays Bank, who on retirement had joined the team of Dartington’s own merchant bank, Dartington & Co.
In practice, Beaford and the North Devon Trust were to find little common ground. I had been told by John Lane that the Trust’s future policy would be focused on rural change, but no rationalisation of its disparate range of activities ensued, except that it managed with difficulty to relieve itself of the burden of running the centre at Braunton Burrows. The Foundation’s grant to the Trust was required to support the cost of the director and his establishment, so that it was impossible to contemplate reducing it without undermining the way the Trust was run. However, the policy of maintaining grants at their historical levels was steadily eroding the Foundation’s capital and a decision eventually had to be taken either to change the policy or to pay out the endowment until it was used up.
Around the time of the millennium, it was finally decided that the Foundation must cease further erosion of its capital and aim to stabilise it at a level of around £300,000. The unavoidable consequence was that the North Devon Trust would no longer be able to employ a professional staff, but have to operate on a voluntary basis. Given the implications of this decision for Michael Gee in particular, it was an intensely difficult one to take, hence the delay in facing up to it for so long. However, John West and I were fortunate that the North Devon Trust was now represented on the Foundation’s board by John Dare, a retired headteacher of a pragmatic frame of mind. After a period of transition, the Trust’s annual grant was reduced to £3,000 to cover the Trust’s central administrative expenses, the fact being that all of its remaining activities were essentially self-supporting. Beaford’s grant was also reduced, but only to £15,000 a year.
I replaced John West as chairman of the Foundation upon my retirement from the Beaford board, but John remained a trustee for another eight years and thereafter served as Honorary President until his death at a great age in 2014. His clarity of thought, breadth of knowledge and innate charm had been of inestimable value to the Foundation and a cause of pleasure for all involved. We had together started to broaden the membership of the board and, at the end of 2014, under the influence of further new recruits, the obvious conflict of interest borne by those Foundation trustees who were also trustees of Beaford or the North Devon Trust was finally addressed. The membership of the Foundation’s board was fundamentally changed accordingly. At the same time, there was serious debate as to whether, given its modest size, the Foundation still had a useful role to perform, or whether it would make better sense for its assets now to be dispersed amongst its two principal clients. The most cogent argument for the continued existence of the Foundation came from Mark Wallace at Beaford, who explained that core funding from any source besides Arts Council England was difficult if not impossible to secure and that it greatly strengthened Beaford’s stance vis-à-vis the Council if there was another body consistently willing to contribute to its core costs, and not simply to support specific projects.
There was also intense debate as to whether the Foundation was obliged indefinitely to continue to support both Beaford and the North Devon Trust, the outcome of which was that in future all grants from the Foundation were to be subject to a system of annual applications, with decisions to be made on the merits of each case. Beaford was at this point warned that its annual grant might need to be significantly reduced in the light of new applications from the Trust. However, when approached for proposals, the Trust’s response was to ask for half of the available money, so that it might then decide for itself what to do with it. This being unacceptable, we were requested to supplement the funds of the Trust’s Young Musicians Support project (YMS), but feared this would simply serve to disincentivise YMS’s long-established fundraising processes. For several years, we instead made modest investments in workshops for young musicians arranged by YMS with professional performers appearing in the region, but, hard as we tried, we could not elicit the kind of feedback required to assess the real impact of these events. Consequently, we recently engaged the services of a consultant to explore with the county music hub, YMS and other interested agencies whether the Foundation could serve as a catalyst for promoting cooperation between the various individual initiatives concerned with musicmaking among children and young people in North Devon, the hope being that the whole might prove greater than the sum of the parts. A five-year project to this end has since been commissioned.
Beaford suffered a rocky few years during the 00s, but under Mark Wallace has gone from strength to strength, enjoying a measure of security through its national portfolio status at Arts Council England and with a programme now extending beyond the arts to both heritage and environment. Indeed, I consider that, given the greatly enhanced condition and accessibility of the photographic archive and a partnership with the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Beaford has now addressed the subject of rural change as fully and effectively as John Lane could ever have expected from the North Devon Trust. However, the Trust for its part can celebrate in particular the extraordinary success of Orchards Live! in promoting the preservation and renewal of Devon’s apple orchards through courses, talks and other events, the dissemination of information via its website, the acquisition of equipment for members’ use and assistance with the marketing of produce. Michael Gee’s crucial contribution to this project has been crowned by his publication in 2018 of The Devon Orchards Book.