The foundation of the Beaford Centre
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The decision of the Trustees of Dartington Hall near Totnes in South Devon to establish a rural arts centre in 1966 in the isolated North Devon village of Beaford (parish population less than 300) was truly pioneering for its time. To quote one contemporary report: ‘Exceptional (and some would say mad) was the Trustees’ decision to open an arts centre at Beaford … This seemed extravagant and unnecessary.’
It is difficult to appreciate just how remote and often overlooked the scattered small communities of North Devon were sixty years ago. The ‘land between the two rivers’ (the Torridge and the Taw) was still unknown territory to many Devonians. Tourists had not yet come to know the area as ‘Tarka Country’ or flock to walk and cycle on its very popular Tarka Trail. The recognition of the special character of the North Devon countryside by its incorporation into the UNESCO North Devon Biosphere Reserve was still forty years in the future.5
Rural depopulation was a live issue for North Devon sixty years ago. In the late 1950s the Dartington Hall Trustees had funded a sociological study of one particular North Devon parish to examine local population trends. (Williams, 1963) They followed this interest up with a decision to support two innovative projects aimed at addressing social deprivation and the lack of employment opportunities in North Devon. The creation of a rural arts centre at Beaford was one of these and the other was the construction of the £0.25m Dartington Glass Factory which was opened at Great Torrington in June 1967. Eskil Vilhemsson and fifteen other glass blowers were recruited from Scandinavia to train local people in new skills at this factory, a business which is still going strong today under the name, Dartington Crystal. (Derounian et al., 1988, 102)
The concept of the new Beaford Centre (later to be known as the Beaford Arts Centre) had at its heart the ambition “to enrich community life through the public performances of live events’. From its opening day, 20th August 1966, the Centre hit the ground running. An inaugural rural arts festival, ‘Beaford Entertainment’, attracted enthusiastic local audiences to 33 events during September 1966 with the words and music of well-known artists such as Gilbert and Sullivan, Benjamin Britten, Sophocles, and Harold Pinter being performed alongside community events such as bell-ringing and dancing. Soon residents of North Devon were seeing a wealth of professional performers arriving on their doorsteps, including dancers from the Royal Ballet, poets such as Stevie Smith and musicians such as Ravi Shankar and the folk group, Pentangle.
The Centre’s expanding programme was enthusiastically supported by the Dartington Hall Trustees. An initial budget for 1966/1967 of under £2,000 (including £150 from the South Western Arts Association, the regional forerunner of Arts Council England) was soon enhanced by the Trustees ear-marking an operating grant of £10,000 p a. In addition, they invested £38,000 capital funding to acquire Greenwarren House, the village’s former rectory, and convert it into Beaford’s centre for residential courses. (Over the following decades residential courses at Beaford were to provide inspiring and memorable experiences to thousands upon thousands of schoolchildren from Devon and beyond).
By 1968 the Centre’s events programme could include the noted poets, John Fairfax, Ted Hughes and John Moat, hosting a residential poetry course for teenagers, drawing inspiration from the ‘exhilaration of solitude’ that the remote Beaford location offered.6 Links with the British Film Institute brought an ‘International Cinema’ season of twelve films to North Devon and the Trustees went on to take the bold step of establishing the Orchard Theatre in 1969 as the Centre’s very own touring company. By that year Beaford could proudly claim to have promoted some 300 events seen by some 36,000 people in its first three years.
The successful launch of the Beaford Centre benefited greatly from Dartington Hall’s national, indeed international reputation as an innovative arts organisation. (Cox, 2005) But just as significant was the Trustees’ decision to appoint John Lane as the Centre’s first Director. A painter and writer by background, Lane moved to Beaford from a lecturing job at Bretton Hall College of Education in Yorkshire. His visionary zeal lay at the heart of the Centre’s early success. Two particular ambitions drove his approach. First was his insistence on providing high quality arts experiences – ‘excellent professional events to provide stimulus’. The people of North Devon did not deserve anything less. Equally important was his commitment to involve local people in creating programmes that drew inspiration from the special character of the area ‘so that they felt the Centre’s activities were not only [made] for them but by them’.
Lane saw the potential for breaking down barriers between art forms and taking arts activity to communities where nothing of its kind had been seen before. He felt sure that the value of arts to society was underestimated and recognised its power for giving people the chance to participate in life-enhancing experiences. (One of his reports was entitled ‘The Great Art of Cheering Us All Up’).
Beaford’s early years met with keen local interest. The Centre was able to record that in 1971, with the help of an allocation of £18,600 from the Dartington Hall Trustees, 28,907 people had paid to attend 280 events spread across more than 50 communities. with a further 6,000 attending un-ticketed events. By 1972 the reputation of the Beaford Arts Centre was such that the government’s Arts Minister was making his way to North Devon and Beaford was being held up as an exemplar arts centre in a House of Lords debate on regional arts development. At that time it was claimed to be one of only six such professionally run centres in the country.
In a paper to the Town and Country Planning Association’s 1972 national conference John Lane presented an overview of the Centre’s progress to date. (Lane, 1972) He highlighted the five main areas of the Centre’s activities as: music, poetry, exhibitions and entertainment; touring plays; youth and community work; day and evening courses; and short-term residential courses. He also made passing mention of involvement in photography and film-making, referring to plans for ‘photographers (to record the area) and … a small itinerant film crew to make films about North Devon’. Thus, the seeds had been sown for a new venture that would see photography take root in the Centre’s future programmes.