Page 170 - Constructing Craft

to choose a rural location. He had no interest in instructing locals in other rural skills

but he employed young men and women from the surrounding district in the pottery.
Also in 1920 Eric Gill established a craft community called the Guild of St Joseph

and St Dominic at Ditchling, a small village in Sussex. The community was founded
on religious grounds with craft employed as a means of expressing the

craftspeople’s commitment to the Catholic faith. In 1925 Dorothy and Leonard
Elmhirst established a community at Dartington Hall in Devon, centred around a

progressive school that taught craft based on the ‘learning-by-doing philosophy’ that

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was currently popular. Dorothy was an American philanthropist and Leonard had
been involved in rural reconstruction in Bengal. The plan for the regeneration of the

Dartington estate included crafts as ‘efficient well-researched modern solutions to
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unemployment and poverty.’ The experiments carried out using techniques from
the early period of the industrial revolution, such as the combining of hand-weaving

and machine-weaving for instance, were given four years to prove themselves as
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economically viable. Most such experiments were found to be uneconomic but
craft, although employed in an experimental manner, was not considered part of a
return to the pre-industrial past but rather a means of solving modern problems in a

rural setting. In all these examples craft served a variety of purposes from being the

sole reason for the establishment of a community through to being one of many
enterprises employed as means to an end – the revival of rural society.

Harry and May Davis

Harry Davis, who, as was seen earlier, held firm ideas on matters relating to craft,
provides us with an example of how interwar craftspeople often believed that their

craft and the way they lived were intimately entwined. Harry and May Davis had
emigrated to New Zealand in search of a better life but before that they had

experienced ideological-based communal living in a remote location. The Davises

held firm pacifist views and a religious society called the Society of Brothers, also
known as the Bruderhof Community, appeared to be an organisation that shared

their views. The Community had been founded in Germany in 1920 by city
intellectuals who wished to start a new life on the land. After being driven out of

Germany by the Nazi regime in 1938 the Bruderhof Community based themselves

Constructing Craft