Leonard Elmhirst was born into a
landed gentry family in
Worsbrough (now part of
Barnsley,
Yorkshire), where the family seat is
Houndhill. He was the second of nine siblings (eight boys and one girl). His elder brother, Captain William Elmhirst, was killed on 13 November 1916, aged 24, while serving with the 8th Battalion
East Yorkshire Regiment during the
Battle of the Somme, and the third son, Second Lieutenant Ernest Christopher Elmhirst, was killed on 7 August 1915, aged 20, while serving with the 8th Bn.
Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) during the
Gallipoli Campaign; both during
World War I. The fourth son, Thomas became Air Marshal Sir
Thomas Elmhirst (KBE, CB, AFC, DL, RAF). In 1912 Leonard Elmhirst went up to
Trinity College, Cambridge, to study history and theology, intending to follow his father into the Church. In 1914, he was deemed unfit for military service and volunteered for overseas service in the
YMCA. His experience of the problems of rural India was to fundamentally change the direction of his career. After one year's service in the army he was demobilised in 1919 and entered
Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York to study agriculture. Arriving almost penniless, he completed a four-year degree course in two years. In 1920 he was elected president of Cornell's Cosmopolitan Club, which was mostly for foreign students, and found that it had large debts and depended on the philanthropy of its alumni and others. Money-raising activities brought him in contact with
Dorothy Straight, who was to become his wife. In America he also met the 1913 Nobel Laureate for Literature,
Rabindranath Tagore, and in November 1921 returned to India as Tagore's secretary. In 1922, in the village of
Surul (of which
Sriniketan is a part) adjacent to Santiniketan,
West Bengal, he set up for Tagore an Institute of Rural Reconstruction. Between 1923 and 1925, Leonard travelled twice around the globe, lecturing and supporting Rabindranath Tagore's missions to Europe, Asia and South America. The influence of Tagore, and the interests and money of his wife to be, led Elmhirst to undertake an experiment in rural reconstruction at
Dartington Hall in
Devon. It is said that Tagore had become familiar with Dartington during his travels in England and influenced Elmhirst in his selection of the estate, which was purchased in a series of transactions in 1925. Elmhirst also assisted in the re-acquisition of his ancient family seat,
Houndhill, a couple of miles from his birthplace. ==Works==