Leonard Knight Elmhirst was a philanthropist and agronomist who worked extensively in India.
Background
Leonard Elmhirst was born into a landed gentry family in Worsbrough (now part of Barnsley, Yorkshire), where the family seat is Houndhill. In 1912 Leonard Elmhirst went up to Trinity College, Cambridge to study history and theology, intending to follow his father into the Church.
Education
Arriving almost penniless, he successfully completed a four-year degree course in two years.
Career
He was the second of nine siblings (eight boys and one girl). In 1914, he was deemed unfit for military service and volunteered for overseas service in the Young Men’s Christian Association. 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.
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
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 (now Sriniketan) 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. lieutenant 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.
In 1946 he refused the offer of a barony from Prime Minister Clement Attlee. In a letter to Attlee he replied that "My own work, however, as you know, has lain in the main among country people..in India, the United States of America and in Devonshire..acceptance would neither be easy for me to explain nor easy for my friends to comprehend".