Maurice Ash

Innovative farmer, and fighter for civic and environmental causes

Maurice Anthony Ash, farmer, writer and administrator: born Hazaribagh, India 31 October 1917; Trustee, Dartington Hall 1964-92, Chairman 1972-84; member, South West Regional Economic Planning Council 1965-68; Chairman of the Executive, Town and Country Planning Association 1969-83, Chairman of Council 1983-87; Chairman, Green Alliance 1978-83; married 1947 Ruth Elmhirst (died 1986; three daughters, and one son deceased); died Totnes, Devon 27 January 2003.

Maurice Ash was a man of profoundly philosophical bent who believed in implementing his ideas – and had both the means and the personality to do so. As Michael Young (later Lord Young of Dartington), his friend from LSE days onwards, once put it, his was a special mix of diffidence and intensity.

With his soft-spoken, gentle manner, long silences that unnerved some people, and tendency to quote Wittgenstein, Ash could seem to be more erudite ruminant than man of action. Yet his years as chairman of the council and executive of the Town and Country Planning Association, of the trustees of Dartington Hall, and of the Green Alliance showed, he believed in fighting for the broadly civic and environmental causes that he held dear. He did so with grace, humour and respect for other people's views. At his own estate of Sharpham, overlooking the River Dart near Totnes, he was an innovative farmer and, on the top floor of his Palladian home, played host to a small Buddhist-oriented community, and then to Sharpham College for Buddhist studies.

Ash's readiness to put his ideas to the test was already evident at Gresham's School, Holt, where Donald Maclean and Benjamin Britten, subsequently his favourite composer, were among his contemporaries and where he was an outstanding athlete. The school was still run on the Honours system, under which there were no rules, but boys were put on their honour not to breach a hallowed code of behaviour. Ash and another boy decided, in a spirit of experiment, to break one of these traditions. Maurice duly confessed, but the other boy did not, leaving him to face the music alone.

At the London School of Economics, where he played hockey for London University, Ash became friendly with Erwin Rothbart, a German Jewish refugee (later an assistant to Maynard Keynes and subsequently killed in Flanders), who persuaded him to specialise in economics: a mistake, Ash later decided, since it prolonged the suppression of his feelings by his intellect, and encouraged quantitative rather than qualitative judgements. His feelings were strong enough, however, to embark on a vain mission to Frankfurt, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to help extricate Rothbart's parents from Germany. During the Second World War Ash fought in the Western Desert, Italy and Greece, first as a private and then as an officer in the tank corps, and was mentioned in despatches.

It was Michael Young, an alumnus of Dartington School and a youthful Dartington trustee, who precipitated the key event in Ash's adult life: his marriage to Ruth Elmhirst. Impressed by a history of his tank regiment that Ash had written, Young recommended him to write a report on the business side of the multi-faceted Dartington estate that Ruth's parents, Dorothy (née Whitney, a vastly wealthy American heiress) and Leonard Elmhirst, had established in the 1920s.

Ash was intrigued to find that, although there was no measurable common denominator between the arts, industries, educational institutions and agriculture that made up the totality, it was very much alive. The whole of it was the estate, which was how everyone thought of it. Propagating the concept of wholeness was to become the central mission of his life.

Full involvement in Dartington was, however, to be a later chapter. At this stage Ruth Elmhirst, whom he married in 1947, was anxious to escape the shadow of her parents. She and Maurice settled in semi-rural Essex, near Bishop's Stortford. Maurice Ash became involved in farming, and attempted to write a book setting out a comprehensive theory of society. He decided he was wasting his time when Peter Winch's book The Idea of a Social Science introduced him to the thinking of Wittgenstein, subsequently a dominant influence.

Instead, and more practically, he became involved with the Town and Country Planning Association, which had been founded at the turn of the century to promote the Garden City idea pioneered in Welwyn by Ebenezer Howard, whom Ash had long admired. The score or so of New Towns established since the Second World War were not garden cities, but the TCPA had played its part in fostering the all-party support they enjoyed. Their chief flaws, as Ash saw it, were first that they were conceived primarily as single-class housing programmes, and second, that they were not allowed to plough back into their own communities the increase in land values engendered by their development.

Subsequent pressure under Ash's chairmanship of the TCPA, coupled with public disgust at developers' windfall profits in the property boom of the early 1970s, contributed to the passage by the Labour government of the Community Land Act of 1975, which – for all its flaws – breached the sacred tenet of "no hypothecated revenue". The first legislative action of the Thatcher government was to repeal it.

Ebenezer Howard foresaw a whole network of garden cities – "multi-centred regions" in today's planning parlance – a concept which the French had adapted and which the TCRA sought to propagate, as did Ash in his book Regions of Tomorrow (1969), one of several collections of densely written essays for the TCPA's journal and, later, the magazine Resurgence.

But Whitehall, and most politicians, remained obdurately hostile to such new thinking. It remained for the TCPA to pursue its case in long public inquiries (Windscale, Stansted Airport etc), which brought Ash into closer touch with the environmental lobby. One by-product of this was his emergence, in 1978, as the first chairman of the Green Alliance, a pressure group set up to lobby across party barriers for environmental causes.

Maurice and Ruth Ash moved back to Devon in 1962. Maurice became a Dartington trustee in 1964, Dorothy Elmhirst died in 1968, Leonard remarried and went to the United States, and Maurice succeeded him as chairman in 1972 (until 1984). The estate's component parts seemed to him to be either stagnant or in decline. The school was to close in ignominy; Staverton Contractors, once the largest building company in the South West, was saved only by a friendly takeover; the textile mill and joinery works folded; the farm lost a lot of money.

Peter Sutcliffe, the executive trustee, and Ash decided that change could best occur on fresh territory. Thus began the enterprises of Dartington Glass in Torrington, and the Beaford Arts Centre 70 miles away in North Devon. Both proved highly successful and were eventually hived off. On the estate there were new shoots too: the site of the timber and textile mills became an industrial estate for small businesses; the old Cider Press became a profitable showcase for the crafts and allied activities, Dartington Pottery was established. So, ultimately, was Schumacher College, to propagate the new paradigm of sustainable development.

Ash believed that grand houses should serve their neighbourhood. Before his wife Ruth succumbed to motor neurone disease in 1986, the Sharpham estate was put into a trust endowed with funds to make some contribution to charitable activities. By creating a Buddhist- oriented community on the top floor of the house itself, with a programme of public talks and workshops. Ash hoped to build modest bridges between Eastern and Western thinking, Sharpham's "spirits", as they were called, played their part the emergence of nearby Totnes as a focal point of alternative approaches to life.

After seven years, the community, which had periodically been disrupted by irreconcilable personal differences, was transmuted into a college led by Stephen and Martine Batchelor and Christopher Titmuss. The estate proper was restructured into a number of smaller units, tenant- rather than landowner- managed, specialising in cheese and wine-making (both very successful) and organic farming.

Few men have worn their wealth as lightly as Maurice Ash. To accompany him on a Saturday morning's shopping in Totnes was to realise just how widely cherished he was. He loved children, and they him. His urge was to share his passions. He enjoyed buying pictures, especially those by the Polish-born Zdislaw Ruszkowski, was long a friend of Henry Moore and trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation – and also founded the Harlow Arts Trust, to endow the soulless new town with sculpture. He even established a top-class restaurant nearby, which proved too far ahead of its time to last long. Himself a paradoxical mix of conviviality and solitariness, he retreated periodically to write at his villa in Cap d'Antibes, where he was also the most generous of hosts.

Western man, he believed, lives suspended between self-importance and futility, bewitched but cut off by the words with which he has defined the world, seeking to reduce his insignificance by the accumulation of knowledge, yet thereby only increasing his own isolation. That dualism, that separation of self from the world, can best be overcome by putting understanding above knowledge, by reversing the hubris that sets man above the natural world, and by rebuilding local life with the aid of appropriate technology. These ideas, most fully elaborated in New Renaissance: essays in search of wholeness (1987), were lived out in a life of rare integrity, in all senses of that word.

Roger Berthoud