Leonard Knight Elmhirst

Leonard Knight Elmhirst (1893 to 1974) was a British philanthropist and agronomist who worked extensively in India and co-founded with his wife Dorothy the Dartington Hall project in progressive education and rural reconstruction. Born into a landed gentry family at Worsbrough in Yorkshire, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1912, served with the YMCA overseas, and after the First World War entered Cornell University to study agriculture, completing a four-year course in two years. In 1921 he returned to India as secretary to Rabindranath Tagore and in 1922 set up for him an Institute of Rural Reconstruction at Surul beside Santiniketan. Tagore's influence and his wife's money led him to buy the Dartington Hall estate in Devon in 1925. In 1929 he launched the International Conference of Agricultural Economists, in 1931 he helped found Political and Economic Planning, in 1932 he brought artificial insemination of cattle from Russia to Devon, and in 1954 he joined the Indian Rural Education Committee.