Maurice Ash


Maurice Anthony Ash was an environmentalist, writer, farmer, and planner. He was chairman of the Town and Country Planning Association and of the Dartington Trust.

Education and early life

Maurice Anthony Ash was born at Hazaribagh, India on 31 October 1917. His father, Wilfrid Cracroft Ash, was a successful civil engineer in British India who also made a large engineering contribution to the 1939-1945 War. His grandfather Gilbert Ash was the founder of the construction company Gilbert-Ash; Maurice was noted for technological inventions in pre-stressed concrete. The mathematician and brewer, Michael Ash, was his brother.
Ash was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk, the London School of Economics, and at Yale. At LSE, he met Michael Young, later Lord Young of Dartington, who became a lifelong friend. During his education he developed a lifelong dislike for pseudoscience.

Career

During the Second World War, Ash served in the British 23rd Armoured Brigade in North Africa, Italy and Greece. In 1944, he was mentioned in dispatches. He later wrote a history of his regiment.

Dartington Hall

After the war, Young introduced him to the Dartington Hall Trust. The rundown 1,000 acre estate of Dartington, near Totnes in Devon, had been bought by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst in the 1920s. With ideas from the philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and money Dorothy Elmhirst inherited from her family the Elmhirsts rescued a medieval hall and developed the estate, creating craft workshops and founding a famous design school.
After farming in Essex, Ash was interested in the postwar plans for new towns such as Welwyn Garden City and joined the Town and Country Planning Association, becoming its chairman and later its vice-president. The TCPA published the influential magazine Bulletin of Environmental Education. Ash promoted enlightened development.
Ash became chairman of the Dartington Trust in 1972. While some Dartington activities were given up, others started. Dartington glass and the Schumacher College continued. Ash also backed a magazine called The Vole.
In writing about the great private estates which followed the dissolution of the English monasteries, Ash argued that they had been failures in any civilizing sense. Monasteries had been centres of learning and innovation. He argued for re-establishing such communities.
Broadly, his philosophy followed Wittgenstein and rejected Descartes.

Books

His published books include:
Ash met the Elmhirsts' daughter Ruth and in 1947, they were married. They had a son and three daughters.
In 1962, the Ashes bought Sharpham House, Ashprington, near Totnes, in Devon, a large Palladian house designed by Robert Taylor. A farm there was run on Rudolf Steiner principles, and also vineyards, a Buddhist community and college, and the Robert Owen Foundation, a charity which provided agricultural experience for people with mental disabilities.