ABSTRACT
Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, celebrated as enthusiastically in the Yorkshire village of Laxton, where Leonard Elmhirst was born, as anywhere else in the Empire, from England to Canada, from Australia to India, gave Leonard his first memory of a public event. He noticed with a kind of envy a few soldiers who had the courage to walk out of the YMCA hut in Eastbourne when he got up to ‘take’ Prayers during the summer of 1915. Thinking of himself as a missionary in the making, he volunteered for India; and by October 1915 he was with the YMCA again, at Ahmadnagar in the Deccan. At no time in his life could Leonard be mistaken for anything other than an Englishman and a gentleman, rooted in Yorkshire. When he had the chance to fulfil his dream he never had any doubt that his Utopia should be set in the English countryside.
