Richard Elmhirst

Richie was at Rugby during the war and when he left in 1918 was sent to the Household Brigade Officers Cadet Battalion in Bushey. He subsequently moved into the Coldstream Guards where he stayed for six months.

Another of the Elmhirst siblings to benefit from Leonard’s influence, Richie was asked by the Dean of Magdalene College, Cambridge to study agriculture there. But he failed his exams and so ended up back in South Yorkshire working on the Frickely estate owned by the Warde-Aldam family of Hooton Pagnell.

Later, Leonard invited him to Dartington Hall to run the poultry department where he met his first wife, an American dancer with whom he had a daughter. However, he left Devon in 1936 and headed for Chicago to study social philosophy.

During WWII, Richie joined the American Air Corps as a private before being pulled out after eight days to become an instructor. He then became a lieutenant and fought at the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific War.

When the war ended in 1945, Richie married his second wife, Morna, and the couple ran a farm at Clackmannanshire.

from a biography of the Worsbrough family