Maurice Ash

Maurice Anthony Ash (31 October 1917 – 27 January 2003) was an environmentalist, writer, and planner. He was chairman of the Town and Country Planning Association and of the Dartington Trust.

Maurice Anthony Ash was born at Hazaribagh, India on 31 October 1917. His father, Wilfred Cracroft Ash, was a successful civil engineer in British India who also made a large engineering contribution to the 1939-1945 War against the Nazis. He was a co-founder of the construction company Gilbert-Ash and is noted for technological inventions in pre-stressed concrete. Ash's grandfather, Gilbert Ash, was a property developer who left him a large fortune.

Ash was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, the London School of Economics (where he read economics) and at Yale. At LSE, he met Michael Young, later Lord Young of Dartington, who became a lifelong friend.

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.

After the war, his friend Young introduced him to the Dartington Hall Trust. The rundown 1,000 acre (4 km²) 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 American Whitneys) the Elmhirsts rescued a medieval hall and developed the estate, creating craft workshops and founding a famous design school.

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