Michael Ernest Sadler

Michael Ernest Sadler, born into a radical home in 1861 at Barnsley in the industrial north of England, died in Oxford in 1943.

His early youth was coloured by the fact that one of his forebears, Michael Thomas Sadler, was among the pioneers of the Factory Acts. His early memories were full of associations with leaders of the working-class movement in the north of England. Remembering these pioneers, Sadler recorded: "I can see how much religion deepened their insight and steadied their judgement, and saved them from coarse materialism in their judgement of economic values. This common heritage was a bond of social union. A social tradition is the matrix of education."

Sadler's schooling was typical of his times. It gave him a diverse background, which was reflected throughout his life in his interpretation of the process and content of education. When he was 10 years old, he was sent to a private boarding school at Winchester, where the atmosphere was markedly conservative. Sadler recalls:

Think of the effect on my mind of being swung from the Radical West Riding... where I never heard the Conservative point of view properly put, to where I was thrown into an entirely new atmosphere in which the old Conservative and Anglican traditions were still strong.

From this preparatory school he moved to Rugby in the English Midlands, where he spent his adolescence in an atmosphere entirely different from that of the Winchester school. His masters were enthusiastic upholders of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution. The young Sadler soon found himself in critical revolt against the Cavalier and Anglican traditions.

He went to Trinity College, Oxford in 1880. There he soon came under the spell of leading historians such as T. H. Green and Arnold Toynbee, but it was John Ruskin who overwhelmed him as an undergraduate. Sadler has left on record how, in his second year at Trinity, a short course of lectures by Ruskin was announced, to be given in the Oxford University Museum. Tickets were hard to get because of the popularity of the speaker. After a warm description of Ruskin's picturesque appearance, Sadler expresses a favourite conviction:

Nominally these lectures of Ruskin's were upon Art. Really they dealt with the economic and spiritual problems of English national life. He believed, and he made us believe, that every lasting influence in an educational system requires an economic structure of society in harmony with its ethical ideal.

That belief persisted to the end of Sadler's life and is recurrent in his many analyses of foreign systems of education. When, in July 1882, the examinations lists were issued, Sadler had gained a first-class degree in Literae Humaniores. A month earlier he had become president elect of the Oxford Union, a field of public debating experience that has produced many English politicians.

In 1885, he was elected secretary of Oxford's Extensions Lectures Sub-Committee, providing outreach lectures. He was a "student" (the equivalent of a fellow) at Christ Church, Oxford from 1890 to 1895. In 1895, he was appointed to a government post as director of the Office of Special Inquiries and Reports, resigning from the board of education in 1903. A special professorship in history and administration of education was created for him at the University of Manchester, where he was impressed by the work of the educational theorist Catherine Isabella Dodd and her experimental school.

He became vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds in 1911, where he now has a building named after him, and returned to Oxford in 1923 as master of University College, Oxford. There he continued to influence national educational policy and promote the work of various modernist artists.

Sadler married Mary Ann Harvey Sadler, "a wealthy Yorkshire heiress", in 1885. Mary, born in 1852, was the daughter of a linen manufacturer with a warehouse in Barnsley. She was his hostess at their house in Headingley, Leeds, called Buckingham House, where Sadler's Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings were displayed in a picture gallery, receiving many cultural figures like Roger Fry and emerging artists like Henry Moore and Jacob Kramer. Mary died in 1931 and left a legacy to the Oxford Preservation Trust. Their only child was Michael Sadleir (1888–1957), a British publisher, novelist, book collector and bibliographer.

In 1934 Sadler married Eva Margaret Gilpin (1868-1940), headmistress of Hall School, Weybridge, Surrey, who had been the governess of his son, Michael Sadleir. Gilpin retired from the school leaving it to her niece. The two of them spent five years touring and enjoying retirement.