Michael Sadler (educationist)

English historian and educationalist, 1861–1943

Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (3 July 1861 – 14 October 1943) was an English historian, educationalist and university administrator. He worked at Victoria University of Manchester and was the vice chancellor of the University of Leeds. He was also a champion of the English public school system. 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:
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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. 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.

From 1923 to 1934, Sadler served as Master of University College, Oxford. He collected paintings and encouraged 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 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.