A FATEFUL confrontation between suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and a Silsden art expert has been highlighted on the town’s Not Just Hockney website.

Colin Neville, who showcases the work of Bradford district artists past and present, has written about Augustus Spencer’s meeting with the daughter of women’s votes activist Emmeline Pankhurst.

He tells how the pair’s meeting went wrong from the start, and contributed to his eventual departure as principal of the Royal College of Art.

He explains how the pair’s animosity culminated in a scandal at the RCA , and criticisms of the talented Silsden painter of landscapes and portraits from which he never fully recovered.

The blog is just one of many written by Colin for his website, which each month attracts several thousand readers across the world to see biographies and pictures by more than 370 local artists.

Colin also compiles the bi-monthly Not Just Hockney presentations that display the work of district artists each month on the giant screen in Bradford’s Centenary Square.

Colin’s latest blog When Augustus Met Sylvia takes readers back to 1906 when Silsden-born Augustus encountered art student Sylvia,

Colin has written a shortened version of his blog for the Keighley News:

In 1900 Augustus Spencer was a man on a mission. He had been appointed as Principal of the RCA, with a view to implementing the reorganisation of the college, launched the previous year. He was noted for his energy and efficiency, but not particularly for his tact.

He threw himself with energy into the post, appointing new staff, negotiating pay-rises for instructors, and pressing the Board of Education for more teaching space.

He also appointed his brother, Beckwith Spencer, to teach history of art and literature – a decision that would later rebound on him.

All students were expected to follow a common curriculum in their first term, involving four art divisions, before choosing a specialism in a vocational area, eg teaching, design, painting.

Whilst this was in principle a sound idea, the way it was implemented upset some students - Sylvia Pankhurst, for example.

In 1904 Sylvia gained a two-year National Scholarship to study at the RCA. She had applied there from Manchester School of Art, where she had been awarded the ‘Best Woman Student Prize’ and a Travelling Scholarship to Venice for her mural designs.

She had subsequently gained a commission to paint murals for the newly-built hall of the Independent Labour Party in Manchester. She had then, a strong sense of her own worth as an artist.

But she was disappointed by the Royal College. The teachers there were, by comparison with Manchester, unsympathetic and critical and Sylvia was not happy with the way the course was organised.

She went to see Augustus to ask if she, and other like-minded students, could do figure drawing in the daytime, instead of in the evening.

But instead of explaining that the limited resources of the college prevented this, Augustus, according to Sylvia, ‘brusquely ordered her from his room’.

This would have been a lapse of manners and judgment by anyone at anytime, but given Sylvia’s involvement with the Suffragette Movement, it was a bad mistake on his part.

Sylvia later recalled that she “resented his manners, and thereafter when she and he met they glared at each other … like savage dogs”.

Sylvia later accused the college of discrimination against women students in their award of scholarships for advanced training.

Her friend, the Labour MP, Kier Hardie, subsequently raised the matter in Parliament, forcing Augustus to admit that under his administration only three out of 16 scholarships in 1905 had been awarded to women.

This must have sounded alarm bells at the Board of Education in London and paved the way for the enquiry launched a few years later by them.

Augustus had little experience of communication on equal terms with women. He was a bachelor, without female siblings, and one of eight sons in his Silsden family.

Almost all his teaching colleagues at the RCA were men and by 1912 only two women teachers had been appointed. Sylvia, with her strong feminist views, must have been completely alien to his experience and expectations.

The years 1904-06 also saw the start of militant Suffragette action, with Emmeline Pankhurst, Sylvia’s mother, disrupting a Liberal Party meeting in Manchester and the first arrests in London and elsewhere.

More encounters with Sylvia followed. In 1910, the Board of Education launched an enquiry into the administration of the college.

When Sylvia heard about this she immediately joined a deputation of seven recent graduates, all of whom had been on the course at the same time as her.

They complained of poor administration, nepotism by Augustus for appointing his brother to the staff, poor teaching, open favouritism, as well as discrimination against women students.

They concluded that they “found the Principal to be neither an artist nor a sympathetic organiser, we respectfully wish to ask, since we have suffered the system, in what way does he merit the position he now holds as Head of the Nation’s School of Design”.

The accusation that Augustus was ‘neither an artist’ must have been particularly hurtful to him, as Augustus, for all his alleged failings as an administrator, was a prolific and talented painter of landscapes and portraits.

Augustus never really recovered from the criticism he received. In 1920 he retired early from the college and died in Silsden a few years later.

* Visit notjusthockney.info for a longer version of the article When Augustus Met Sylvia.