The building that is now Ruskin College’s Headington headquarters was for many years the home of the left-wing educationalist and reformer Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (1861-1943), the one-time master of University College, Oxford, who was himself a lifelong disciple of John Ruskin.

As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford, he much admired such social reformers as Arnold Toynbee and Thomas Hill Green. But it was Ruskin who captured his imagination most of all. After attending a series of lectures that the great art critic gave at the University Museum in 1881, he wrote: “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."

Sir Michael Sadler bought The Rookery, as the present Ruskin Hall was then called, in 1934, the year he retired from University College, and also the year he married the Quaker educationalist and headmistress, Eva Gilpin. He lived there until his death in 1943 when his son, also Michael, inherited it and then sold it to Aubrey Edward Gurden, a former chef at Keble College and co-founder in 1919 of the Oxford bakery, Oliver and Gurden.

During the Second World War the American army camped in the grounds of the lovely, predominantly 18th-century house — covering them with Nissen huts — and later used the house itself as a convalescent home. Then, in 1946, Mr Gurden let the whole estate to Ruskin College which the following year bought it outright (less a a small parcel of land where a new house at 4 Dunstan Road was built).

The college, under the direction of Lionel Elvin (principal from 1945 to 1950), was, during that immediate post-war period, expanding at an unprecedented rate as more and more people from working class origins applied for an Oxford education; and that expansion continued under Elvin’s successor, Billy Hughes (principal, 1950-79), when new buildings were constructed or acquired both at the Headington site and its red brick neo-William and Mary Walton Street premises — built in 1913 by architects Joseph and Smithern and sold to Exeter College for £12m in 2008.

As a matter of fact, Ruskin College never had anything to do with John Ruskin. It was simply named after him — he being a friend of the Labour movement. He was in his eighties when it was founded (as Ruskin Hall) in 1899 and merely wished it well.

The college was the brainchild of two American students at Oxford University: Charles Austin Beard, 24, and Walter Watkins Vrooman, 29. They had met for the first time in late 1898, but such was the success of their project that barely five months later the first students at Ruskin Hall — not to be confused with the John Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, which was founded by Ruskin in 1871 — were studying at the hall’s first premises, leased from Balliol, at 14 St Giles.

From the start, Ruskin Hall — which became a college four years later — was something of an enigma in Oxford: closely allied to the Labour movement and seeking help from local and national trade unions and co-operative societies, yet the product of middle-class reformers.

As for Sir Michael Sadler, he would surely be intrigued by the fact that his home is now part of a college named after his art critic hero. As an undergraduate and president of the Oxford Union he was expected to go into politics, but instead he made the study of adult education his career, with the education of the young wage earner one of his main lifelong concerns.

He was also, incidentally, an art collector and critic; probably the first to collect the works of Kandinsky. His son, the aforementioned Michael, wrote Fanny by Gaslight, a novel about the life of a Victorian prostitute, which became a film directed by Anthony Asquith in 1944.