‘The Battle of the Principal’: Insurrection at the Architectural Association
In this extract from his new book looking at the Architectural Association in the postwar years, Patrick Zamarian explores one of the lesser-known of the many conflicts between the school’s student body and its principals – in this case the ‘querulous’ Michael Pattrick.
In July 2020, the Architectural Association dismissed its director Eva Franch i Gilabert, the only woman ever elected to the post. Her male predecessors often fared no better. The founding members of the AA were barely in their twenties, and student activism runs as a continuous thread through its history. The student rebellion of the 1930s, which found its way into modernist folklore, was followed by similar events in the postwar period. In the mid-1960s, the students managed to get their principal William Allen sacked, and they came close on other occasions. At the end of his first term as chairman, Alvin Boyarsky faced down an insurrection and emerged with his authority strengthened. The same applied to Michael Pattrick, who headed the school in the 1950s and fended off a well-orchestrated attempt to get him removed from office. The following extract gives a taste of Pattrick’s uneasy relations with the student body.
Michael Pattrick (centre) and Peter Shepheard (right) showing Gordon Russell around the AA’s annual exhibition of student work, July 1954. Credit: © AA Journal.
Though initially conducted in a constructive, almost amicable fashion, the meetings of the council/staff/students’ committee could not dispel the students’ mistrust and dislike of Pattrick, who appeared intent on changing the face of the school and who – true to the ‘querulousness’ which Chitty had attributed to him – aggravated matters by adopting a rather ruthless approach in his dealings with nonconformist students. Over the course of almost two years, the students’ committee pursued an overt campaign initiated by Spyer and his vice-chairman, John Smith, to get Pattrick removed from office. Things eventually came to a head at a general meeting of students on 12 March 1953, called to debate a motion of censure on the principal. Just over half of all students attended the gathering and passed an almost unanimous vote of no confidence in the principal and a request to the council to consider a new appointment. The council took a resolute stance, reaffirming its ‘complete confidence’ in the principal and forbidding the students any further discussion about its employees.[1] Pattrick, who professed himself ‘completely unaware […] that something like this was brewing up,’[2] hoped that, given his support on the council, he might be able to ease matters with the students. However, despite holding a series of weekly meetings with them during the Easter holidays, in May 1953 he conceded that he was ‘not able to say that any common ground of agreement had been reached.’[3]
In fact, Pattrick underestimated the gravity of the situation. Drawing their inspiration from the Yellow Book, the students’ committee had appointed a sub-committee to draft a ‘Report on Recent Events in the School, and Suggestions Toward a New Policy’, which it intended to circulate to the membership.[4] Completed in June 1953, the report was a peculiar hybrid of two wildly inconsistent parts. Its main body outlined the factors which had, in the students’ view, led to ‘the present decline of the AA school’ and put forward a number of ‘constructive proposals’ to improve the situation.[5] The majority of these concerned school policy, including the re-introduction of the unit system, the adoption of a liberal educational model and – triggered by recent events and somewhat quixotic – the possible foregoing of RIBA recognition to enable the AA to ‘follow its own course unhindered.’[6] In addition, the report listed a number of suggestions relating to the association as a whole, notably the re-branding of the AA Journal as a proper architectural magazine run by an editorial board with student participation and – most importantly – the restoration of the student vote. In sharp contrast to these ‘constructive proposals’ in the main body of the report, the appendix, which gave a history of events over the previous two years, served no discernible purpose other than to launch a scathing attack on the principal and, to a lesser extent, the council itself. Predictably, neither of them was inclined to sanction the dissemination of such a document. On 9 June 1953 the council resolved that ‘no lobbying of this nature be permitted’,[7] and three days later Pattrick advised the students’ committee that a ‘deliberate disregard of the council’s order’ might result in the expulsion of those concerned.[8]
AA students in the late 1950s. Credit: © AA Archives.
Pattrick rejected the students’ justification of their conduct as being in keeping with a ‘type of “unwritten” constitution’[9] and acted on the legally sound, if somewhat insensitive, premise that they had ‘no constitutional rights whatever.’[10] Even so, he empathised with the students, whose recalcitrance he saw as an understandable reaction to the worsening employment prospects awaiting them upon qualification, and he stubbornly refused to take their attacks personally (even when they were meant to be). Indeed, in a memorandum to the school committee Pattrick asked its members to ‘understand that however wild and illogical the students’ proposals may be, they are, for the most part, entirely sincere, and therefore deserve serious consideration.’[11] Hugh Casson, who had taken over the presidency from Anderson, agreed and called a meeting of the council/staff/students’ committee on 18 June 1953 to examine the report. The council representatives, though impressed with the students’ constructive proposals, rejected the appendix as being detrimental to the interests of the association and – given the students’ unwillingness to withdraw it – categorically refused to issue the report to the membership.[12] Casson warned the students that they might be excluded from the school should they proceed with their plans for publication, and Pattrick himself threatened to take legal action:
You cannot surely in your wildest dreams imagine that I am going to agree to the circulation of this document on recent history. It would put me in a position of having to sue for damages […]. I would certainly bring an action on it.[13]
Alarmed by indications that the report was being leaked to sympathetic sections of the membership, in the following week the council convened a special meeting to discuss the situation. Pattrick made it clear that he ‘did not want to sack anybody,’[14] but some members of the council were considerably less lenient. Brandon-Jones felt that ‘the time has come now for something to be done,’[15] and so did fellow councillor Richard Arthur de Yarburgh-Bateson, an architect with the Hertfordshire County Council:
Regarding what has become the Battle of the Principal, I think that the students should be informed as strongly as possible […] that any student, who is dissatisfied with the way that the Principal is running the school, has the remedy in his own hands. He can seek his architectural education elsewhere.[16]
In spite of this, the council hoped that the discussion on the students’ constructive proposals would be continued, and at the beginning of July 1953 Casson called further meetings of the council/staff/students’ committee to this end. The student representatives, however, were not content with limiting the debate to their proposals and urged the council to rescind its directive banning any discussion of the association’s employees, not least because it prevented the committee from examining their report in full.[17] Unwilling to expose his principal to the humiliation of having his position scrutinised by the students, Casson used a doctor’s appointment as an excuse to cancel a follow-up meeting.[18]
The council meanwhile pursued the students’ constructive proposals: it set up an ‘AA Journal advisory group’ (and eventually implemented its recommendation to create an editorial board with student participation), and at a meeting on 13 July 1953 it rather unceremoniously agreed to work towards a restoration of the student vote.[19] When in November 1953 the council/staff/students’ committee reconvened once more, the council representatives urged the students to withdraw the appendix of their report not least because it portrayed them as an irresponsible body and thus hurt their case before the membership. Brandon-Jones, who strongly supported their re-enfranchisement, warned the students that if the paper were leaked to the members it would ‘stop all hope of the vote being returned.’[20] Fellow councillor Peter Shepheard, a distinguished architect and landscape designer, concurred:
We do feel absolutely at the end of our tether. I think if you had any sense at all you would drop this thing and never bring it up again. It is a document which can only be described as childish and does you no good at all.[21]
To the council’s incredulity, the students’ committee valued its opposition to the principal higher than the implementation of any of its proposals and, on 1 December 1953, resigned en bloc.
NOTES
AA Council, 30 March 1953, AAA/CM.
Pattrick, letter to Anderson, 13 March 1953, AAA, 1991:26.
AA Council and Advisory Council, joint meeting, 21 May 1953, AAA/CM.
Report, June 1953.
Ibid.
Ibid.
AA Council, 9 June 1953, AAA/CM.
Pattrick, letter to Colin Glennie, 12 June 1953, AAA, 1991:26. Glennie had succeeded Shepherd as chairman of the students’ committee for the 1953/54 session.
Ibid.
Pattrick, quoted in: AA School Committee, 15 April 1953, AAA/SCM.
‘Principal’s Report’, 18 June 1953, att. to: AA School Committee, 22 June 1953, AAA/SCM.
Council/Staff/Students’ Committee, 18 June 1953, AAA/CSSCM.
Ibid.
AA Council, 25 June 1953, AAA/CM.
Ibid.
Yarburgh-Bateson, letter to Casson, 23 June 1953, AAA, Box 1991:26.
Council/Staff/Students’ Committee, 8 July 1953, AAA/CSSCM.
Casson, letter to Ronald Sims, 17 July 1953, AAA, 1991:26.
Casson, letter to Ronald Sims, 17 July 1953, AAA, 1991:26.
Quoted in: Council/Staff/Students’ Committee, 12 Nov 1953, AAA/CSSCM 1952-53.
Ibid.
Patrick Zamarian is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Liverpool, where he was awarded a PhD for his thesis on The AA School of Architecture in the Postwar Period (1945–1965). He also holds master’s degrees in architecture and in the history and theory of architecture, both awarded by ETH Zurich. The Architectural Association in The Postwar Years is the first archive-based study of the Architectural Association, published to coincide with the centenary of its full recognition by RIBA. The book traces the history of the school from the end of the war until the mid-1960s, when it surrendered its position as the pacemaker in British architectural education in order to safeguard its institutional independence.
