Francis Dodd, 1874-1949 Portrait of Charles Prestwich Scott 1846-1932

Francis Dodd, 1874-1949

Portrait of Charles Prestwich Scott 1846-1932

Signed/Inscribed:

and dated "Dodd 1916"

pencil on paper

35 x 27 cm. (13.3/4 x 10.3/4in.)

working drawing for the oil on canvas portrait in the Manchester City Art Gallery Acsesion number : 1978.180 bequeathed by Mrs Alice Olga Scott, 1978

Literature

etching, 1916 NPG 3997

Notes

Charles Prestwich Scott, (1846–1932), newspaper editor and proprietor, was born at Bath on 26 October 1846. He was the eighth child and fourth son of Russell Scott (1801–1880), a partner in a coal company, and his wife, Isabella Civil, daughter of Joseph Prestwich, wine merchant. Scott's upbringing was Unitarian. He attended Hove School, Sussex, run by a Unitarian minister, and Clapham grammar school. He also, for reasons of health, spent a period with a private tutor on the Isle of Wight, the Revd Arthur Watson. Despite religious obstacles, in 1865 he secured admission to Corpus Christi, Oxford, immersing himself in a full university life—including rowing and debating—and graduating BA in 1869 with a first class in literae humaniores. Thereafter, he habitually looked to Oxford for recruits to his staff.

Scott's choice of career was determined by three things: family connections, his evident literary skills, and his strongly directed personality. J. E. Taylor, his cousin (but many years his senior), owned the Manchester Guardian, which Taylor's father had founded. An organ both of the flourishing cotton trade and of religious and political dissent, it was the most valuable newspaper property outside London. Taylor offered Scott a position on the paper which he took up in 1871, and elevated him to the editorship in January 1872. Scott, aged only twenty-five, was many years junior to the more experienced of his colleagues, but this did not prove a difficulty. His piercing brown eyes, striking good looks, newly acquired beard, and authoritative manner left no doubt who was in charge. Scott remained editor for fifty-seven years.

Within a short time Scott was attracting to the newspaper highly distinguished writers on the arts and sciences, including such figures as A. W. Ward, James Bryce, C. E. Montague, and Arnold Toynbee. In politics the Manchester Guardian in 1872 was more whig than radical. Scott, for more than a decade, seemed content with this. But perhaps he began foreshadowing a change in political direction by the attention his paper began devoting to social questions. The Guardian carried well-documented accounts of conditions in the mining districts of northern England, of the indifferent housing of the poor, and of deficiencies in the medical services. Scott sent W. T. Arnold (grandson of Arnold of Rugby, and nephew of Matthew) to Ireland, from whence came reports of appalling social conditions and their connection with political discontents and political crime.

Hence the ground was not unprepared when, in 1886, W. E. Gladstone committed his party to Irish home rule (thereby splitting the Liberal Party). Scott embraced the cause. It proved a wide-ranging conversion, from which Scott emerged not just a home-ruler but a social radical. His newspaper in the next three decades opposed British imperialism in South Africa (and in particular Cecil Rhodes's exploitation of native labour), resisted large programmes of armaments, and gave devoted support to women's suffrage and the many schemes for social improvement embodied in what, with the Liberals restored to office from 1905, became the ‘new Liberalism’.

In 1895, while remaining editor of the Manchester Guardian, Scott entered parliament for the Leigh division of Lancashire as a Liberal. He remained until 1905. It proved a stormy decade. The South African War not only divided the Liberals (again) but cost the Manchester Guardian readers and advertisers on account of its ‘unpatriotic’ attit