The February speaker was Alan Osborne who took the Cockerells, father and son as his subject. He began with Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (1867-1963), who transformed the Fitzwilliam Museum from a dark, overcrowded space to a palace of the arts.
He was born in Brighton and his father was a coal merchant. He was expected to take over the family business when his father died but did so reluctantly as his main interest was in the arts and he knew John Ruskin, William Morris and Octavia Hill. Eventually he escaped to become the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, working for William Morris and cataloguing his books at Kelmscott Manor. He became an art collector and advised other collectors, but had no real experience as a Museum Director, when he was appointed to run the Fitzwilliam in 1908. On the strength of having a proper job he got married and was to father three children.
He raised large sums to allow the Fitzwilliam Museum to expand and bought its first Picasso. He introduced Sunday opening and set up the Friends of the Fitzwilliam, with Rupert Brooke as an early contributor through that scheme. He added an extension to the building as he trebled the size of the collections. He was knighted in 1934 and finally left the Fitzwilliam in 1937, having served longer as Director than any other.
Christopher Cockerell (1910-1999) was Sydney’s only son and was born in Cambridge and educated at St Faith’s, a preparatory school in Hunstanton and at Gresham’s, where he excelled at Maths. He read Mechanical Engineering at Peterhouse and joined an engineering company in Bedford. He returned to Cambridge in 1934 to take an MA in Radio and Electronics and then went to work for the Marconi Company in Chelmsford and may well have had contact with Marconi himself. He married at this time and was the father of two children.
One of his first tasks was to develop equipment for the BBC at Alexandra Palace including outside broadcasting vehicles. As Head of Aircraft Development he was paid £400pa aged 27. In 1939 he developed a visual method for plotting direct courses for bombers, which helped them to find their way home and for them to be located if they crashed. He also worked on radar and helped to locate German radar stations before D-Day, so they could be wiped out before the invasion of France.
His success led to further promotion at Marconi, but he disliked being a manager rather than an engineer and left in 1951 to buy a boat building company at Oulton Broad and set out to make the boats go faster using air on which they could float. This was the basis of the Hovercraft, his most famous invention. He patented the Hovercraft in 1955, but few believed it would ever work and he had to invest much of his own money in the project, selling his house and living in a houseboat at one point. Eventually Saunders-Roe took it on and developed a craft which could cross the Channel and it did so from Calais to Dover on the fiftieth anniversary of the Blériot crossing. A commercial service began in 1966 and lasted until 1991 with some 6 million passengers travelling. Hovercraft are still in use on the Southsea-Isle of Wight ferry and a museum devoted to the Hovercraft is being set up at Lee-on-Solent. Other air-cushioned products were also developed, notably the Flymo lawn mower. Cockerell was knighted in 1969. He had patented over 70 products by the time of his death.
Many members reminisced about their experiences on the Hovercraft, which were not all happy ones. Some had such a miserable crossing that they returned by another method, which probably explains why Hovercraft are no longer used for Channel crossings.
Mary Dicken