Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (16 July 1867 – 1 May 1962) was an English museum curator and collector. From 1908 to 1937, he was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England.

Biography

Sydney Cockerell made his way initially as clerk in the family coal business, George J. Cockerell & Co., until he met John Ruskin. Around 1887, Cockerell sent Ruskin some sea shells, which he collected. At that time he had already met William Morris. Cockerell tried to patch up a quarrel between Ruskin and

Octavia Hill Octavia Hill (3 December 1838 – 13 August 1912) was an English Reform movement, social reformer, whose main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities, especially London, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born into a fa ...

, who had been a friend of his late father Sydney John Cockerell, and godmother to his sister Olive. From 1891, Cockerell gained a more solid entry to intellectual circles, working for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. The architect Detmar Blow was a friend. He acted as private secretary to William Morris, becoming a major collector of Kelmscott Press books; was secretary also to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; and was

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...

's executor. From 1908 to 1937 Cockerell was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. He built up the Museum's collections of private-press books and manuscripts, prints, drawings, paintings (including Titian's ''Tarquin and Lucretia''), ceramics and antiquities. It was he who secured the Museum's rich holdings of works by William Blake and who bought its first Picasso print. He raised funds for building extensions, set up the first 'Friends' scheme in Britain and introduced Sunday opening. Cockerell appears as one of a circle of three figures in the book by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, ''The Nun, the Infidel, and the Superman'', with Dame Laurentia McLachlan and George Bernard Shaw. It was later dramatised by Hugh Whitemore as ''The Best of Friends'', which was produced on stage at the Hampstead Theatre in 2006 and on television in 1991 According to Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of Charlotte Mew, ''Charlotte Mew and Her Friends'' (1984), "Cockerell was one of the six children of a Brighton coal merchant who died quite young. This meant a hard start, but, as he told his biographer, Wilfred Blunt, 'I was protected by poverty from marriage until I was forty.' During that time he was able to develop his two ruling passions - the arts (or rather the classification and collecting of them), and the cultivating of great men. When he became Director of the Fitzwilliam in 1908 he identified the Museum entirely with himself, and heroic indeed were his efforts to tap bequests, endowments, and death-bed legacies which would enrich it in every department. He calculated that during his lifetime he had made a quarter of a million pounds for the Fitzwilliam, and about a dozen enemies." He was a leading figure in the revival of italic handwriting as an artistic craft.

Family

He was the son of Sydney John Cockerell (1842–1877) and Alice Elizabeth Bennett, daughter of Sir John Bennett. The bee expert Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell (1866–1948), who settled in the United States, was his brother, as was the bookbinder Douglas Bennett Cockerell (1870–1945). The bookbinder Sandy Cockerell (Sydney Morris Cockerell) was his nephew. He was married to the illuminator and designer

Florence Kate Kingsford Florence Kate Kingsford, Lady Cockerell (25 May 1871 – 18 September 1949), known variously as Florence Kingsford and Kate Cockerell, was a British illustrator and calligrapher who specialized in creating illuminated manuscripts. She worked ...

, who in 1916 was diagnosed with

multiple sclerosis Multiple (cerebral) sclerosis (MS), also known as encephalomyelitis disseminata or disseminated sclerosis, is the most common demyelinating disease, in which the insulating covers of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord are damaged. This d ...

. They had two daughters, Margaret and Katharine, and a son, Sir Christopher Cockerell, who invented the

hovercraft A hovercraft, also known as an air-cushion vehicle or ACV, is an amphibious Craft (vehicle), craft capable of travelling over land, water, mud, ice, and other surfaces. Hovercraft use blowers to produce a large volume of air below the hull ...

Sources

Online Archive of California

References

External links

Cockerell Papers — Archive Descriptions
University of Exeter *
Sydney Cockerell Papers
(MS Eng 1106), Houghton Library, Harvard University {{DEFAULTSORT:Cockerell, Sydney 1867 births 1962 deaths Academics of the University of Cambridge English curators English art collectors Knights Bachelor Directors of museums in the United Kingdom People associated with the Fitzwilliam Museum

Biography

Family

Sources

References

Further reading

External links