Sydney Carlyle Cockerell

Brighton, 1867 - 1962, Kew

BiographyCockerell, Sydney Carlyle (English museum curator and collector, 1867-1962)

LC Heading: Cockerell, Sydney Carlyle, Sir, 1867-1962

Biography:
Cockerell, Sir Sydney Carlyle (1867–1962), museum director and book collector, was born at Brighton on 16 July 1867, the second child (and second son) of the family of four sons and two daughters of Sydney John Cockerell (1842–1877), coal merchant, of London, and his wife, Alice Elizabeth (d. 1900), the elder daughter of Sir John Bennett, watchmaker and sheriff of London and Middlesex. His younger brother Douglas Cockerell (1870–1945) became a distinguished bookbinder.

In May 1882 Cockerell entered St Paul's School, London, as a day-boy scholar but he remained there only until Christmas 1884, when he joined the family business, Geo. J. Cockerell & Co., of Cornhill, as a clerk. His father had died young, an event which had left his widow and six children badly off, and Sydney out of family duty therefore decided against a university course and entered the coal business, which he found uncongenial. He joined his two uncles as a partner in May 1889 but stayed in the firm only until the end of 1891.

Church architecture in England and on the continent had already engaged his attention. So too had Octavia Hill, a family friend, who temporarily stimulated his involvement in social welfare work. Her friendship with John Ruskin, and Cockerell's absorption in Ruskin's political and artistic writings, emboldened him to begin a correspondence initiated by a gift of shells from his collection. In 1887 he visited Ruskin at Brantwood, his Lake District home, and a friendship developed rapidly, cemented by a chance meeting at Abbeville while on holiday in France in the summer of 1888. Nearly three weeks' exploring Abbeville and Beauvais in Ruskin's company was a formative experience for the young coal merchant. Ruskin was a powerful influence and Cockerell remained in touch throughout his hero's frail and secluded old age.

In 1886 Cockerell had met William Morris, his other great hero, initially through socialist interests but increasingly through the work of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings: Cockerell joined its committee in 1890. Aesthetically stimulating contacts such as these unsettled him in his business career, and he decided to follow his own strong but still not fully formed inclinations. Morris offered him the educative task of cataloguing his library of manuscripts and early printed books, attractive (if unremunerative) employment to which in 1894 he added the duties of secretary to the Kelmscott Press.

Cockerell showed himself keen and knowledgeable and became de facto Morris's private secretary, zealously caring for him in his final illness in autumn 1896. Cockerell proved an efficient executor of Morris's will, winding up the press and seeing to the completion of various publishing projects. Literary executorship was a service he would confidently perform for many other literary and artistic friends. At Kelmscott House he had been introduced to the poet and traveller Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. For two years he became Blunt's part-time confidential secretary, working also for the wealthy connoisseur Henry Yates Thompson as adviser on his collection of medieval manuscripts. Seeking more permanent work, he went into partnership with Emery Walker, an agreeable colleague with whom he worked in his rather less congenial process engraving business from 1900 to 1904. In 1903 he found time to visit Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.

On 4 November 1907, still without settled employment, Cockerell married (Florence) Kate (1872–1949), daughter of Charles Tomson Kingsford of Canterbury; she was a manuscript illuminator and artist. They had two daughters and a son, Sir Christopher Sydney Cockerell, the inventor of the hovercraft. Soon after their marriage his wife developed disseminated sclerosis and eventually became bedridden (she died in 1949). Cockerell did not allow this grievous personal tragedy to interfere with his activities. Their marriage made it necessary for him to find regular work, and an ideal opportunity occurred in 1908, when Montague Rhodes James resigned the directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Although he had no university education, Cockerell was appointed; he was director for twenty-nine years.

‘I found it a pigsty; I turned it into a palace’ (Blunt, 135), Cockerell opined in old age. Energetic and purposeful, he rehung its crowded walls and spaced out its jumbled exhibits, adding flowers and rugs and furniture, and by skilled use of light and space he gave the Fitzwilliam a cheerfulness and an accessibility that have been influential on museum display worldwide. The collections and buildings were not just rearranged but much augmented. Cockerell intrepidly pursued benefactors, and though he became notorious for his importunity he was usually successful. The Marlay (1922) and Courtauld (1931) galleries were added during his tenure. His determination made him some enemies in Cambridge, but his success was recognized by the award of an honorary LittD in 1930. He was a (short-term) fellow of Jesus College from 1910 to 1916, and after many years of deeply felt exclusion became a fellow of Downing from 1932 until his retirement in 1937 (when he was elected honorary fellow). He was knighted in 1934. For three years from 1936 Cockerell served as European adviser to the Felton trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. He travelled to Australia to consult his employers, and visited American galleries and libraries on several occasions between the wars.

Cockerell was proud of his literary friendships and kept them in good repair by conversation and correspondence. Some (such as those with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Thomas Hardy) extended into literary executorships, in which his loyal but masterful manner led to difficulties with family representatives, but others were founded on exchanges of letters later anthologized for him by Viola Meynell in Friends of a Lifetime (1940) and The Best of Friends (1956). Unexpectedly for ‘a man without any set creed’ (Blunt, 226), he formed a close though mainly epistolary friendship with the scholarly Roman Catholic nun Dame Laurentia McLachlan (1866–1953) of Stanbrook Abbey, Worcestershire. He placed his connoisseurship and knowledge of fine book production at the disposal of this learned Benedictine house with its printing press, and his friendship with its abbess withstood even an imprudent introduction to another of his friends, George Bernard Shaw.

Since childhood Cockerell had been a dedicated collector, and by his early thirties he concentrated his efforts on medieval manuscripts. His means were small but his knowledge was wide and his connoisseur's eye and his instinct for a bargain were both very keen. He was prepared to resell to improve his collection, but the items he retained were closely studied and often carefully annotated on their flyleaves. He showed scholarly (and commercial) prescience in pursuing manuscripts of the humanist scribes of the Renaissance, and for other periods his collection included work by the first identifiable English scribe, the thirteenth-century Oxford artist W. de Brailes. By 1908 Cockerell's collection was strong enough to include no fewer than 17 of the 269 items displayed at the Burlington Fine Arts Club's loan exhibition of illuminated manuscripts, for which Cockerell was chief contributor to the large and important catalogue. The standard listing of his manuscripts shows that no fewer than 126 items had been in his possession during his lifetime, and in old age he shrewdly organized the sale of his remaining treasures both by private treaty and in the saleroom (Sothebys, 1956–9). He was a member of the Roxburghe Club from 1915, and published several fine editions under the aegis of its members. He bullied other collectors to improve their standards until they matched his own, and a characteristically English enthusiasm for the study of Italian humanistic manuscripts is very largely due to his initiative.

As a young man, Cockerell developed an idiosyncratic, squarely-formed humanist hand. It was fluent and graceful, tiny but (until his old age) easily legible, and consistent throughout the long period covered by his diaries (1886–1962), now in the British Library (Add. MSS 52623–52702). He was a friend of Edward Johnston, whom he encouraged in the revival of pen-formed lettering, and later did much to encourage the use of italic script in education and art work.

Cockerell settled in retirement at 21 Kew Gardens Road, Richmond, Surrey, where he remained—except for wartime exile to Gloucestershire and Old Windsor, Berkshire—virtually confined to his bedroom from 1951, until his death there from heart failure on 1 May 1962. He was an exigent invalid, supported by devoted volunteer attendants and to the end much visited by scholars, calligraphers, and biographers of Victorian eminences about whom (in his tenth decade) he became the sole remaining—if rather proprietorial—living authority. Bald, and neatly bearded, he had a brusque manner but a not unkindly glint behind small gold-rimmed spectacles; his legendary astringency overlay a frequently attested genius for friendship. A settled agnostic in his opinions, he had no expectation of a future existence. His remains were cremated.

Alan Bell
(Alan Bell, ‘Cockerell, Sir Sydney Carlyle (1867–1962)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/32475, accessed 25 April 2016])

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