Remembering a Veteran: Sir John D. Cockcroft, Royal Field Artillery, British Army

John D. Cockcroft

John Douglas Cockcroft (1897-1967) was one of the most productive and broadly valuable scientists of the 20th century. In 1914, he won a County Major Scholarship, West Riding of Yorkshire, to the Victoria University of Manchester, where he studied mathematics. When Cockcroft completed his first year at Manchester in June 1915. He joined the Officers' Training Corps there, but did not wish to become an officer.  He eventually enlisted in the British Army on 24 November 1915. On 29 March 1916, he joined the 59th Training Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, where he was trained as a signaller. He was then posted to B Battery, 92nd Field Artillery Brigade, one of the units of the 20th (Light) Division, on the Western Front.

Cockcroft participated in the Advance to the Hindenburg Line and Passchendaele. He applied for a commission, and was accepted. He was sent to Brighton in February 1918 to learn about gunnery, and in April 1918, to the Officer Candidate School in Weedon Bec in Northamptonshire, where he was trained as a field artillery officer.  He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery on 17 October 1918.  The war ended shortly afterwards and he was released from the Army in January 1919. After completing his education and serving an apprenticeship at Vickers Electrical, he began work under Lord Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. He married Eunice Elizabeth Crabtree in 1925 and the couple had four daughters and a son.

Walton, Rutherford, and Cockcroft

He first collaborated with P. Kapitsa in the production of intense magnetic fields and low temperatures. In 1928 he turned to work on the acceleration of protons by high voltages and was soon joined in this work by E.T.S. Walton. In 1932 they succeeded in transmuting lithium and boron by high energy protons. In 1933 artificial radioactivity was produced by protons and a wide variety of transmutations produced by protons and deuterons was studied. In 1951 Cockcroft and Walon received the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atom. 

In September 1939 he took up a war-time appointment as Assistant Director of Scientific Research in the Ministry of Supply and started to work on the application of radar to coast and air defence problems. He was a member of the Tizard Mission to the United States in the autumn of 1940, in which British breakthroughs on Radar were shared with American scientists. 

World War II British Radar Unit

After this he was appointed Head of the Air Defence Research and Development Establishment. In 1944 he went to Canada to take charge of the Canadian Atomic Energy project and became Director of the Montreal and Chalk River Laboratories until 1946 when he returned to England as Director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell.  He is considered one of the founding fathers of the nuclear energy industry.

For the remainder of his life, Cockcroft held a number of distinguished posts and received honors and awards to numerous to list here. John Cockcroft died on September 18, 1967.

Sources: Nobel Prize Biography; Wikipedia; Moments of Discovery