I came across a news item on the BBC regarding hovercrafts and, once again, it goes to prove that Norfolk isn’t full of sugar beet farmers and ditch diggers!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/11/newsid_4333000/4333329.stm

Christopher Cockerell was born on 4 June 1910, at Cherry Hinton, Cambridgeshire, son of museum director, Sir Sydney Cockerell and was subsequently educated at Gresham’s School in Holt, North Norfolk.  He was an extremely adept student and went on to study, unsurprisingly, engineering at Cambridge University.

He began his career working for the world renowned company Marconi in 1935 and, during his time there he produced over 30 inventions for which he was paid the princely sum of £10 each.  Marconi obviously thought he was a thoroughly decent upstanding sort of chap to have around and so he was placed with an elite team of engineers to work on the development of the radar during the second world war, which Cockerell thought was one of his greatest achievements. 

He continued to work for Marconi following the end of the war but in the early 1950s he had the opportunity of spreading his wings (or perhaps that should be paddling his own canoe!).  His wife, Margaret, inherited a goodly amount of dosh following the death of her father and they decided to invest in a boat building and hiring business on the Norfolk Broads.

Cockerell could see the merit of boats that not only travelled on water but also travelled on land and so began an epic voyage of discovery.  He began his experiments with bare basics – a tin can and a firework – to prove that a vehicle could float on a cushion of air.  After a few trials he managed to design a boat which had a specially engineered pump to blow high pressure air into a rubber curtain around the bottom rim of the craft and his major trial took place at Oulton Broad on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk in the early 1950s.  By this time, Cockerell had set up a company called Ripplecraft to develop the idea even further and eventually, in 1955, he convinced the Ministry of Supply to back him.

Unfortunately, the military market weren’t keen.  The admiralty considered it was more like a plane than a boat.  The RAF, on the other hand, considered it more like a boat than a plane, and the army couldn’t quite decide what it was and so filed it under B for bin.

The invention was initially put onto a ’secret’ list but, with a bit of persistence by Cockerell, it was finally released from the list in 1958 and the National Research Development Council took the helm and funded the construction of the world’s first passenger amphibious hovercraft.

A flying boat firm on the Isle of Wight in the resort of Cowes (renowned by the yachting fraternity), was granted the contract to develop the hovercraft and, under Cockerell’s supervision, they worked on a 20 ft version.  They obviously worked at a fair rate of knots (thought I’d throw in a nautical term there for good measure!), and just eight months after the design work began, on 31 May 1959 the seven ton craft took it’s maiden flight.  On 11 June 1959 the press were invited to view the vessel.  They were swept away, not by the tide you’ll be pleased to hear but by Cockerell’s innovative contraption, and asked to see it in action. 

Word spread far and wide across the lands and in July this mystical beast skimmed across the English Channel with Mr Cockerell astride its hovering haunches (sounds a little more poetic than on it’s draughty deck)!  Strangely enough, this crossing took place in the 50th anniversary year of the first cross-channel aeroplane flight.

And the rest, they say, is history.

Christopher Cockerell was recognised for his services to engineering and was knighted in 1969.  He died at Hythe in Hampshire on 1 June 1999, just a few days before his 89th birthday and, rather sadly, so very close to the 40thanniversary of the first ‘flight’.