Catherine Cobb

Catherine "Casty" Cobb (née Cockerell; 28 March 1903 – 17 September 1995) was a British jeweller and silversmith, she was from an established Art and Crafts family.

Early life, education and marriage Catharine Cockerell was born on 28 March 1903 to Florence Arundel and Douglas Cockerell. Her father was a bookbinder and her mother was a jewelry maker who inspired her to work with metal. Her patermal uncle Sydney was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and knew both William Morris and John Ruskin. who is also a jeweller having started to learn at her grandmother's knee.

The Cobbs moved to Cambridge during the Second World War where she taught drawing and design and well as jewelry at Cambridge Technical College. She continued to teach jewelry at her house in Trumpington up until just a few months before her death aged 92, sharing the benefits of her excellent collection of tools and her enthusiasm for the subject. Second, she also supplied silver clasps and other ornaments for bookbindings for the Cockerell Bindery which was carried on by her sibling Sydney. After World War 1, she realised the likely demand for fine stainless steel table knives since the servants to polish the previously used silver knives no longer existed. She made knives and forks with steel elements forged in Sheffield to her design, to which she added her distinctive pique handles.

Puppetry In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Cobb became interested in puppetry. She found some Punch and Judy puppets in the family attic and Clissold printed fabric for a "set-up" and in the summer of the 1930s they took their Punch and Judy show on tour around Buckinghamshire and along the south coast. Around the same time she began to assist sculptor William Simmonds. She worked in his woodcarving workshop in the Cotswolds, and behind the scenes of his critically acclaimed puppet shows which were performed in front of the Duke of Westminster and Winston Churchill.

Exhibitions Women's Work (2019) Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, Sussex

Ancestry