125 stories for 125 years

Joe Cobcroft

In 1953 Joe Cobcroft was appointed as a senior lecturer in chemistry to relieve the workload for A.T.S. Sissons and to take his classes while he was overseas. Cobcroft decided to do the pharmacy course while he was lecturing and was apprenticed to Nigel Manning.

He had a brilliant intellect. He became interested in computers in the early days of the technology and taught himself five or six languages. When he retired from the college in 1979 he became a scientific translator.

Joe had lectured in chemistry for years but when the college upgraded to degree status, Joe, with a diploma but not a degree, had to leave. He later returned to the college to become a demonstrator in pharmaceutics, working for Louis Roller who had been one of Joe’s students.

Louis remembers Joe as ‘the most brilliant lecturer I have come across. He would deliver his lectures with great passion and without the use of notes, had memorised untold numbers of chemical structure and knew the logarithm book by heart. He had the most astonishing memory. He had the ability to make us actually visualise complex chemical structures in our minds by his words and body language. I felt absolutely privileged being in his lectures.’