William Cockerill, Junior

William Cockerill, Junior

William Cockerill (* 18th April 1784 in Haslingden , Lancashire ; † 16th June 1847 in Guben ) was a British entrepreneur , who as textile and wool mill mainly in Guben and Cottbus the industrialization progress brought decisive.

Live and act

William Cockerill was the eldest son of the textile machine and iron manufacturer William Cockerill, senior and Elisabeth (Betty) Charles (1760-1823) , who came from England and worked in the Liege area . His famous brothers were the industrialists John Cockerill and James Cockerill . As early as 1797 at the age of 13, William accompanied his father in his entrepreneurial activities in Sweden , Hamburg and finally from 1799 in Verviers and learned the trade of mechanical engineering. In 1807, Cockerill started his own business as a textile machine manufacturer in Verviers with the machinist James Hudson (1773-1833), who had previously worked for his father. In 1810 he also founded a spinning mill in Reims , which burned down after a few years and was not rebuilt.

Finally, in 1816, Cockerill completely relocated its activities to the Kingdom of Prussia, which was liberated from the French, and at the request of the Guben textile entrepreneur Gottfried Böhme set up new spinning mills in both Guben and Cottbus. He had previously had it produced in the wool spinning mill founded by John and James Cockerill in Berlin in 1814, but then considered it more expedient to build such a factory in Lusatia . On this occasion, William Cockerill, initially with the organizational and financial help of his brother John, first acquired the old monastery mill in Guben, where he set up a wool spinning mill. In 1818 he equipped the factory with the first steam engine, but it took until 1843 to run it entirely with steam.

Factory in Cottbus built by Cockerill in 1830

During the same period as in Guben, William Cockerill built a wool yarn spinning mill in the Princely House of Cottbus Castle with state support from the Prussian Finance Minister Hans Graf von Bülow . In September 1818 he also leased the courtyard of the palace and, in early 1819, the court preacher's house as a business premises. After ten years of uninterrupted lease, the palace finally came into his possession. In addition, in 1822 Cockerill set up a cloth finishing plant in Kutzeburg near Cottbus, which he equipped with machines and machine parts from his brother John's Liège workshops. In 1830 Cockerill had another factory built, which was one of the first spinning mills in Cottbus to be operated with water power and which he transferred to the manufacturer Ernst Rodig five years later. The factory building in today's street Am Amtsteich 18 is now a listed building .

The yarn produced in Cockerill's factories was known nationwide as Cockerill's thread and was in great demand and was considered a quality standard. He held the wool yarn monopoly from around 1830 to 1845 and was thus able to determine the prices on the market himself. In his field, Cockerill was considered to be a pioneer of the industrial revolution in the cities of Guben and Cottbus, which, however, also played an important role in the decline of the old cloth making trade. For his services he was awarded the Order of the Red Eagle and posthumously honored with a street named after him in Guben, which was renamed August-Bebel-Strasse after the Second World War .

After his death in 1847, the Cockerill'schen factories were sold, of which only the Guben factory last produced as "VEB Gubener Wool" until the mid-1990s. This former factory at today's Cottbuser Straße 1, consisting of a residential building, gatehouse with a fragment of the fence, part of factory building 3 and the remains of the garden, has meanwhile been placed under monument protection.

family

William Cockerill was married to Ernestine Henriette Edle von Scheibler (* 1791), daughter of the Monschau cloth manufacturer Paul Edler von Scheibler (1758–1805) and who was visually impaired and later completely blind. With her he had a son who died from drowning at the age of three. The marriage then obviously fell apart, because Henriette is no longer mentioned in any source. In his second marriage, Cockerill married Wilhelmine von Maaßen, daughter of the Prussian Trade Minister Karl Georg Maaßen . This marriage remained childless.

Literature and Sources

• Bernd Pilz: The Cockerill factories in Guben and Cottbus. In: Guberner Heimatkalender , 28th year 1984. pdf
• Carola Möckel: The Cockerills in Prussia. In: Yearbook for Economic History , 1987/3, p. 9 ff.
• Mechtild Hempel: warp and weft. The drapery in Guben. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar 2006, p. 66 ff. ( Preview on Google books )
• Neues Lausitzisches Magazin, Volume 31, p.76f biography

Web links

• Genealogical and historical records of the Becker family with numerous pictures and other sources