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. Biography Cobb was the daughter of bookbinder Douglas Cockerell; her uncle Sydney was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and knew both William Morris and John Ruskin. Her mother Florence Arundel was a jewelry maker who inspired her to work with metal. Nicknamed "Casty" by her classmates at the Central School, Cobb learned jewelry and silversmithing during the 1920s. She became friends with Joyce Clissold, a textile printer, and later took over a space in the Footprints textile workshop which Clissold took over from its founders. In 1937, she married Arthur Cobb. She had one son and three daughters. Her legacy as a jeweller continues in her granddaughter Abi Cochran who is also a jeweller having started to learn at her grandmothers 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. When her children had grown up she began examining in art for the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate, often travelling with the potter Charlotte Bawden. She was sent to Malaya, Africa and India.