Owned by a friend of Sydney Cockerell, the musicologist Jerrold Northup Moore, with four letters in Cockerell’s hand laid in and two further dictated letters, plus Moore’s own recollections of Sydney Cockerell and Cockerell’s famous invocation to friendship that he had printed and circulated to friends after his death.
A lovely association copy of Blunt’s biography of Cockerell in which he quotes at length from Northrup Moore’s own testimony (laid in) about visiting Cockerell during his 90s (pp350-352 - Moore marks his entries in the index), finding him alert and perfectly dressed in bed - and then the conversation began: ‘We talked of Morris, or Marshall, Faulkner, and Ellis, of Ruskin and Rossetti, of Lizzie Siddall, and finally of T.E. Lawrence. “Oh, I didn’t realise you were interested in him!” said Sir Sydney. “What a pity - he wrote me some letters but they were sold last year.’
Moore has laid in to the book his copy of this account that he forwarded to Blunt in response to a request published in the TLS. He describes how ‘My acquaintance with Sir Sydney was in August of 1960’ and Moore has preserved all of the documentation accompanying his visits and the extraordinary memories of William Morris and his contemporaries that they sparked, as well as the arrangements for transferring a folder of William Morris proofs to the Morgan Library in New York City. From this encounter Moore has preserved and laid into the book:
1 August 9 1960, ALS, dictated and signed by Cockerell with the postscript, ‘I expect you know that I am an old fogey of 92’, Cockerell responding to JNM’s request to visit him.
2 August 24 1960, ALS, in Cockerell’s hand, arranging for JNM to meet Lady Clark - the art historian Virginia Surtees
3 August 30, 1960, Nelson Postcard in Cockerell’s hand, regarding JNM ‘delivering the folder of Morris proofs’ to the ‘head of the Pierpont Morgan Library.’
4 October 4, 1969, ALS in Cockerell’s hand, worried about delivery of the ‘proofs of designs by Morris for the Kelmscott Press.’
5 December 27, 1960, ALS in Cockerells hand, acknowledging delivery of the folder and explaining his decision to sell the folder ‘It’s contents would not have been much important to me at that period, as I possessed an unrivalled collection of Kelmscottiana, but they were all I had left, and time has made them valuable.’
6 July 9, 1961, ALS, dictated and signed by Cockerell, responding to a request from JNM at Yale University Library for recordings of Cockerell speaking.
Jerrold Northup Moore, long typed copy letter to Wilfrid Blunt offering memories of his time with Cockerell, a gift made to the British Library of Morris’s Godefroy on vellum and his extravagant generosity to Moore himself.
7 Wilfrid Blunt, May 21 1963, aerogramme, thanking JNM (Yale University) for sharing his memories of Cockerell - ‘his extraordinary kindess to many whome he barely knew... his memory was extraordinary...’
8 Undated thank you note from Wilfrid Blunt
9 ‘Testimony and Appeal from the Will of Sydney Cockerell’ - a printed invocation to friendship, circulated after his death to friends and acquaintances.
Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962) museum curator and collector, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (1908-1937) was secretary to William Morris’s Kelmscott Press who during his immensely long life acquired a wide circle of artistic and literary friends, including John Ruskin, Octavia Hill, William, Jane, and May Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Philip Webb, Lady Burne-Jones, Emery Walker, Thomas Hardy, and many others.
