ST MARY CRAY: Battlefield meeting of milkman and nuclear scientist (From This Is Local London)

ST MARY CRAY: Battlefield meeting of milkman and nuclear scientist

12:20pm Sunday 31st January 2010 in

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From milking cows to fighting on the battlefields of France with one of the greatest scientists of our time. SCOTT MULLINS speaks to the great nephew of a man who met the original ‘atom smasher’.

As the First World War raged over the fields of France in 1916, a 21-year-old milkman-turned-gunner found himself fighting alongside John Cockcroft - the nuclear genius who would later be handed a Nobel Prize.

The milkman was Albert Rodbourne and his great nephew John Pateman has recently uncovered his distant uncle’s amazing secret.

The son of a cowman, Albert was born in 1895 and became a milkman in his teens.

When war was declared in 1914, a 19-year-old Albert was one of the first men in the St Mary Cray district to volunteer and was sent to France in July 1916.

Mr Pateman, a 53-year-old local historian, explained: “Albert was sent for training on Salisbury Plain, where the recruits lived in bell tents.

“There were very few qualified trainers, no uniforms and an acute shortage of weapons and equipment.”

“He fought his first battle at Mount Sorrel in 1916 and was later heavily involved at Delville Wood on the Somme.”

The revelation that Albert once served as an artilleryman alongside a future Nobel Prize winner came to light last month when Mr Pateman was researching his family history.

Mr Pateman, who used to live on the Ramsden Estate in Orpington before moving to Lincolnshire, said: “When John Cockcroft arrived the 91 and 92 artillery brigades were at Corbie and on December 14, 1916, they returned to billets in the village of Morlancourt to rest for about a month.

“It is intriguing to think how John Cockcroft, the brilliant science scholar, met Albert Rodbourne, a humble milkman who left school at 14.

“Artillery brigades and their individual batteries were very close units and the men got to know each other well, particularly when they were in a tight corner. Albert and John served together from December 1916 until February 1918.”

Mr Pateman’s great uncle was tragically killed on August 14, 1918, when a shell he was lifting accidentally exploded. The war finished three months later.

He was buried in Sucrerie Cemetery at Ablain St Nazaire, unaware he had crossed paths with one of the leading nuclear scientists of the century.

John Cockcroft

John Cockcroft was born in 1897 in Todmorden, Lancashire, and was the eldest son of a cotton manufacturer.

At school he took a keen interest in physics and maths and later won a scholarship for a maths degree at the Victoria University of Manchester.

But in 1915 he abandoned his university studies and enlisted.

He ended up at the notorious Bull Ring training camp in Etaples, France, before being posted to 92 Field Artillery Brigade in the 20th Light Division.

Albert Rodbourne was posted to 91 Field Artillery Brigade.

Cockcroft died in 1967 at the age of 70.

Splitting the atom

After the war, John Cockcroft studied a degree in electrical engineering and then began to work closely with Ernest Walton on accelerating charged atomic particles to very high speeds.

The age of nuclear fission and the ‘atom smashers’ had arrived and the pair’s work made headlines across the globe when they were announced as the first people to have ‘split the atom’.

Cockcroft and Walton were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951.

Cockcroft was later involved with the development of the first atomic bomb and founded the UK Atomic Energy Commission, which led to the UK’s first nuclear power station.