Meet our new Hon General Secretary
Dr Robert Cockcroft has been appointed Hon. General Secretary of the Kent Archaeological Society.
Bob, 62, was born in Bradford but moved to Kent in 1987. “I think it’s one of the most fascinating counties in Britain”, he says. “It has a truly extensive history and has been a backwater, a front line, a cultural bridge and an industrial pioneer. There’s nowhere else like it in Britain.
I’ve always been interested in history and archaeology. I’m a keen railway enthusiast and am particularly interested in railway buildings - a neglected area of the subject. I have photographs of many thousands of them and architectural drawings of several hundred”.
Bob and his French wife, Muriel, live in Ashford. His elder son, David, recently obtained his Doctorate in Archaeology at Newcastle University and is now working as a field archaeologist; their younger son Joseph is preparing for his GCSE examinations in Science, Maths, Art and Music.
Bob has a PhD in analytical chemistry from Imperial College and runs a market research company, as does Muriel, and specializes in the analysis and interpretation of quantitative surveys and product tests as diagnostic tools.
He has worked in market research since he was 24, initially with Unilever in Port Sunlight and subsequently with their subsidiary in Ashford, Proprietary Perfumes (now part of Quest International) and a company in the Netherlands.
He then returned to the UK to set up his own consultancy. “I’ve researched how people live in quite a number of countries around the world,” he said. “This has sometimes involved living in households to see what actually they do and experiencing their daily lives – ‘a fly on the wall approach’ being a better description”.
