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Dear friends,
More than a few members of the Antique Telescope Society, as well as BAA members, own T. Cooke & Sons, or Cooke, Troughton & Simms telescopes. At times, restoring or repairing them can be challenging, and ATS member Matt Considine, FRAS, and I have been searching for the company records. The U. of York / Borthwick Institute has the vast majority of what is known to remain, but what’s been elusive is the status of actual engineering and technical material. We just received the following report from Dr. Nick Melia of Borthwick Institute. His news was not positive, so I am reaching out to see if anyone knows anything further about other possible locations that T. Cooke engineering drawings may have ended up, if not in a landfill or incinerator.
Warm regards from NYC,
Bart
Bart Fried
President and Founder, Antique Telescope Society
American Astronomical Society – Historical Astronomy Division
British Astronomical Association
Amateur Astronomers Association, Inc.
oldscope@gmail.com
1-646-267-4620On Tue, Jun 3, 2025, 10:45 AM Borthwick Institute <borthwick-institute@york.ac.uk> wrote:
Dear Matt,
Many thanks for your email.
As you will no doubt have seen in the catalogue, the T Cooke and Sons archive contains few manufacturing or design records. While we hold an index of drawings (our ref: VI/TC/4/2/2), the drawings themselves survive in neither the T Cooke and Sons archive, nor subsequent iterations of the company. Unfortunately, we don’t know there whereabouts of the drawings, or, indeed, if they survive.
I’m sorry not to be the bearer of better news; do let me know should you have any further questions, and I’ll do all I can to help.
With best wishes,
Nick
Dr. Nicholas Melia
Archives Assistant
Borthwick Institute for Archives
University of York
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD
Tel: 01904 321166
Email: borthwick-institute@york.ac.uk
Website: http://www.york.ac.uk/borthwickFind us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UoYBorthwick
Follow us on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/uoyborthwick.bsky.social
Read our blog: https://blogs.york.ac.uk/borthwick-institute/All online sources point to Borthwick and over 1m3 of material. It may be worth a trip to inspect it all.
Have you seen this: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.165833/page/n57/mode/1up
Several entries in the British Library Catalogue and in Kew’s National Archives so worth looking there if you’ve not already.
And lots of items listed on WorldCat.
And this item in York Archives: https://catalogue.exploreyork.org.uk/client/en_GB/default/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:781724/one?qu=Cooke%2C+Troughton+and+Simms+Ltd.&dt=list&h=0
And this in the RAS Library: https://royast.cirqahosting.com/HeritageScripts/Hapi.dll/retrieve2?SetID=3548FC96-A89E-472D-B5C3-A99C93BF2149&searchterm=Troughton&Fields=%40&Media=&SearchPrecision=20&SortOrder=0&Offset=3&Direction=%2E&Dispfmt=F&Dispfmt_b=B27&Dispfmt_f=F00&DataSetName=LIVEDATA
Good luck finding what you are after.
If you haven’t come across him, Martin Lunn (aka the Rambling Astronomer) is very knowledgeable on all things Cooke and regularly writes about Cooke instruments. Might be someone to ask?
https://theramblingastronomer.blogspot.com/
Mark
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