Vale Paul Cockburn: MOTOR legend passes away

Hero to thousands of MOTOR readers, inventor, industrial designer, poet, musician, entertainer, adventurer, raconteur, gentleman, father, husband, grandfather and my mate, Paul Cockburn, has died after a long battle with cancer which, though it eventually overcame him, could not diminish the bloke in any other meaningful way.

It is often said of people past that ‘they really knew how to live’.This is usually code for `they took the grandkids to Disneyland in 1988 and managed to stay out of prison for the rest of the time’. But Cockburn (forgive me, we never called each other anything but Cockburn and Morley - the Statler and Waldorf comparison was made more than once) took the idea of understanding how to live to a PhD level. In fact, he might have invented the concept.

He often warned me of the dangers of fixating on the struggle to earn and accumulate the things we would need in retirement. And then completely forgetting to retire to die wealthy but unfulfilled.

“You spend your first years sowing,“ he told me. “But at some point, you have to harvest.”

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So can I just say here that you may all have no fears about that in Cockburn’s case. He worked hard but he also worked clever (that came pretty naturally) and, in the process, piled up the wherewithal to call it quits and enjoy life. He bought a motorhome (which we cruelly dubbed the Wino-Bago) installed a pool at home just outside Sydney and created a bull market for the wine and cheese manufacturers of the universe.

But it is his working life – including his years as MOTOR's roving social commentator – that you lot will remember most fondly. Cockburn’s tenure at MOTOR began when, in a move of such stupidity there hasn’t yet been a scale devised by which to measure it, he was dumped from Wheels magazine as a writer. He’d been talent-spotted years before by Phil Scott - who always recognised true genius when it spilled wine on him - and employed Cockburn to write the offbeat stuff. A superior arrangement is impossible to imagine. And yet, somebody at Wheels years later thought he was wrong for the post.

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Which is how he came to the MOTOR fold. Scooped up and handed a truly b-r-o-a-d brief, Cockburn became the voice of both reason and insanity within these pages. Often on the same page. He could smell an idiot from three city blocks and his business smarts and technical bent allowed him to identify lame duck engineering or marketing in milli-seconds. But always, always, in a gentlemanly, genuine and hilarious way. But his industrial design chops also shone through and his 'good design, bad design’ soon became a staple of every PCOTY MOTOR undertook for years.

His life as an industrial designer (he would refer to that as his real job) saw him design everything from a bike to a suspended chair (and very comfy it was) and TV props to a torch. That torch was, of course, the original Dolphin torch. But what you may not know is that the brilliance of that design was somewhat down to his insistence on using an elderly Jaguar as transport (Cockburn was one of the very few people bold enough to use the words `E-Type’ and `transport’ in the same sentence).

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The Dolphin was the solution to the problem of (inevitably) working on an E-Type’s engine after dark, while trying to throw light on to Lucas electrics around the forward opening, clamshell bonnet. That’s why the Dolphin was designed to be sat on its bottom with the lens angled up and/or across, so it could be placed on the road or tyre and still throw light into the engine bay. Genius. What did you expect?

Ah yes…the E-Type. With more than half-a-million miles (not kilometres) on it and having been the recipient of more than one engine rebuild and at least three body restorations that I know of, the E-Type might be dismissed by purists as grandad’s axe. But that would be forgetting that this wasn’t just any E-Type; this was Cockburn’s E-Type. In fact, it’s probably the best known E in the country and that’s down to Cockburn’s love of actually driving the thing. Everywhere. In the end, the car was pretty highly modified (he and I bolted Webers to it years ago) but Cockburn had no time for the purists: If the mods made it a better product, then it got modded.

Cockburn and I met many, many years ago on the job, and it didn’t take long to weigh each other up and come to the same conclusion. We both liked old, weird cars, we both enjoyed an after-work drink and we were both firmly committed to digging out the kernel of silliness in whatever was presented to us, whether that was a car, an event, a person or even just that night’s entrée.

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He was just better at it than I. Cockburn once told me that he always wanted to meet me after reading a piss-take yarn I wrote about taking an XR6 Ute to a B and S ball. He loved that yarn. This was like Einstein telling you he digs your quantum-theory stuff, or John Lennon watching you pick a guitar and starting to hum along and tap his foot. But that’s what Cockburn did: He lifted you up.

Circumstances kept me from visiting Cockburn as the end drew in, but I phoned him and he told me he was dying, but that he’d never been more at peace. He told me that he was surrounded by the people he loved, the things he held dear and that he’d never been happier. Typical. A joy right to the bloody end.

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