Charles Frederick Cross, 1855 - 1935

Charles Frederick Cross was born in 1855, the son of C. J. Cross, J.P., of Brentford, who was at first a schoolmaster and later a director of T. B. Rowe & Sons, Soapmakers of that town. He was educated at King’s College, London, had a year at Zurich University and Polytechnicum, and went next to Owens College, Manchester, then, as now, an active centre of chemical science; he took his B.Sc. degree at London University in 1878 ; he thus had Lunge and Roscoe as teachers. He at once entered the field of cellulose technology, to which he was to devote his life, as he became engaged, on the introduction of Roscoe, in research for the Barrow Flax and Jute Company on the constitution of jute fibre substances and their technical development at Barrow-in-Furness from 1879 to 1881. This and similar work he continued at the Jodrell Laboratories at Kew, in collaboration with E. J. Bevan, who had qualified by spending three years in the paper industry as chemist to the Musselburg Mill (Cowan & Co.). The research partnership became an actual one ; the two had been friends and fellow students in Manchester since 1878 and had already collaborated in 1880 in a paper giving the well-known method of analysing cellulose materials by chlorination, which is still in worldwide use. In 1885, Cross and Bevan started in business as analytical and consulting chemists, primarily to the paper trade, at New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, the business being still carried on to-day under the same name; E. J. Bevan died in 1921.