Robert Cochrane (witch)

Following Cochrane's death, the Mantle of Magister of the Clan of Tubal Cain was given to Evan John Jones. Another of Cochrane's initiates, Evan John Jones wrote a book, Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed (a collaboration with Doreen Valiente) outlining his version of the Cochrane tradition. Whilst there was no objective way to validate Cochrane's claim to be a hereditary witch, the experience of being in his coven was that of being one of "Diana's darling crew" (Jones, cited in Clifton, 2006).

A group called The Regency was formed by Ronald "Chalky" White and his friend, George Winter, to preserve and continue Cochrane's tradition; it eventually disbanded in 1978 but recently a website has been set up to preserve The Regency memory.

He began to claim to have been born to a hereditary family of witches whose practices stretched back to at least the 17th century; these statements have later been dismissed. He subsequently went on to found a tradition known as The Clan of Tubal Cain, through which he propagated his Craft. In 1966, he committed suicide.

Cochrane often insulted and mocked Gardnerian witches, annoying Valiente. This reached such an extreme that at one point in 1966 he called for "a Night of the Long Knives of the Gardnerians", at which point Valiente in her own words, "rose up and challenged him in the presence of the rest of the coven. I told him that I was fed up with listening to all this senseless malice, and that, if a 'Night of the Long Knives' was what his sick little soul craved, he could get on with it, but he could get on with it alone, because I had better things to do." She left the coven and never came back.

After Doreen's departure, Cochrane committed adultery with a new woman who had joined the coven, and, according to other coven members, did not care that his wife Jane knew. In May 1966, Jane left Cochrane, initiating divorce proceedings and considering performing a death rite against her husband involving the sacrifice of a black cockerel. Without her, the coven collapsed.

Cochrane ingested belladonna and Librium on Midsummer eve 1966, and died nine days later in hospital without recovering consciousness. He left a suicide note expressing his intent to kill himself "while of sound mind".

In December 1965 to April 1966, Cochrane corresponded with an American witch named Joseph Wilson. Wilson formed a new tradition, known as the 1734 Tradition based upon teachings of Ruth Wynn Owen, a tradition taught by a man he refers to as Sean, and Robert Cochrane's teaching.

In 1964, further individuals joined the Clan. Among these was Evan John Jones, who would later become the Magister of The Clan of Tubal Caine, and an accomplished author upon the subject of witchcraft. Jones had met Cochrane through his wife Jane, as they both worked at the same company.

In 1964 Cochrane met Doreen Valiente, who had formerly been a High Priestess of the Gardnerian Bricket Wood coven, through mutual friends which he had met at a gathering at Glastonbury Tor held by the Brotherhood of the Essenes. The two became friends, and Valiente joined the Clan of Tubal Cain. She later remarked that there were certain things in this coven that were better than those in Gardner's, for instance she thought that "[Cochrane] believed in getting close to nature as few Gardnerian witches at that time seemed to do". She also commented on how Cochrane did not seem to want much publicity, as Gardner had, something she admired. However, she became dissatisfied with Cochrane however, over some of his practices.

Cochrane arose to public prominence in November 1963, when he published an article titled "Genuine Witchcraft is Defended" in Psychic News, a weekly Spiritualist publication. In it, he outlined his beliefs regarding Witchcraft, and first publicly made the claim that he came from a hereditary line of Witches.

Later, in the 1960s, he claimed that members of his family had been practitioners of an ancient pagan witch-cult since at least the 17th century, and that two of them had been executed for it. Claiming that his great-grandfather had been "the last Grand Master of the Staffordshire witches", he said that his grandparents had abandoned the Craft and converted to Methodism, for which his great-grandfather had cursed them. He said that his father had practised witchcraft, but that he kept it a secret, and made his wife promise to not tell his son, Robert. Despite her oath, according to Cochrane, after his father's death, her mother did in fact tell him, at which he embraced his heritage. He asserted that his Aunt Lucy actually taught him all about the faith. However, these claims would later be denounced by members of his own family. His nephew, Martin Lloyd, has refuted that the family were ever Witches, insisting that they were Methodists, while his wife Jane also later asserted that Cochrane's claims to have come from a hereditary Witch-Cult were bogus.

Cochrane formed his second coven, which provided the basis for the Clan of Tubal Cain, in the early 1960s. Searching for members, he placed an advert in the Manchester Guardian requesting that anyone interested in Graves' The White Goddess contact him; he received a response from the schoolteacher Ronald Milland White, known to his friends as "Chalky". White then introduced him to George Arthur Stannard (also known as George Winter), who ran a betting shop near Kings Cross in Central London. White and Stannard joined this nascent coven, the latter taking up the position of Summoner. Describing his creation of his Witchcraft tradition, later Maid of the Clan Shani Oates remarked that "Like any true craftsman, he was able to mold raw material into a magical synthesis, creating a marvelous working system, at once instinctively true and intrinsically beautiful."

Following correspondence with Cochrane in the mid 1960s, an American named Joseph Wilson founded a tradition called the 1734 Tradition, based on his teachings circa 1974.

During the early 1950s, he joined the army as a part of his national service, but went absent without leave; as punishment, he was sentenced to 90 days imprisonment in a military prison in Colchester. He admitted to having a violent temper in his youth, but calmed after meeting Jane, whom he would later marry. For a time he worked for London Transport as a blacksmith in a foundry; one potential reason why he adopted the blacksmith Tubal Cain as a part of the mythos for his tradition. He and Jane later worked as bargees transporting coal around the English Midlands, taking an interest in the folklore of the Bargee community, later believing that it contained traces of the "Old Faith". By the start of the 1960s, he was living with Jane and their son on a London County Council-run council estate near to Slough, Berkshire; he did not like the neighbours, considering them "the biggest load of monkeys there have been trained since the Ark." He worked as a typographical draughtsman in an office, but disliked his job. He founded a witches' coven, but it soon broke up as one member died and he fell out with another.

Robert Cochrane (26 January 1931 – 3 July 1966), who was born as Roy Bowers, was an English occultist who founded the tradition of Witchcraft known as The Clan of Tubal Cain.

According to Jonathan Tapsell, Cochrane was "an unsung giant of modern Wicca" due to the fact that he "gave inspiration to those who came later to escape the narrow confines of Gardner's philosophy". Michael Howard considered him to be "one of the most fascinating, enigmatic and controversial figures of the modern Craft revival". John of Monmouth claimed that Cochrane was "the man behind, what is now called, 'Traditional Witchcraft '". Historian Ethan Doyle White asserted that Cochrane left behind "an ever-expanding legacy", noting that by the 21st century, he had become an "almost tutelary figure" within the Traditional Witchcraft movement, and warrants the title of "Father of Traditional Witchcraft" more than any other occultist. Elsewhere, Doyle White asserted that Cochrane had been "without doubt the most influential" of Gardner's rivals in the mid-20th century Wiccan movement.

The numerological number '1724' (a possible misprint in the book), was explained by Doreen Valiente in her 1989 book The Rebirth of Witchcraft. Valiente claimed that Cochrane had given the American witch Justine Glass a photograph of a copper platter with '1724' printed on it for her 1965 book Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense – and Us. He had told Glass that it depicted a witch's ritual bowl that had been in his family for many centuries. Valiente revealed that this was a lie by Cochrane – she had herself, in fact, bought that very item for him only the year before in a Brighton antiques shop to be used in a ritual.