And his expertise on the subject extended to intimate knowledge of the production – and consumption – of Italian buffalo cheese, mozzarella. Not surprisingly, “Buffalo Bill” was one of his nicknames.As well as helping Third World farmers to improve their methods, Cockrill was one of the first in the West to describe the techniques of acupuncture applied to animals that he saw on visits to China, where they were used to anaesthetise, cattle undergoing surgery.Throughout his career, Bill Cockrill used his natural skills as a communicator to educate and inform people; both in spreading knowledge of improved methods of husbandry and in describing to a wider world the problems that had to be overcome to relieve hunger in the developing countries. Socially, he was the very best of company.William Ross Cockrill, veterinary surgeon: born Edinburgh 23 October 1913; FRCVS 1950; married 1939 Eudora Sime (two daughters); died London 24 April 1999.. WRITING IN the Journal of Theological Studies in October 1961, the reviewer of David Wallace-Hadrill’s book Eusebius of Caesarea comments on how it revealed a parochial clergyman who had studied the early Christian fathers “to good purpose”. It was the quality that ran through the many strands of Wallace-Hadrill’s life, from his schooldays at Cheltenham when his passionate devotion to writing and listening to music began, through his reading of PPE at Oxford which somehow motivated him to take Anglican orders, through his divinity course with distinction at Manchester, and his later doctorate in that demanding faculty, and throughout his professional life as chaplain and master at Aldenham School and as curate and parish priest.
It was at Manchester in the early years of the Second World War that he came under the inspirational influence of Professor J.W Manson, the distinguished scholar and theologian.

At Manchester too he met Eusebius’s writings and the germination of his book began. Eusebius was not, as Wallace- Hadrill says in his preface, “the most universally loved of the Fathers” – indeed elsewhere he describes him as substituting a “crudely florid manner for delicacy, lightness of touch and humour”. What he admired in his subject was his emphasis on Christ’s “clear appreciation and acceptance of the natural world around him” and on “the service of one’s fellow men in this world rather than an escape into a life of solitary meditation”.So the Eusebius was written “in spare moments in the parochial ministry of the Church of England”. Long unbroken periods of study were not available; the testimonies of his parochial dedication are in the memories of former parishioners in Hornchurch, where he served in the later 1940s, and more especially in the steelworks parish of Eston, Middlesbrough, from 1955 to 1962, where he was responsible for two churches.There particularly the logistic problems of such specialised research were marked not only in access to sources but also in resolving textual and linguistic problems in them. It is conceivable that Eusebius was himself better provided, with easy access to the libraries of Caesarea and Jerusalem. Nevertheless a work containing much pure scholarship, exploratory of untouched areas of Eusebius’s wide output, was the result.

As the book neared completion and the author began to have doubts about its value, the combined persuasions of his wife and elder brother, the late Professor J.M. Wallace-Hadrill was needed to ensure its publication.Somehow at this time too, he was able to write stories to entertain his four children. There were also two further books springing from his interest in the early Christian fathers. These were written in competition with all the pressures on time and energy of being a housemaster and teacher at Aldenham The first is in one sense a propaganda work. The Patristic View of Nature (1968) set out to establish that the early fathers were by no means as hostile to the natural world as their reputation suggests.

It was characteristic of the author that he should set about this loving mission of “rescue”.His final published writing of a theological nature is Christian Antioch: a study of early Christian thought in the East (1982). The germination – even if there was an inevitable long dormancy – was back in Manchester in the 1940s. Wallace-Hadrill had asked Manson to recommend a book elucidating the meaning of Antiochene. He was told that as such a book did not exist he had better write it.Robert Murray in the Journal of Theological Studies (April 1984) speaks of the work as “a labour of love, enriched from exploration in many directions by a survivor of the once glorious breed of scholar parsons”. What Murray probably did not know was that Wallace-Hadrill in another more essential way was a survivor.