Researching Charles Sykes

Sykes was born in 1875 in Brotton, in present-day Redcar and Cleveland, England.

The Spirit of Ecstasy, also called "Emily", "Silver Lady" or "Flying Lady", carries with it a story about a secret passion between John Walter Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu (second Lord Montagu of Beaulieu after 1905, a pioneer of the automobile movement, and editor of The Car magazine from 1902) and his secret love and the model for the emblem, Eleanor Velasco Thornton.

Sykes was commissioned by Lord Montagu to make a special mascot for his 1909 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. Sykes produced a small statue of a young woman in fluttering robes with a forefinger to her lips. It was named "The Whisper" and is to this day unique to the Montagu family's Rolls-Royces. The statue is displayed at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu.

Sykes was also an illustrator under the pseudonym 'Rilette'. His work appeared on the cover of many issues of the magazine Woman published by Hutchinson and he designed many advertisements, especially for de Reszke cigarettes.

He was born in Clowne, Derbyshire, the only son of Samuel Sykes, the local greengrocer and was educated at the Netherthorpe Grammar School and Sheffield University, where he gained a BSc in physics in 1925. He stayed on there to do a PhD course in physics but after one year accepted an invitation by Metropolitan-Vickers of Manchester to complete an unfinished project on the alloys of zirconium. The results of that study earned him a PhD in metallurgy and a position in the research department of Metropolitan-Vickers.

Based on his work on alloys at Metropolitan-Vickers he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1943, his application citation referring to his original investigations into the order-disorder transformation in alloys, the use of x-rays for analysis and his developments of X-ray tubes, continuously evacuated valves and diffusion pumps, and his work on production of hard metals.

During the Second World War he carried out work on armour piercing shells at the National Physical Laboratory and headed the Armament Research Laboratory at the Projectile Development Establishment at Fort Halstead, Kent.

In 1944 he was appointed director of the Brown–Firth research department in Sheffield, contributing his large knowledge of special materials and alloys to the development of high temperature gas turbines. In 1951 he was made managing director of Thomas Firth and John Brown Ltd, becoming deputy chairman in 1962 and chairman in 1964. He retired in 1967.

He was elected President of the Institute of Physics in 1952–4, served as Chairman of the Advisory Council on Research and Development for Fuel and Power from 1965 to 1970, and was a freeman of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, a Sheffield magistrate, and pro-chancellor of Sheffield University (1967–71).

He died on 29 January 1982 at his home in Sheffield. He had married Norah, daughter of Joseph Edward Staton of Clowne, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Born in Athens, Alabama, to William Henry and Jane Palmyra Sykes (nee Hayes), Sykes attended the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, graduating in 1904. He did freelance work for two years before entering newspaper work in 1906, with the Philadelphia North American and Williamsport News. He then worked for the Nashville Banner in Tennessee until 1911 before joining the Public Ledger later that same year. When the Public Ledger was reorganized into the Evening Ledger in 1914, he became that paper's first editorial cartoonist, and remained its only cartoonist until its dissolution in early 1942. He married Charlotte Kennedy Hannum on September 11, 1907. He was an editorial cartoonist for Life magazine from 1922 to 1928. He also designed insignia for several army units, and received a National Headliner Award in 1941. Sykes's early work was distinguished by usage of coquille board for shading. His later work incorporated crayon and wash. Cartoon historian Richard Marschall described Sykes's technique as "one of the most amiable styles in all cartooning. His perspectives were unique, his anatomy precise, and his shading almost theatrical." A 1918 cartoon promoting the fourth Liberty Loan won a gold medal from the Liberty Loan Committee. In 1980, over 300 of his cartoons and sketches were donated to Virginia Commonwealth University.