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.

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.

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.

[5] 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.

His nephew, Martin Lloyd, has refuted that the family were ever Witches, insisting that they were Methodists,[7] while his wife Jane also later asserted that Cochrane's claims to have come from a hereditary Witch-Cult were bogus.

[10] The Clan of Tubal Cain revere a Horned God and Fate, expressed as the Pale Faced Goddess, named Hekate.

[10] However, differences between the two also existed, for instance Gardnerians always worked skyclad, or naked, whereas Cochrane's followers wore black hooded robes.

[13] Valiente notes that this spontaneity was partly because the Cochrane coven did not use a Book of Shadows in which structured rituals were pre-recorded, leading to more creativity.

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.

[10] His friend and correspondent, the Qabbalist and ceremonial magician William G. Gray introduced him to John Math, a practising Witch and the son of the Earl of Gainsborough.

[17] Cochrane took a particularly hostile attitude toward the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca, deeming its founder, Gerald Gardner, to be a con man and sexual deviant.

[19] Upon examining Cochrane's writings, Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White has identified four possible reasons for this animosity.

First, Cochrane disliked the publicity seeking that a variety of prominent Gardnerians (among them Gardner, Patricia Crowther, Eleanor Bone, and Monique Wilson), had embarked on; they appeared on television and in tabloid newspapers to present their tradition as the face of Wicca in Britain, which angered Cochrane, whose own tradition differed from Gardnerism in focus.

[21] The fourth point purported by Doyle White was that Cochrane might have been hostile to Gardnerism as a result of a poor experience with it in the past.

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".

[24] 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.

Valiente claimed that Cochrane had given the journalist Justine Glass a photograph of a copper platter with '1724' printed on it for her 1965 book Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense – and Us.

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.

"[34] 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".

[39] Following Cochrane's death, the Mantle of Magister of the Clan of Tubal Cain was given to Evan John Jones.

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).