Philip E. Cleator

Philip Ellaby Cleator was an English rocketry pioneer and space advocate, born in Wallasey, Cheshire, who worked as an office employee in the Liverpool area before science fiction films and news of Germany's and America's early rocket societies drew him toward spaceflight advocacy. In October 1933 he founded the British Interplanetary Society in Liverpool, an organization that grew into what has been described as the world's most important space advocacy society from the mid-1930s onward and remains the oldest continuously operating such society in the world. In 1936 Cleator published Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel, reportedly the first book on rocketry and spaceflight published in Britain, helping introduce the concept of interplanetary travel to a British readership decades before it became technically feasible.