On Saturday June 22nd 2024, we had the honour of presenting a Special Recognition Award to a lifetime member who has been a member of the Institute for 76 years.

Roy Milliner FICME, who joined the Institute in 1948, has had a long, distinguished, and well-travelled career as a foundryman. Born in Coventry in 1931, Roy has made significant contributions to the field of castings over the decades.

Although Roy was unable to attend the ceremony in person, we captured a special moment on video of him receiving his certificate from Aaron Wright, Managing Director of Cerdic Foundries, and toasting ICME with a whisky in his engraved tumbler.

About Roy

Roy Milliner’s long, distinguished and well-travelled career as a foundryman began in Coventry, where he was born in 1931. Although he saw his hometown brought to its knees during the Blitz of 1940, Roy prevailed, completed a stint at technical college and embarked on a patternmaking apprenticeship aged 16 at machine tool specialist Webster & Bennett – starting out on the princely sum of £1.40 a week.

After completing his apprenticeship, he was awarded the Coventry Engineers Award and became a Freeman of the City of Coventry, before travelling just up the road to Wolverhampton in 1953 and enrolling at the prestigious National Foundry College.

During his time at the college, he met Joan (with whom he recently celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary) via a local cycling club. 1955 proved a busy year for Roy, as he married Joan, gained his diploma from the college and embarked upon his military service – stationed with the Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers at Blandford Forum in Dorset and then in Taunton.

But within a year, he was back in his native Coventry, taking up a role in the technical department at Daimler. From there he joined Sheepbridge in Chesterfield as a methods & development engineer before being approached by Archibald Kendrick Ltd in Birmingham to take up the post of foundry manager in 1961.

After two years Roy moved his young family to Stowmarket to work at lawn mower manufacturers Suffolk Iron, part of the Qualcast Group and then they made their most pivotal move to the West Country in 1967.

While he was lured by the prospect of running a foundry in Totnes, Roy soon decided that this was the time and place to strike out on his own.

In 1970 Cerdic Foundries was founded in Chard, South Somerset. He chose this location because there was an opening for work in the area, as a nearby foundry had just closed down. The business certainly had humble beginnings – operating in a builder’s yard out of three small sheds, with a small furnace melting aluminium and bronze. To expand the product base Roy bought up an iron foundry in Bridgwater, which after several years he moved to a new facility in Chard along with the non-ferrous production.

On this very site, Cerdic Foundries grew considerably over the following decades in terms of footprint and customer base. It is now a one-stop shop, offering pattern making, moulding, core-making, ferrous & non-ferrous melting and, most recently, machining.

As fate would have it, the machine shop is equipped with a Webster & Bennett boring mill which incorporates castings made using the patterns produced by Roy during his apprenticeship back in 1947.

Remaining in the chairman position at Cerdic, Roy nominally took retirement in the early ‘90s but spent a good deal of time visiting businesses abroad through his work with the British Executives Service Overseas charity. In total, he visited nine countries – including Zimbabwe, India, China, Indonesia, Romania and Russia – and helped foundries in these nations to update with the new technologies and methods.

Cerdic Foundries remained family-owned and run until 2016, when the board received an offer from a large organisation to acquire it. In the interest of growing the business further and continuing the legacy that Roy created, the decision was made to pass it on to these new custodians.

To this day, Roy still lives in the Somerset countryside with Joan – preferring to concentrate more on his other great legacy of two daughters, five grandchildren and three great grandchildren.