A One–Time Resident of Bollington

I may be doing the setter an injustice, but this question has all the hallmarks of being made up on the spot without the facts being checked.

I can find no record of John Cockcroft ever having lived in Bollington. He was born in Todmorden in 1897, and lived in the nearby village of Walsden until he was 28 years old. He married in Todmorden in 1925, the year after he'd won a scholarship to Cambridge University. Cockcroft was elected a Fellow of St. John's College on 5 November 1928; he and Ernest Walton built a particle accelerator, and began operating it in March 1932 (bombarding lithium and beryllium nuclei with high–energy protons).

The scientist who was born in Bollington (in 1891) is James Chadwick, whose claim to fame is that he discovered the neutron in 1932 – demonstrating that these were what Cockcroft and Walton had observed in their experiments. Shortly afterwards (in April 1932), Cockcroft and Walton succeeded in "splitting the atom".

Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935.