It was heavily influenced by Algol-60, but unlike Algol-60 which was extremely small, elegant and simple, CPL was big, only moderately elegant, and complex. It was intended to be good for both scientific programming (in the way of Fortran and Algol) and also commercial programming (in the way of Cobol?), hence the name (are you sure the name doesn't come from the combined effort of two academic institutions?). It can be seen as a similar effort to PL-I? in this way, or to later efforts such as Ada.
CPL proved just a bit much for the small computers and not fully developed compiler technologies of the time. Properly working compilers were probably written by about 1970 (i'm not completely sure about that), but the language was never very popular and seems to have disappeared without trace sometime in the 1970s.
BCPL was designed as a seriously simplified cut-down version of CPL, and some of the same people were involved. I think the intent was to have a language they could write the CPL compiler in without having to resort to Assembler or Fortran. Although probably intended as a temporary quick and dirty tool until CPL was up, BCPL was much more successful than CPL and lasted much longer.
Barron, D. W., Buxton, J. N., Hartley, D. F., Nixon, E., Strachey, C. "The main features of CPL". Computer Journal, volume 6, p 134 (1963).
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