My close friend and former colleague at the Caldecott Community has died. He was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease early last year. He was advised immediately that there was no cure. He spent the remainder of his life preparing for death and receiving love and attention from all those who knew him, his daughters and their mother, his family, his friends, his former and current colleagues and young people that he cared for.
I first met John when I introduced myself to him in September 1976. I remember the date very well. It was three days before the start of the Autumn term at the Caldecott Community, a therapeutic community for emotionally challenged children and teenagers. The staff always gathered before the young people returned to the Community after a summer break. We were also tasked to prepare for the annual reunion of past children and staff members. This involved setting up a marquee on the front lawn .
John had arrived as a new member of staff. I was returning for the start of my second post there, having already worked as a houseparent for five years before leaving in 1974 to work in London and to get my professional training in Salford. I had been told that John was new to Caldecott and so I approached him after lunch in the dining room and said that we would all be meeting on the lawn afterwards if he would like to come and help us put up the marquee. Many weeks later he told me that he had taken an instant dislike to me for telling him what to do. By this time John had realised that I was a kindred spirit with regards all the interests that he also had, namely music, the countryside and drinking beer.
We were close colleagues at Caldecott for three years. He introduced me to making the most of a difficult job. We worked six days per week for three school terms a year. We were responsible for two groups of children and teenagers from 7am until the last person was asleep. Caldecott was still an antiquated benign institution that had the children’s best interests and care to heart, it had made progressive changes to its method of working, but it was still operating in a way that would have surprised most of our local authority peers in residential child care.
As kindred spirits, John and I were also revolutionaries at heart, wanting more change and improvements faster than they were evolving. Friday night staff meetings were our platform for doing this. After which we always managed a mad spring through the grounds and down to the village in Mersham to catch the last pint at the Royal Oak.
During the three years that we spent at Caldecott, John introduced me to his family and to Scotland. He persuaded me without difficulty to hire a car and travel to Scotland to spend a week on the Isle of Arran. We spent an initial night at his parents’ house in Stepps, a small community north of Glasgow. John’s parents were doctors, GP’s in the East End of Glasgow. Mr Cook’s father was also a retired GP. Three generations of East Enders had medical care from the Cook family.
We travelled to Arran and John introduced me to the extraordinary beauty of the West Coast of Scotland. We had rented a cottage on a farm and John, really interested in trying to improve his guitar and song writing skills, had brought a reel to reel tape recorder with him. Our evenings were spent with me trying to read while John repeatedly went over tracks on the tape machine.
The following year John had an invitation from his younger sister to visit and stay with her in a hotel in the Swiss Alps. She was a receptionist and had managed to acquire a room for us. We travelled to Sion in John’s second hand soft top Triumph Spitfire, in the early stages of winter. We arrived a kilometre short of the hotel because it was snow bound. We had brought Wellington boots so we looked slightly off piste walking into the foyer with our bags.
The next year we had a trip to Dundee where John introduced me to a lot of his friends with whom he had close musical connections.
We both left Caldecott at the same time. John had decided that, as a Scot from Stepps near Glasgow, and after his training in Dundee, that being so close to London was far too attractive to miss. He applied successfully to get a post working with an Intermediate Treatment team with Islington social services. I had just been invited to take an interest in applying for a post in Westminster, working in an adolescent childrens home under the management of someone who had also trained at Salford.
It was only natural to continue our friendship. John had managed to get a flat in Kings Cross from his employers and I was living on the premises in Maida Vale in my new post. We met regularly to enjoy the music scene and to drink beer. Our favourite midweek venue was the King’s Head in Islington that hosted musicians most evenings. Our favourite at that time was Isaac Guillory. These were the days when drink driving was still a ‘thing’ and alcohol limits by law were much less severe than now. It was not unknown for us to have three or four pints in an evening session. On one occasion I had collected John from his flat and travelled over to Islington. At the end of the evening we got into the car and drove off down Islington High Street. As we approached a pedestrian crossing I had to overtake a stationary van without realising that someone was about to cross the road. I travelled on. I then spotted a blue lamp on the van and I was pulled over. I had to be breathalysed and the officer said that I was lucky because I was just below the limit. Had I been one degree over then he would have had to remove my keys and get my friend to drive me home. I looked at John who had a very innocent looking face and smile.
John Cook had trained in Dundee and had a Diploma in Youth and Community Work. He had spent three years in Dundee making a lot of friends in the music scene there. He had good connections with a band called Skeets Bolliver. This was a creative band of the art house genre. Their music was either quirky Scottish or boppy rock. One member of the band was Michael Marra . On our earlier visit to Dundee John had introduced me to him. Michael was an interested, interesting man who was the creative songwriter for the band. He later became a national treasure in Scotland. Michael had been invited by Barbara Dickson’s producer to come to London for six weeks to write songs for an album. During this time he stayed with John in his flat for a while before he was put into a hotel with a piano to get writing. The resulting album was ‘The Midas Touch’. It had limited appeal but in my opinion consisted of probably his best songs. This was partly due to the amazing backing group of session musicians. The latter played as a band called ‘The Jazz Sluts’ on a Friday night in a West London pub. This was a regular haunt for John and me.
At my first introduction with Michael Marra, he mentioned that Skeets were travelling to London to appear at the Speakeasy in the hope of getting to the attention of BBC producers. I had good friends in Redhill, Surrey who ran a Sunday night music venue catering for different types of rock genre and I suggested that I fixed a gig for them. So, John’s friends in Skeet Bolliver played the venue, the Lakers Hotel. I don’t think anyone realised that a Scottish national treasure in the making was performing there that night.
These are the stories with John that were the foundation stones of a friendship that lasted for five decades.
John always wanted to go to America, to work or do anything. He tried to persuade me to go with him. I was too cautious about my security and future occupation to be able to make that decision. John chose to go there by landing a place at Tucson University in Arizona. He studied there for two years gaining his Masters in Education, specialising in counselling. I remember cassette tapes that he sent to me telling me what he was up to, with insects chirping in the background while he was sipping a late night beer on the balcony of a farm house that he was living at. He was lodging with another student. John always wanted to learn to fly. He managed to get a job on a golf course, cutting grass from 6am to 8am. With the money that he had earned, he went to the local airfield to purchase a flying lesson. Within six months he had earned his pilot’s licence, flying dog legs over the Grand Canyon. This was in 1983.
When John returned to Britain it was not too long before he had renewed contact with the Caldecott Community where he returned to work. The Community had changed dramatically and was leaning much more towards a better understood planned environment approach to helping emotionally challenged young minds. This included the research into and funding of a new children’s house that would provide an intensive focus for the most challenged of the children whose local authorities had no other provision for.
It was no surprise to me that John would be selected to become the new manager of this house. On my first visit to it, I was taken by the attention to design detail. It had been planned to enable individual and group care and play. The dining room in particular was the opposite of instutional and gave the impression of a farmhouse style open plan. This was an environment that I knew John would be successful in. He was very much inspired by Melvyn Rose, the founder of the Peper Harow Foundation. Rose was a charismatic therapeutic community practitioner. John and I had travelled to London during our time at Caldecott together, to listen to a lecture by Rose on the work of the planned environment at Peper Harow. It was inspirational, if not flawed because of the focus on residential care as opposed to family work, but that was of its time, the 1970’s.
John remained in post there until the 1990’s. He was disappointed to be passed over for a new post in the new training college that Caldecott was developing. However, by this time John had come to the attention of Melvyn Rose and the Peper Harow Foundation and he was invited to manage a new project in Brighton that would repair the damage to young children who had experienced numerous foster care breakdowns. The focus of the work was to help children to overcome these breakdowns and not to blame themselves for them but to realise that carers need as much support as they did. The contract was to last for three years. Shortly after visiting John in his new house I read an article in Community Care about the director of social work at Fife in Scotland, Allan Bowman. In 1990 he came under fire from the Reporters Office because of his blanket closure of all residential child care placements in favour of community care. There was little if any transition. No young person could be placed in a residential child care setting. In the mid 1990’s Bowman was appointed to become Director of Social Work for Brighton and Hove. I remember phoning John and warning him that his project was in danger. John did not believe that could happen because Peper Hrrow had a three year contract and there was two years to go. Shortly after, Bowman pulled the plug on the contract.
John remained with the Peper Harrow Foundation until the beginning of this century. He was responsible for setting up and acting as a consultant to three other projects in Norfolk and Kent. All remain successfully in operation.
I don’t recall the beginning of his next stage but John decided with two other partners to start his own private venture. He purchased a property in Broadstairs in Kent and created his own residential children’s home with the same focus as his previous projects but with the idea of specialising in offering placements to young people who would otherwise be placed in secure accommodation. For fifteen years this project expanded and included a supported flat for teenagers who needed a throughcare service that enabled them to go to college or work. In the last months of his life John sent me a copy of an Ofsted inspection report of his residential house. It was graded ‘Outstanding’.
Contact with John was always meaningful. He frequently visited me after I moved to Scotland in 1987. There was always an outing or a walk involved. Having trained a s a pilot it was only natural for John to acquire his own aircraft. In the early 1990’s he said he was flying his plane up to Scotland, using Cumbernauld air field as his stopping place. He invited me to spend the day island hopping with him. The plane was a two seater with the passenger behind the pilot. We had ear phones and microphones to communicate while flying. This was like the pioneering days and we had to use road maps to identify locations and airfield handbooks to identify where to land. We flew down the Clyde, over Arran, over Kintyre to land on Gigha. We flew to Colonsay and then on to Islay. We stopped there for lunch and when we returned to the plane we found a family taking photos of it. John asked if they had a special interest and they said that they had a model kit of his plane with the same registration letters. John replied that he had bought the plane from the man who owned the model aircraft kit company! We made our last stop at Mull. It was a long, exciting day with an accomplished pilot who shared his love of flying with me that day.
We communicated regularly. The recent years of Covid and lockdowns had a big impact on John. The onset of his MND was beginning but he had not been diagnosed formally until early in 2022. I last saw him in November last year, staying with him in his house in Hythe and preparing his meals to give his daughters some time off. He was frail and finding his mobility a challenge. The disease was mostly affecting his breathing. We drank whisky and reminisced about our lives. I had a long conversation with him in March before leaving for a holiday. When I returned I tried to phone him but the call was declined. Two days later his daughter phoned to let me know that he had died that morning.
Other than my own family, one thing that has kept me grounded with my past, is my friendship with John Cook.
At his funeral there was a poem by Jaspreet Kaur called ‘The Moment’. The last verse reads:
And the moment that we all begin to believe that we can change this world
For the better, we will do it. Because Life is but these moments where we learn, change, grow and give; so, go live your moments.
