FB Cooke’s granddaughter
During visits to his home, FB Cooke’s granddaughter Faith Egan remembers him as ‘desperately Victorian. He was austere, distant and rather grumpy.’
Faith explained to Classic Boat that his obsession with writing was to pay the medical bills for one of his four daughters, Kathleen, who suered from osteoarthritis, and also to meet the school fees for his other children.
Faith recalls her mother, Barbara’s daily warning: “Be quiet, father’s working.” He had interests in bone china, motorcycles and photography as well as sailing and wrote about those, too. As a result of his self-imposed workload, he was a man of strict, ritualistic discipline.
“My bed was made up in the front room and he would come and wind the grandfather clock up at the same time every night, and I dreaded the peals as they woke me up,” Faith said.
Faith has a large archive of her grandfather’s work, which is kept in her home in the Derbyshire Dales where she lives with husband, Colin.