Quiet pioneer of environmental causes
William E Cooke, a sanitary inspector in West Yorkshire, was an environmentalist long before the word was widely used. His family talk to John Blow about his work.
LIKE so many of the people in Sheffield, Anna Buehring was against the ill-fated programme to fell thousands of trees in the city. She was one of those protesters who was “out there at five o’clock in the morning, standing under the trees”, hoping to stop them being cut down.
And one person she felt was there with her, at least in spirit, was William E Cooke – her late grandfather, a determined campaigner and environmentalist.
Because of William, the family learned about “campaigning and sticking up for causes and what’s right”, says Anna, 68.
Now barely a day goes by without climate change, food-safety standards, air pollution or sewage in the rivers hitting the headlines. But before the environment was one of society’s key concerns, there were people like William, who was a senior sanitary inspector in Bingley.
Anna and another of his granddaughters, Pam Hooper, 73, along with her mother and William’s daughter, Betty Longbottom,
99, have been looking over his achievements, shown in two large books stuffed with newspaper clippings.
They are hoping to get these archived for posterity, as they reveal so much more than one man’s work. Anna says: “I used to work in social housing. I was particularly interested because Granddad did a lot of work trying to improve housing conditions for people. So I just felt interested in that side of what he did really, but we’ve recently kind of got them out and started looking at them and realised what a record of social history they are.”
It is a sobering look back at what Yorkshire was like in the inter-war period – cramped slums, cows with tuberculosis giving milk, sooty air blackening the buildings.
William, though, was determined to make changes.
Born in Kidderminster in October 1898, as a young man he became a pupil to the chief sanitary inspector of a West Midlands borough in 1913, starting at a time, as he later wrote for The Sanitarian,
when “diseases such as tuberculosis, scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhoid were common”.
In the First World War he was on the Eastern Front in Turkey and, returning to civilian life in 1919, earned a salary of £80 per year and received a government grant to train for the meat and food inspector’s certificate at Birmingham College.
Then he left for the West Riding, where he found “the grim environment of the North – the dark satanic mills, slums and, all too soon, the General Strike,” he wrote in 1964, in an article looking back at his career.
In the 1920s, he spearheaded a clean milk campaign, working alongside the University of Leeds. Pam says: “He was really keen on pasteurised milk because in those days you didn’t have to have pasteurised milk, you could sell unfiltered milk. There was no TB testing and things like that.”
The West Riding County set up a Veterinary Department and a systematic clinical inspection of all dairy cows in the area was established.
Then there was the issue of industrial smoke coming from the area’s many workplaces. The West Riding Regional Smoke Abatement Committee set up in the mid-1920s to deal with the pollution, pioneering classes for stokers and incentivising with higher wages for those who obtained appropriate qualifications. In the 1930s, homes in Bingley suffered overcrowding and bug infestations and William was instrumental in slum clearances of dangerously poor housing.
There was also Rat Week – a campaign to deal with rodents in the town – and awareness events such as Bingley Health Week.
His normal work was affected somewhat by the national effort during the Second World War and he later wrote: “I do remember feeling exasperated in June 1940 when we were suddenly instructed to approach all owners of boiler furnaces and order them to produce as much black smoke as they possibly could and increase the amount of industrial haze.”
It was 1955 before slum clearance could resume. Meanwhile, nationally, work to alleviate pollution in the atmosphere also made progress with the Clean Air Act 1956. William – who was husband to Edith and father to Betty and her sister Jean – was also an advocate of recycling.
Although he initially retired in the 1960s, “for all of six weeks”, says Pam, he returned to work part-time for a few more years. He died in 1978.
Looking through the clippings at a care home in Yeadon, Leeds, Betty, who is due to turn 100 on November 1, says: “It’s emotional. I wish I’d have known more about it but I wasn’t old enough when some of the things were going on.” What would he make of direct action groups around now such as Extinction Rebellion?
“I’m not sure he would have supported their tactics wholeheartedly but certainly the sentiment,” says Anna. “I think he’d be horrified, to be honest, at the state of the world and the environment now.”
Pam adds: “He would have probably been a great advocate of self-sufficiency because he was very green-fingered, Granddad and Grandma were, it was sort of background that they came from, but he fed you all during the war, didn’t he?” Betty replies: “Oh, yeah. We even had two cows in our orchard.”
William, believe his granddaughters, was an inquiring mind with a gentle determination. Anna says: “Thinking about him now, he was quite driven really. Quiet, not ambitious in the sense of wanting to be some hierarchy but ambitious in the sense of wanting to do things in the world, I think.”
Pam adds: “He got things done but he got it done quietly.”