John Cook, 1938–2019

This month, Dad died.

It’s a strange thing to write. A few weeks on, it still feels so unreal. I keep thinking I need to tell him things, or mentally noting jokes I think he would like. It will be strange – it is strange – writing things he will not read.

Over the coming years and months, I and my family will be doing stuff to support the Pulmonary Fibrosis Trust. They helped Dad – their support let him go on a final trip abroad.

We set up a JustGiving page here. This disease causes the lungs to progressively stiffen and ultimately stop oxygen transfer. It’s an awful and incurable disease with no effective treatments, only drugs that temporarily slow the fibrosis down. In time, we will look at helping research charities, too.

Here’s what I said at his funeral at St John the Baptist’s in Purley yesterday, the place where he and my Mum have worshipped for almost half a century, and where we were touched at how many people made the effort on a hot Tuesday morning to say goodbye.

If you visit St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London, the monument to Sir Christopher Wren, the architect, contains the words:

LECTOR SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE.

For those whose Latin is rusty, that’s:

Reader, if you are looking for his monument, look around you.

That would be an appropriate epitaph today for Dad. Not because he was secretly an architect of interwar churches. But because there could be no more fitting way to remember our Dad than a congregation of his friends.

Before he died, he did not lack for visitors. And since his death, our house has been full of letters, of cards, of flowers. We have appreciated the food, too. To be honest, without Dad, we struggle to live up to our surname.

Dad’s was a life defined by a genuine love of people. He made friendships easily, and he valued them. It has been striking – and comforting – to us how we have heard from friends from so many of the phases of his life who cared for him in return.

We heard from friends he met as a schoolboy at Mayfield. From his early career, too – on leaving school in 1955, he became an articled clerk with Spain Brothers, a firm of chartered accountants, before moving to Peat Marwick Mitchell – the firm which became KPMG.

We heard from fellow students from the London Business School where he studied in 1967 for a Masters Degree. From P&O, where he became a big wheel in bulk shipping. From Hambros Bank and then EC Hambro Rabben and Partners, the firm he helped found.

In retrospect, he was also a born brother of the Catenians, a fraternal Catholic association. The organisation proclaims: “Our primary purpose is to establish a network of friends”.

Boy, did it deliver for Dad. He first came to a dinner-dance in 1963. He met Harold Emery, his soon-to-be father-in-law, who was then president of the Sutton Circle of the organisation. Dad would go on to be circle president four times. He was proud of his fifty years of membership.

The Sutton Circle provided a drumbeat of singing contests, dinner-dances, meetings, cricket matches, barbeques… But above all, it gave him a huge stock of friends of a variety of ages and backgrounds – lots of whom who have rallied to mum’s side in the past few weeks, as well as today.

A major part of his talent for friendship was simply kindness. He was keen to help people if he could, without being a meddler or intrusive. He was generous, and hated unfairness. He never wanted to stick his nose in but quietly fretted about people he cared about – and took genuine joy in things that brought them joy. He got excited for things that made them excited.

That defined his politics; in his final years, every conversation turned to Brexit – something that he regarded as a catastrophe. He had reasoned arguments about economics and geopolitics. But his real motivation was simpler: who would not want to make common cause with our friends and neighbours?

He obtained his Irish passport, aged 79 in 2017, as a modest rebellion. He emailed us with the news: “Now listening to Ode to Joy and drinking champagne to celebrate my continuing European heritage”. (None of us is eligible.)

That’s a rather neat example of something mentioned in the messages that so many of you sent to us: his sense of humour. From the London Business School, in the workplace, at home and even here at mass during his long service among the tenors of the choir at St John the Baptist, he enjoyed trying to make people laugh – not always at an appropriate moment, either.

To us, his family, imagining a world without Dad is still impossible, like imagining a world without the ground beneath our feet. He met mum in 1962 – a recent graduate of Southampton University – and they married in 1966 at St Elphege’s in Wallington. They moved to Foxley Lane, and joined this parish, a few years on. I’m the youngest of their brood of five. And he was a source of immovably firm support to all of us.

When Dad was at work, we would call him after school. In fact, we were probably constantly bothering him with calls. Not that he complained – it is quite something to work as hard as he did and not leave your children feeling they ever had to fight for attention or care.

But despite all those calls, we actually knew very little about his work-life, except for the names of his colleagues.

My mental map of his career is composed of a list of his mates – since the mid 1980s: Fergus, Toby, Chips, Eivind, Peter, Erik… Because that’s how he talked about it. We did not really know what he did, but our impression of the world of shipping was that it was a bit like Dad, full of friends and principled people whose “word was their bond”.

So when Anna started working as a shipping lawyer, it was a bit of a rude awakening because, except for Dad’s friends, no one was remotely trustworthy at all. There were hints of this in some of his aphorisms that made it back to Foxley Lane. “If they’re going to screw you once, they’ll find it easier to do it a second time” “Crooks don’t steal from you all the time, they steal from you when they need it”

But Dad enjoyed Anna’s foray into his world – and was always hugely entertained about whatever she was doing, especially helping her chase down ships that Anna was trying to have seized. Dad would, in those days, deploy his network of mates to help find them.

Shipping was also a rather patriarchal world: in some cases, a gentlemanly sort of arena and in other parts blokey. But you’d struggle to work that out from what dad wanted for his four daughters. He was ambitious for all of us – pushing us. We used to get poked with those big arthritic fingers to finish our maths or do our piano practice.

But that ambition really was because he wanted us to be able to do what we wanted as adults. What he really wanted for us was for us to be happy. He and Mum fought hard to make sure that the world allowed our Hattie to become the person she is.

When we made mistakes, or needed his help, he was sometimes annoyed with our doubtful decision-making. He could be snappy. But we never for a moment doubted he would help us and was on our side.

And he had a gift for making clear to each of the five of us that, even though we are very different people, he loved each of us for who we are. There was plenty of competition between us, but not for Dad’s approval.

He was also a doting grandfather: he went in for babysitting, school pickups, dinner, attending school plays to hear the 10th narrator speak, a summer camp production of Grease, tennis camps, swimming lessons, new card games, even learning German.

He was ready to listen and understand 21st century teaching models. He never believed he knew everything.

Dad also had an expansive idea of what family was. He never let it be doubted that he saw my brothers-in-law as my brothers. And his face genuinely lit up at getting to see his nieces and nephews. Our house always had space for photos of our cousins and their families.

Dad was one of three children. His older brother, David, died six years ago. His younger sister, Gill, is here today. And he was always a source of insight into what they and their children were doing. He’d be worrying on their behalf about something, and delighting in their accomplishments.

This love and care was not confined to the Cook side of the family tree, either. When my cousin Paul, from Mum’s side, needed a bit of help when he was at medical school, he moved in with them for a bit.

We are all so pleased he did – because I really think the years they ended up spending together in Purley, retired from work and hanging out with his nephew, were among the happiest of his life.

When my French exchange, Alban, needed a place to stay in south London, of course Dad and Mum did what they could. Why would you not help someone?

Part of his legacy is leaving a big family behind him – one of which the five of us and our mum is just a small part.

He, of course, could not have been this person without Mum. They were not above cross words. But they shared a common outlook on life for the important stuff. And built a happy home around things they shared – like their faith – and things where they found an accommodation, like the theatre. Mum went to see plays, while Dad napped.

Dad would roll his eyes at my saying this but we should say a word about his remarkable bravery and resilience.

More or less since I was born, in 1982, Dad has been poorly. He got Crohn’s disease back then, and it forced him into a brief early retirement in 1985. A veteran of hours of surgery, he lived off a limited diet. He had terrible arthritis in his fingers, too. And then, around a decade ago, he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis – a gradual stiffening of his lungs. It was that, in the end, that killed him.

But, for all that, he never really complained about his lot or felt sorry for himself. He was fed up with being ill but was determined to recover: just a few weeks before he died, he told us in detail how he wanted to replace his current car with an electric one. He was with us until the end, in mind and soul, and planning for the future.

There are consolations in the fact that Dad died well. But the real consolation is that he lived so brilliantly. He built a world for each of us to grow into. Our grief is a tribute to how deeply he was loved.