Jean Mary Cook, FSA, teacher, archaeologist, museum curator and university administrator

Jean Cook was an Anglo-Saxon archaeologist of distinction who used her considerable gifts as a pioneer administrator in museums and higher education. Far more important than just knowing about organizations and how they worked, she cared about people and cared for them. She was always as much at ease with support staff or students as with professional colleagues. She played a crucial role in the establishment of the Oxfordshire County Museum and the South Region of the Open University. She was also a skilled enabler who helped other archaeologists and historians to bring their research to publication, often at the expense of her own work.

Jean Cook was born at Walmley, near Birmingham, in 1927. She went to school at the High School for Girls in Sutton Coldfield, where she concentrated on science. She was determined to go to university, rather to the consternation of her mother. Her first degree, at Royal Holloway College, was in botany. On graduating she went on to the Institute of Education, London, where she was awarded her Education Diploma in 1950. She began her teaching career at the Frances Mary Buss Foundation Camden School for Girls, where she taught botany. In her spare time she studied at Birkbeck College for a BA in English, with archaeology as a subsidiary subject. Her archaeological course tutor at Birkbeck was Vera Evison. This introduction to archaeology was to be a turning point and henceforward archaeology became the central enthusiasm of her life.

She excavated with Vera Evison at Great Chesterford in 1954 and spent a season in Helgö in Sweden. In 1955 she conducted the excavation of a small Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Broadway Hill in Worcestershire for the then Ministry of Public Buildings and Works. The report was meticulously published three years later in the Antiquaries Journal and she was able to demonstrate the early nature of Anglo-Saxon settlement in the West Midlands.

She began her second, and distinguished, career in museums in 1954 when she went to work at the Guildhall Museum, London, under Norman Cook. She published work on early medieval finds from the museum. She completed her part-time BA degree and began to work for a higher degree. Her research was on the down-to-earth subject of the wooden buckets sometimes found amongst the grave goods in Anglo-Saxon burials. She began to collect and record material on these and continued to do so all her life. She was particularly interested in the technical details of their manufacture.

In 1958 she was promoted to the curatorship at the Royal Museum, Canterbury, where she set about modernizing the collection. After completing a Museum Diploma in 1960 she was appointed the curator of the new museum in Chichester in 1962. She built up the collection from scratch and the material was displayed in a converted historic building, which included a flat for the curator.

The Chichester experience was to prove valuable when in 1964 she moved to the challenging post of first Director of the Oxford City and County Museum. Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum had effectively fulfilled the function of the local museum, but the need for a specifically locally focused museum had long been recognized. She set about the task of establishing a model museum with energy and enthusiasm: collecting representative objects for display and establishing an excellently equipped conservation laboratory, under Brian Arthur, capable of handling not only delicate archaeological objects, but also farm machinery. Pride of place went to the typical red and yellow Oxfordshire farm wagon restored by David Smith, which became one of the centrepieces of the early display at Fletcher's House at Woodstock. In 1965 she was elected to a fellowship of the Museums Association. The new museum opened its doors on 15 October 1966. As at Chichester, a small flat was created for her in the attics of Fletcher's House, and once again she 'lived above the shop'.

Two aspects of the museum deserve special mention. She was a strong advocate of the need for the museum to become accessible to schoolchildren. Jeff McCabe was appointed Schools Officer in 1965 and a Schools' Loan Service was quickly established. Stacks of red painted boxes containing a treasure trove of material for children to handle in their own schools were one of the most familiar sights of Fletcher's House.

Even more pioneering was the establishment of the Field Department under its first Field Officer, Don Benson. Both Jean Cook and Don Benson believed that the new museum should be actively involved in research through excavation. This led to the excavation of the Neolithic long barrow at Ascott-under-Wychwood, which was threatened by road building; parts of its re-erected burial chamber were displayed in the museum. Even more significant was the creation of the first County Sites and Monuments Record, which provided the county with an accessible record of its archaeology (stored on optical coincidence cards in those pre-computer days) and available not only for research, but as a tool in planning. Following the pioneering Oxfordshire example, county or district Sites and Monuments Records are now ubiquitous in the UK and indeed may soon become a statutory requirement of local government.

A spin-off of this activity was the authorship by Don Benson and Jean Cook in 1966 of City of Oxford Redevelopment Archaeological Implications. The report was not intended to be an exhaustive survey of the archaeological knowledge of Oxford, nor was it intended primarily for archaeologists and historians. It was an attempt to provide basic information for those who were directly concerned with planning in the city. It succeeded admirably in its aim. The publication was the first in what became a national genre of implication surveys and is the ancestor of the Urban Archaeology Databases and Strategies and Extensive Urban Surveys currently being promoted by English Heritage.

Jean Cook realized that the scale of excavations necessary in Oxford could seriously effect the focus of the fledgling museum and would also require resources that might not be available to the local authority alone. Accordingly, she actively promoted the formation of the Oxford Archaeological Excavation Committee as a rare example of the city, the county and the university coming together in a joint project to rescue Oxford's buried past. The success of the excavations in Oxford was to lead later to the formation of similar archaeological committees in the county and ultimately to the creation of the highly successful Oxford Archaeological Unit, on whose committee she was later to serve.

The creation of a new museum was an extraordinarily exciting enterprise for all those associated with it and she became a highly respected part of the museum world both locally and nationally as a member of the Council of the Museums Association. A glowing report on the museum by the then head of the Department of Museum Studies at Leicester University appeared in The Museums Journal, which commended Jean Cook's zeal, the team-working, the new thinking and the new museum image that had been created. The museum appeared to be going from strength to strength, its future was assured and proposals were in hand for a branch museum in Oxford, a farm museum and a permanent site for storage. But budget cuts began and she became increasingly frustrated that it was no longer possible to sustain the initial momentum. In spite of the support of her committee, and in particular John Edwards, its secretary, she was not prepared to contemplate the compromises that were going to become inevitable. To her colleagues' surprise and deep regret Jean Cook resigned from the museum in 1970. It was to be left to her successor, Richard (later Sir Richard) Foster, to carry forward the work that she had so ably begun.

Jean Cook left the Woodstock museum to begin a new career as a university administrator, working as Assistant Regional Director for the South Region of the Open University (OU), which had been founded the year before. She was enthusiastic about wanting to be involved in developing the new educational opportunities it offered. Crucial to the success of those pioneering years of the OU was the need to secure the active co-operation of numerous organizations, especially local education authorities, universities and other institutions of higher, further and adult education. This was not just a matter of politics: there were important educational and administrative objectives to be met, such as the setting up of local study centres and the creation around them of meaningful 'university communities'. All of this had to be achieved in a very short time-scale. She had a great concern for the supply of the academic needs of the students under her care: she had to make sure that they had tutors for all their courses and a counsellor, and had to arrange registration, examination and summer schools. But, perhaps more importantly, her regional office was there to make the OU more personal and less a faceless institution for students studying at home. Her own previous experience as a part-time student made her especially qualified for this work. Jean Cook brought to the OU a unique combination of professional experience, administrative skills, enthusiasm and warm personality in helping to meet these challenges.

She retired from the Open University in 1983, followed by a year's study leave. She once again became actively involved in archaeology in Oxford. In the first instance she brought her considerable talents to assisting Trevor Rowley at the Oxford University Department for External Studies in developing his extensive archaeological programme for continuing education students. She had herself helped to persuade the Department to appoint a full-time archaeology tutor when she had been at Woodstock. As an Associate Tutor of the Department she helped to introduce a rigour to the embryonic certificate courses in archaeology. In particular, she forged links between the Department and the Open University that allowed a structure of courses to be created, ranging from intermediate to post-graduate level. She thus was able to combine her love of archaeology with experiences gained at the Open University and to bring a special element of pastoral care to the students at Rewley House, who were devoted to her. A lasting legacy of this period was a volume of essays entitled The Archaeology of the Oxford Region, which she edited with Grace Briggs and Trevor Rowley. An important part of her role in this collaboration was to cajole reluctant authors into completing publishable texts based on what were originally University Extension Lectures, given in 1980. The resulting book provides an important benchmark for the region's archaeology and has fulfilled the editors' wishes of providing a volume of scholarship that has survived into the 21st century. A similar co-operation with Trevor Rowley led to Dorchester through the Ages in 1985. Other local studies followed of buried Oxford, Old Headington (with Leslie Taylor), of Sutton Courtenay (building on the research of John Fletcher and Christopher Currie), and of Great Marlow, which was compiled with the help of an adult education group. Jean Cook was the driving force behind these publications, which made archaeology and local history available to a wide audience.

At the same time, and also with Grace Briggs, Jean Cook was assisting Dr J N L Myres to bring to fruition the final volume of The Oxford History of England, entitled The English Settlements. As Dr Myres put it, they 'collaborated most generously and efficiently in relieving me of nearly all the tiresome and time-consuming incidentals of authorship'. The trio collaborated again, but this time with the addition of Dr John Mason, to produce The Building Accounts of Christ Church Library 1716-1779, published by the Roxburghe Club in 1988. Dr Myres described Jean Cook as his 'Girl Friday', a role that was made even more apt when she established her allotment in the grounds of the Myres' manor house at Kennington.

In addition to her adult education work and facilitating the publication of the research of others, Jean Cook found time to be involved with archaeological societies at a local and national level. She was Honorary Secretary of the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society from 1985 to1990, organizing the Society's 150th birthday celebrations in 1989, which included a dinner in Corpus Christi College and a notable joint meeting with the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in Stamford. She was President of this Society between 1992 and 1994. During this time the Society underwent a renaissance which was very much due to Jean Cook's concern for the needs of the membership. She was also a life member of the Oxford Preservation Trust, serving on the Environmental Awards Panel.

In 1993 she became a member of the Council of the Society of Antiquaries of London, to which she had been elected as a Fellow in 1967. In 1996 she agreed to become the Society's Honorary Secretary and was the first woman to hold this post. In her typical forthright way she announced that she would hold the post for three years only. During those three years she certainly made her mark. She took a particular interest in the welfare of the Society's staff and made the Society's Library at Burlington House her special concern. The successful computerization of the Library's catalogue and its recent availability on the web is a tribute to her interest, while her background in museum conservation led to her encouragement for the conservation of the Library's books.

After her three years' service she retained her connection with the Antiquaries through her active involvement with a research project sponsored by the Society to understand the evolution of the landscape around Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. Typically Jean Cook was anxious to involve and to inform the residents of Kelmscott and make the work of scholarship relevant to them.

For the last twenty years of her life Jean Cook was a resident of the newly developed area of St Ebbe's in Oxford. From the beginning she was an active member of the community there. She helped to found the St Ebbe's New Development Residents' Association, known as SENDRA. She acted as chairman and secretary to the Association on several occasions, doing major work for the public inquiry of 1997 into the building of a so-called 'Leisure Village' in Oxpens. She established beautiful gardens to her house, which were seen and admired by all her neighbours. She often said that her preferred career would have been as a gardener at the Oxford Botanic Gardens. The community showed its love and respect for her during the illness that led to her death, by their constant and diligent help in all her needs.

Jean Cook was a grave and private person, full of integrity and deeply devoted to her sister and to her sister's family. She applied rigour, timeliness and high standards to everything that she undertook. But above all she was selfless and always put others first. She deserved the affection and the respect in which she was held. During her sudden, short illness she was sustained by her strong Christian faith and the support of her friend, Mary Hodges.

Tom Hassall FSA

9 August 2001