John Cook 1952 – 2023
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.
John was born in Scotland and raised in the village of Stepps, north of Glasgow. His parents were GP’s as was his Grandfather. They practised in the East End of Glasgow and helped several generations of Glaswegians with their health and delivery in to the world.
John went to a private school in Glasgow which he did not enjoy. This may have contributed to his motivation to enter the world of youth and community work. He studied at Dundee and gained his Diploma in Youth and Community Work and then, like many before him, spotted an advert on the back page of New Society seeking houseparents at Caldecott.
John arrived at Caldecott in 1976. The Community was evolving quickly at this stage. Under James King’s directorship it had moved away from segregated age and sex groups and was now operating a successful family group style method of care. I had returned to Caldecott in 1976 for a second post after my professional training and John and I became kindred spirits and close friends. Full of ideas we always wanted to change things for the better. John excelled in the environment at Caldecott, bringing energy and charisma to us all.
Towards the end of 1979 John decided to work in London and he worked for the London Borough of Islington in their Intermediate Treatment team. This was a different environment but exactly the one he had trained for. He had an ambition to go to America, to do anything, and he tried to persuade me to go with him at one point. I was too concentrated on my own life and career, having found a post with Westminster City Council.
John travelled to America where he had been offered a place at Tucson University in Arizona. He spent two years there and gained his Masters in Education, specialising in counselling. He occasionally sent cassette tapes of himself talking to me about what he was up to. These often had a background of insects chirping in the background, late at night where he was sitting on the balcony of a ranch house that he was lodging in. Each morning before classes he went to work on a golf course where he cut the grass on the greens. With the money he earned, each night he bought himself a flying lesson and within less than six months he had his pilot’s licence. Much of his training was flying over the Grand Canyon.
John returned to Britain in the middle of the 1980’s. It was no surprise to me that he would return to work at the Caldecott Community. It gave him the breathing space to start his career again. He returned at exactly the right time. Caldecott was building and developing a new service for young people needing a more intensive care environment, one that was designed to enable the staff to focus on individual needs. It had at its heart the theory of the ‘planned environment’ that would enable better outcomes. This house was Lacton House, not too far from Lacton Hall. It had been designed after consultation with a number of similar projects. John was successful in becoming the first leader of this house. I recall visiting him and being shown a house that was so different, warm and enveloping. It had rooms that were designed to help troubled minds. It included a kitchen and dining room that would enable food and feeding to play an important part equal to play and sleeping.
John stayed at Lacton House for several years. He then came to the attention of Melvyn Rose, the founder of the Peper Harow Foundation. His work and writing at that time was legendary amongst residential social workers. In 1992 John left Caldecott to work for Peper Harow. He was asked to start a new residential house in Brighton under contract to Brighton social services. It was designed to work with young people who had experienced multiple foster care disruptions. The contract lasted less than the three years due to the arrival in Brighton of a new director from Fife in Scotland who was opposed to the use of residential care in favour of foster care and community placements. He had already closed access to residential care in Fife, causing a controversy for several years.
John stayed with the Peper Harow Foundation until the beginning of this century where he was responsible for developing three other projects in Norfolk and Kent which, to his credit, still remain in operation. Most recently he had started his own private residential service for young people who might otherwise have been placed in a secure environment. This was based in Broadstairs. It embraced the therapeutic community, planned environment, practice that John had been learning over the past thirty years.
It is to John’s credit that everything that he did in his social work career with children and young people was consistently successful. It embraced the values of community life that he experienced at Caldecott, the importance of a thought out planned environment that he learned from Peper Harow and his interest in theoretical knowledge to underpin his work.
My lasting memory of John will be his energy and focus that he brought to all that knew him. The tributes at his funeral gave testimony to the love and respect that anyone who knew him would recognise.