1903), daughter of John Forster Baird, of Bowmont Hill, Northumberland. They had no children.
From his boyhood Cook was a keen politician and a strong liberal. He was president of the Oxford Union in 1879 and enjoyed the reputation among his contemporaries of being an extremely accomplished and resourceful debater. After leaving Oxford he was for a time secretary of the London Society for Extension of University Teaching, and gradually found his way into journalism by means of contributions to the Pall Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of John (afterwards Viscount) Morley. In 1883 William Thomas Stead [q.v.] became editor, and shortly afterwards invited Cook to join the staff. Here he had for a colleague another distinguished Oxford man, Alfred (afterwards Viscount) Milner, with whom he established a lifelong friendship. Stead, Milner, and Cook made one of the most remarkable trios in London journalism, the first being a vehement innovator and zealot, the other two men of the scholarly and academic type, who were sometimes left breathless by the brilliant indiscretions of their chief. To the end of his life Cook acknowledged the debt that he owed to Stead and applied not a few of Stead’s ideas to the papers that he afterwards edited, but, as a writer, his own methods were the opposite of Stead’s, and he relied rather on quiet and incisive argument than on emphatic assertion and remonstrance. He was in fact a most skilful debater with his pen, and few people fell into controversy with him without discovering the variety of his weapons and the deadly accuracy of his memory for facts.
When Stead resigned the editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890, Cook was appointed to succeed him, and instantly made his own mark as an editor. He carried on Stead’s liberal imperialism, his zeal for the ‘big navy’, and his admiration for Cecil Rhodes, whom the paper had been mainly instrumental in popularizing with the general public; but he also made his own quiet but very tenacious personality felt both in public affairs and in matters literary and artistic. In the autumn of 1892 the Pall Mall Gazette was sold to Mr. William Waldorf (afterwards Viscount) Astor, and in the absence of guarantees for the future policy of the paper Cook and his political staff immediately resigned. Within a month he was at work again preparing to found a new paper to fill the gap in liberal journalism, and at the end of January 1893 the Westminster Gazette, for which the capital had been found by Sir George Newnes [q.v.], was started under his editorship and carried on the tradition of the old Pall Mall, At the end of 1895 Cook was offered and accepted the editorship of the Daily News. For four years he conducted this paper with great success, but his objection to ‘little Englandism’ and the strong views that he held on imperial policy were unacceptable to some of its readers; and when the South African War broke out, his espousal of the war policy brought him into collision with a large section of the liberal party, and caused a sharp division of opinion among the proprietors of the Daily News. His editorship was ended abruptly in January 1901 by the sale of the paper to new proprietors, and for the next ten years he had to content himself with expounding his views as a leader-writer in the Daily Chronicle, which offered him this refuge after his departure from the Daily News. In these years he edited, in collaboration with Mr. Alexander Wedderburn, the monumental library edition of Ruskin’s Works in thirty-eight volumes (1903-1911), and followed it up with the standard biography of Ruskin (1911), which was entirely his own work. From his boyhood onwards he had been, if not a Ruskinian, a great admirer of Ruskin’s writings, and he devoted to his works as much industry and research as the most erudite scholar could apply to a classical text. He next undertook the Life of Florence Nightingale (1913), and two years later wrote a study of John Delane (Delane, of The Times, 1915), which has been described as ‘the best book ever written about a journalist’.
To those who knew him but little Cook seemed to be a reserved and rather silent man; but he was a warm friend, and a man of unshakable loyalty both to his own convictions and to those to whom he pledged his support. He took a high view of journalism as a profession, and claimed to exercise complete independence as an editor. Though a convinced liberal, he was fearless in criticism of his party when he thought the public interest required it, and was no respecter of persons, however eminent. For many years he was an intimate friend and counsellor of liberal politicians, and though his sympathies were with the liberal imperialist group, he remained on good terms with all sections of the party and contributed not a little to the liberal revival of 1906. His long experience of journalism and intimate knowledge of
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