Olive Cook

Olive Muriel Cook was born on 20 February 1912, at 43 Garden Walk, Chesterton, Cambridge, the daughter of Arthur Hugh Cook, an assistant at Cambridge University Library, and his wife Kate (née Webb).[1] She won scholarships to The Perse School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she earned a bachelor's degree in modern languages.[1]

After Cambridge, Cook worked for the publishers Chatto and Windus as a typographer.[1] She moved to the National Gallery, where she was employed as supervisor of publications, under Kenneth Clark, and was involved in the removal of its collections to Blaenau Ffestiniog in anticipation of World War II.[1] During the war some of her watercolours were acquired for the Recording Britain project.[1][2]

After the war, she worked as a freelance writer and artist. In 1948 she wrote the guidebook Suffolk which were illustrated by Rowland Suddaby (part of the Vision of England series), and in 1953 the Cambridgeshire: Aspects of a County in 1953. She married the photographer Edwin Smith in 1954.[1][3] She published Breckland in 1956, in the Regional Books series.[3]

Cook often worked in conjunction with her husband, Edwin Smith, providing the text in books where he took the photographs, such as Leonard Russell's annual The Saturday Book from 1944 to the 1960s, the English Parish Churches series (1950), English Cottages and Farmhouses (1954), English Abbeys and Priories (1961) and The Wonders of Italy (1963).[3]

Cook was part of the campaign against the building of Stansted Airport, and wrote The Stansted Affair, published in 1967, with a foreword by John Betjeman, and reviewed as a "telling angry indictment".[1][4]

Cook shared a house on Church Row in Hampstead with fellow artist Malvina Cheek in the late 1940s.[5] In 1954, Cook married the photographer Edwin Smith.[3] In 1962, they moved to Saffron Walden, firstly to a tall house on the corner of Audley Road and East Street, and later into the Coach House at the Vineyards on Windmill Hill.[4]

Cook died of cancer on 2 May 2002 at Saffron Walden Community Hospital, Saffron Walden.[1] The papers of Cook and her husband were donated to Newnham College.[6]

Collected information about Olive Cook on The Golden Fleece website.