Pembroke Acquires Barrie Cooke Archive and Collection

Pembroke is delighted to announce that it has acquired the archive of British-born Irish expressionist painter Barrie Cooke (1931-2014).

The archive consists of papers, poems and letters sent to him by a range of leading writers and artists, from across Britain, Ireland, continental Europe and the United States. The most important of these papers are by two of his closest friends, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) and Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998; Pembroke 1951). Cooke produced 150 paintings, drawings and prints in response to his friends’ work, only a handful of which have ever been exhibited or published.

Pembroke Fellow Dr Mark Wormald, who has closely studied how central Ted Hughes’ love of fishing was to his approach to poetry and life, first came across mention of Barrie Cooke in Hughes’s unpublished fishing diaries in the British Library.

In 2012, Mark travelled to Ireland to visit Barrie Cooke at his home and studio in County Sligo to talk to him about the many fishing trips he had made with Ted Hughes and Hughes’s son Nicholas. A year later, when Cooke was in frail health and living closer to his family in County Kilkenny, Mark read him a fishing diary entry Hughes had written over thirty years before about catching his first Irish salmon, with Cooke at his side.  Cooke remembered it vividly, and then asked Mark whether he’d care to see a large cardboard box jammed full of letters and poems, which his daughters had feared lost.

Hughes and Cooke were close friends for almost forty years, with Hughes often travelling to stay with Cooke in County Kilkenny and County Sligo and to fish the waters of the River Nore, Mulcahir, Erriff, Fergus and Unshin, the pike loughs of County Clare and Limerick – Lough Gur above all -- and the great limestone lakes of Ireland’s west – Arrow, Key, Ree, Allen, for pike, trout and salmon. Cooke also fished with Hughes in  Devon, on the Rivers Torridge and Dart; Heaney too remembered a day fishing with Hughes in Devon, and wrote a tender poem, ‘Casting and Gathering’, for Hughes’s sixtieth birthday, which includes the memorable line: ‘You are everything you feel beside the river.” That poem, like many others of Heaney in the archive, hovers between his own memories of the beloved river of his boyhood, the Moyola, and his friends’ serious passion for the art. ‘For both men,’ he would write, ‘the rod tip is like a straw in the cosmic wind’.

It seems it was not only the fishing that provided Hughes with ideas. The friendship of Cooke, a meeting of minds, interests and art, also stimulated his work. Cooke is credited as the inspiration behind Hughes’ poem ‘The Great Irish Pike’, about Lough Gur, published in 1982. These papers reveal that their creative collaboration went back far earlier, to the early 1960s.

Cooke produced charcoal drawings, watercolours, monotypes and lithographs of Hughes’ and Heaney’s poetry throughout their lengthy friendship. A portrait he painted of Ted Hughes hangs in the National Gallery.

Pembroke is already the home to a suite of Cooke’s and Hughes’ lithographs of “The Great Irish Pike”, generously donated by Carol Hughes, Ted’s widow in 2012. The College has since built a remarkable collection of Hughes’ manuscripts, books, fishing tackle, a plaster cast of a pike, as well as his writing desk and chair.

The opportunity to add Ted Hughes’ correspondence with Cooke – happily rediscovered during that visit in 2013 - to this collection was too great to pass up. But in addition to the vividness and intimacy of those letters, a part of their value in the way they contribute to the network of private, mutually sustaining artistic friendships of which Cooke was the genial centre. 

The College would like to put on record its thanks to the Arts Council England/V+A Purchase Grant Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), Art Fund, the Friends of the National Libraries, Old Possum’s Practical Trust and the Duke of Devonshire’s Charitable Trust, as well as several dozen friends and alumni of Pembroke. Their generous financial support enabled Pembroke to raise the necessary funds to complete the purchase just after lockdown at the end of March.

Earlier this summer the Cambridge Colleges’ Conservation Consortium undertook conservation and preservation work on the collection. The College archivist is currently in the process of cataloguing the collection, a process which should be completed early next year.

A further announcement will follow when they are available for researchers to study.

Pembroke also intends to work with the Estates of the writers and artists represented in the archive and collection to make it available as appropriate to a broader audience. The College is currently in the middle of a redevelopment project, which will see it opening a gallery in Trumpington Street in 2022. The intention is that items from the archive will go on public display there in special exhibitions, and it is hoped that some of these exhibitions will tour to partner institutions, in Cambridge, Ireland and the United States.

For a richly illustrated feature and video prepared by the University’s Office of Communications, read BIG FISH.

Image credits

Hero image: Two poems by Seamus Heaney, inscribed in the guest book of Barrie Cooke and Jean Valentine, 23 August 1990. Credit: The Heaney Estate. Photograph by Mark Wormald

1. Barrie Cooke, ‘Sweeney flying from the battle’ (Watercolour and pencil, 1983) for Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (1984). Credit: The Estate of Barrie Cooke. Photograph by the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium.

2. Ted Hughes and Barrie Cooke afloat, pike fishing in Ireland, 1978/9. Credit: Aoine Landweer-Cooke.

3. Barrie Cooke, ‘Crow II’ (Charcoal drawing, 1972) for the cover sleeve of Ted Hughes’ recording of Crow for Claddagh Records. Credit: The Estate of Barrie Cooke. Photograph by the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium.

4. Ted Hughes cartoon of the Morrigu eating the Dagda, plus marginal notes and poem ‘Trenchford on Dartmoor’ (1990–92), in the guest book of Barrie Cooke and Jean Valentine. Also poems inscribed by Dennis O’Driscoll and Julie O’Callaghan. Credit: The Estates of Ted Hughes and Dennis O’Driscoll and of Julie O’Callaghan. Photograph by Mark Wormald

5. Barrie Cooke ‘Pike Fishing II’ (Charcoal drawing, 1980). Credit: The Estate of Barrie Cooke. Photograph by the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium.