Peter Cook was educated at St Peter’s College, Radley, a public school near Abingdon in Oxfordshire.

The following are extracts from a biography of Peter Cook by Harry Thompson.

Radley had strong links with overseas service which was why Peter had been sent there. In the words of one contemporary, Robin Gunn,’It was a very insular society, geared to producing characters of self-sufficient enough to govern the natives in distant, lonely, steamy parts of the globe.’

It goes without saying that Peter’s first year or so at Radley was utterly miserably unhappy. He intensely disliked the authority that the school exercised over him and those who applied it.
Peter’s first wife Wendy remembers that,’He did share with me how sometimes he would bang his head on the wall in despair in the night because he couldn’t breathe and I think he felt so abandoned. He really had such a lonely time.’

Peter Cook soon learnt to use humour as a form of self-defence.
‘I hated the first two years,’ he explained,’because of being bullied. And I was as cowardly as the next man, I didn’t enjoy getting beaten up and I disliked being away from home – that part was horrid. I could make fun of other people and therefore make the person who was about to bully me laugh instead.’ How many times, over the years, has the British comedy industry had cause to be grateful for generations of public school bullies.
Peter’s particular bete noire at Radley was the Senior Prefect, Ted Dexter, later to become England’s cricket captain. Even in later life, Peter was still ‘really angry’ at the treatment he had received at the hands of Dexter.

As well as having to endure the disciplinary attentions of Dexter and his sort, Peter found his pretty features attracted a different kind of unwelcome attention. Asked later by Michael Parkinson what his chief memory of Radley was, he replied: ‘Trying to avoid buggery. I’ve always wanted to look up one old acquaintance of mine – and I won’t mention his name, he’ll know perfectly well who he is, the dirty sod. I was a young quite pretty boy, number three in the charts and he was a prefect, and he came into my cubicle. I was reading a magazine and he sat on the bed and put his hand up the back of my pyjamas and started stroking my back. And he said, “Do you mind that, Cook?” And I said “Yes …” In fact I didn’t mind at all but I felt I ought to say yes, because my master had had me in at the beginning of term and had said, “As a young boy, Cook, you will discover that there are a lot of other boys at this school. And sometimes…. the other boys…..do things to the younger boys.”
Asked later by Playboy magazine how he had lost his virginity at the school, he retorted, ‘At what end?’

It fills me with immense pride to have been a state school teacher all my life. Peter Cook’s experiences are of course not thankfully universal but a good friend of mine who is a counsellor once told me that a statistically significant disproportionate number of his clients are from private boarding schools. We have had two fantastically talented boys from our school win scholarships to Eton in recent years and I’m absolutely certain that today’s improved culture serves to protect them from the customs and abuse that boys used to suffer. When invited to join in the acclaim that these public fellowships bring to the school, I become a silent conscientious objector. You see, in state schools, we teach anybody and everybody. We often find our most valued role is helping young people cope, at such an impressionable age, with all the things that Peter Cook was coming to terms with. We don’t fuck them up or indeed try to fuck them!

John Cleese, in a posthumous assessment, distilled the essence of Cook’s talent:

“Most of us have to grind away for something like six or seven hours – that’s what Chapman and I used to reckon – to produce three minutes of material, whereas for the first fifteen or twenty years of Peter’s professional life it took him exactly three minutes to produce three minutes of material …..”

Derek and Clive – Sir

January 5, 2014