The opening of Pembroke's Barrie Cooke Archive
The Barrie Cooke Archive opens today at Pembroke College.
Hundreds of poems and letters and 150 images reflect the creative friendships British-born expressionist artist and fisherman Barrie Cooke (1931-2014) developed beside Irish waters with many poets, writers and painters. Seamus Heaney, Pembroke alumnus Ted Hughes and John Montague, Cooke’s closest friends, provide the archive’s most extensive holdings.
English Fellow Dr Mark Wormald, said: ‘In 2013 a memory of fishing with Ted Hughes prompted Barrie Cooke to show me a cardboard box stuffed with the letters and poems at the heart of this collection. My colleagues and I are grateful to his family for giving Pembroke the chance to give it a permanent home in the College Archive, and we are delighted now to invite wider engagement with all its treasures.‘
Mark writes in more depth about the Barrie Cooke Archive on the Kit Smart Blog. This Slightly Foxed podcast describes the friendships at its heart.
Pembroke acquired the archive in 2020, thanks to a number of generous donations from major national funding bodies, alumni and friends of the College.
As well as providing an invaluable resource for researchers, via its online catalogue, the College is committed to ensuring that items are seen by the wider public. It plans to hold a number of public exhibitions and related events in the new Pembroke gallery, scheduled to open in 2023, as well as in partnership with interested institutions.
Researchers are welcome to consult Barrie Cooke Archive. Visits must be booked at least two weeks in advance. Opening hours for accessing the archives are Wednesday-Friday, 9.30-12.00 and 2.00-4.30. Please contact library@pem.cam.ac.uk to book an appointment. Please note the reading room is closed on Bank Holidays, for a week in September and for two weeks in December.
Hero image: From 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.