Mary Cook
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Dame Mary Turner Cook, DBE (1863 - 1950) was the wife of Australian Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Cook.
When she married Joseph Cook in 1885, Mary Turner was 22 years old and had been a schoolteacher for eight years. Beginning as a pupil teacher at Chesterton Girls’ School, by 1885 she was an assistant mistress. Like Joseph Cook, she came from a Staffordshire mining family.
Mary Cook appears to have had a role in helping both her brothers and her husband to overcome their lack of education. Usually considered self-taught, Joseph Cook had the advantage of a skilled teacher in his wife. At their Lithgow home, Cook studied in the evenings, moving from writing and grammar to typing and shorthand, and then to book-keeping. He also began studying to become a Methodist minister.
By 1891, six years after their marriage and emigration to Australia, the couple had three small sons, and Joseph Cook had a seat in the New South Wales parliament. By 1901 they had six children, and he had won the Parramatta seat in federal parliament. For the 20 years he sat in the federal parliament, Joseph Cook spent much of his time in Melbourne, where parliament sat. Mary Cook managed their large household in Sydney, with nine children born between 1866 and 1906.
When Joseph Cook became Navy Minister in W. M. Hughes' government in 1917, the Cooks’ children were aged between 20 and 11 years. Mary Cook was by then very active in the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Red Cross Society, and in Cook’s electorate of Parramatta. She spoke at meetings there in the 1919 election campaign, and also deputised at ministerial events, such as the unveiling of an Honour Roll dedicated to the 1914 – 1918 servicemen and women in General Granville Ryrie’s Manly electorate.
During her husband's term as High Commissioner, Mary Cook played a key role for the Australian Red Cross Society, including representing the Society at a meeting of the International Red Cross Board of Governors in Paris in 1923.
The Cooks returned to Australia in 1927, enjoying an active retirement. On 24 September 1950, three years after her husband’s death, Mary Cook died, aged 87, at her Bellevue Hill home in Sydney.
[edit] Services
Mary Cook's services to Australia were acknowledged when she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1925.
