Edward Tyas Cook

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Sir Edward Tyas Cook (12 May 1857 – 30 September 1919), was an English journalist, biographer, and man of letters. He was born at Brighton and died at South Stoke, Goring.

He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford. Whilst at Oxford he was President of the Union and of the Palmerston Club. On coming to London as secretary for the extension of university teaching, he became a contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of John Morley. He was later assistant editor under W. T. Stead, and editor from 1890 till 1892, when the paper passed into the hands of W. W. Astor and changed its politics. Cook then resigned, but a year later became first editor of the newly founded liberal evening paper, the Westminster Gazette. In 1896 he gave this up to take the editorship of the Daily News, which he held till 1901. During World War I, conjointly with Sir Frank Swettenham, he directed the official Press Bureau. He was knighted in 1912, and created Knight Commander (KBE) in 1917 on the inauguration of the Order of the British Empire.

Cook loved art and gardening. He published Studies in Ruskin (1891), edited the works of Ruskin (1903–1907), and wrote the authoritative Life of Ruskin (1912), also producing handbooks to the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, and to the Greek and Roman antiquities in the British Museum. His book on The Rights and Wrongs of the Transvaal War ran into several editions, and he wrote Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) and Delane of the Times (1915), as well as two volumes of Literary Recollections (1918 and 1919).