Samuel Bennett Crooks

The Very Reverend Samuel Bennett Crooks, OBE,^[1] TD^[2] was Dean of Belfast^[3] in the last third of the 20th century.^[4]

He was born on 20 January 1920 into an ecclesiastical family (his father was the Rev. S. B. Crooks, Rector of St Stephen’s, Belfast)^[5] and educated at Down High School and Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in 1944^[6] and became Dean's Vicar at St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast until 1949, when he was appointed Rector of St John’s, Orangefield.^[7] Later he was Rural Dean of Hillsborough and Archdeacon of Dromore. In 1970 he became Dean of Belfast, a post he held for 15 years. He was made a Chaplain of the Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem in the Queen's Birthday Honours in February 1976.^[8] He died in 1986 aged 66 in a car crash on the Saintfield Road near Carryduff on his way to a meeting at Belfast cathedral.

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