Coordinates: 51°33′40″N 0°42′29″W / 51.561°N 0.708°W / 51.561; -0.708

Cookham
Holy Trinity Church
Cookham  Cookham shown within Berkshire
Population	5,519 (2001)
OS grid reference	SU895855
Civil parish	Cookham
Unitary authority	Windsor and Maidenhead
Ceremonial county	Berkshire
Region	South East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	MAIDENHEAD
Postcode district	SL6
Dialling code	01628
Police	Thames Valley
Fire	Royal Berkshire
Ambulance	South Central
EU Parliament	South East England
UK Parliament	Maidenhead
List of places: UK • England • Berkshire

Cookham is a village and civil parish in the north-easternmost corner of Berkshire in England, on the River Thames, notable as the home of the artist Stanley Spencer. It lies 2 miles (3.2 km) north of Maidenhead close to the border with Buckinghamshire and forms part of the High Wycombe Urban Area. It has a population of 5,519,^[1] and was deemed Britain's second richest village by The Daily Telegraph in 2011.^[2]

Geography[link]

The area is made up of three villages:

• Cookham Village - the centre of the original village, with an attractive High Street which has changed little in appearance over the centuries.
• Cookham Dean - the most rural village.
• Cookham Rise - the bit in the middle that grew up around the village's railway station.

The village's neighbours are Maidenhead to the south, Bourne End to the north, Marlow and Bisham to the west and Taplow to the east.

The River Thames flows past Cookham on its way from Marlow to Taplow, and forms the boundary with Buckinghamshire. Several islands in the Thames belong to Cookham, such as Odney Island, Formosa Island and Sashes Island which separates Cookham Lock from Hedsor Water. The Lulle Brook and the White Brook are tributaries of the River Thames which flow through the parish.

A good amount of common land remains in the parish, such as Widbrook Common, Cookham Dean Common and Cock Marsh. Winter Hill affords excellent views over the Thames Valley.

Cookham is also home to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, based in Moor Hall. The John Lewis Partnership, one of the country's premier retailers, which runs John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarkets, has a residential training and holiday centre based at Odney.

Local government[link]

Cookham's municipal services are provided by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. Cookham also has a parish council made up of fifteen councillors assisted by a part time parish clerk and an assistant. The local health services are managed by the East Berkshire PCT (Primary Care Trust) - NHS Services.

The ancient parish of Cookham covered all of Maidenhead north of the London and Bath Road until this area's severance in 1894. There were several manors: Cookham, Lullebrook, Elington, Pinkneys, Great Bradley, Bullocks, White Place and Cannon Court.

History[link]

The area has been inhabited for thousands of years. There were several prehistoric burial mounds on Cock Marsh which were excavated in the 19th century and the largest stone axe ever found in Britain was one of 10,000 that has been dug up in nearby Furze Platt. The Roman Road called the Camlet Way is reckoned to have crossed the Thames at Sashes Island, now cut by Cookham Lock, on its way from St. Albans to Silchester. By the 8th century there was an Anglo-Saxon abbey in Cookham and one of the later abbesses was Cynethryth, widow of King Offa of Mercia. It became the centre of a power struggle between Mercia and Wessex. Later King Alfred made Sashes Island one of his burhs to help defend against Viking invaders. There was a royal palace here^[3] where the Witan met in 997.

It is recorded in the Domesday Book as Cocheham. The name may be from the Old English cōc + hām, meaning 'cook village', i.e. 'village noted for its cooks', although the first element may be derived from the Old English cōc(e) meaning 'hill'.^[4]

Although the earliest stone church building may date from 750 AD, the earliest identifiable part of the current Holy Trinity Church, Cookham is the Lady Chapel, which was built in the late 12th century on the site of the cell of a female hermit who lived next to the church and was paid a halfpenny a day by Henry II.^[5]

In the Middle Ages, most of Cookham was owned by Cirencester Abbey and the timber-framed 'Churchgate House' was apparently the Abbot's residence when in town. The Tarry Stone - still to be seen on the boundary wall of the Dower House - marked the extent of their lands.

The town people have resisted many attempts to enclose parts of the common land, including by the vicar, Rev. Thomas Whateley in 1799, Miss Isabella Fleming in 1869 (who wanted to stop nude bathing at Odney) and the Odney Estates in 1928 who wanted to enclose Odney Common.^[6] The Maidenhead and Cookham Commons Preservation committee was formed and raised £2,738 to buy the manorial rights and the commons which were then donated to the National Trust by 1937. These included Widbrook, Cockmarsh, Winter Hill, Cookham Dean Commons, Pinkneys Green Common and Maidenhead Thicket.^[7]

Transport[link]

Cookham Village is on the A4094 between Maidenhead and Bourne End. The A404(M) motorway from Maidenhead to High Wycombe is just to the west of Cookham Dean. Cookham railway station is at Cookham Rise, on the Marlow to Maidenhead branch line. There are two direct trains to and from London, Paddington during the morning and evening rush hour. The rest of the trains require a change at Maidenhead. An hourly bus service to Maidenhead, Bourne End and High Wycombe is provided by Arriva Shires & Essex six days a week; on Sundays Courtney Coaches run a service from the village to Maidenehead and Bracknell. The river has a long stretch of moorings above Cookham Bridge.

Attractions[link]

The village is a tourist destination as it is a convenient base for a number of walks along the Thames Path and across National Trust property. There are a good selection of restaurants and pubs in the High Street. The Stanley Spencer Gallery, based in the former Methodist chapel, also has a permanent exhibition of the artist's works.

Arts and literature[link]

Stanley Spencer's birthplace and home in Cookham

• Kenneth Grahame is said to have been inspired by the River Thames at Cookham to write The Wind in the Willows, as he lived at ‘The Mount’ in Cookham Dean as a child and returned to the village to write the book. Quarry Wood in Bisham, adjoining, is said to have been the original 'Wild Wood'. He later lived in Winkfield, Blewbury and Pangbourne.
• The English painter Sir Stanley Spencer was born here and most of his works depict villagers and village life in Cookham. His religious paintings usually had Cookham as their backdrop and a number of the landmarks seen in his canvases can still be seen in the village. A number of his works can be seen at the small Stanley Spencer Gallery in the centre of the village, close to where he lived. He also painted frescoes in at least one of the private houses in Cookham; however, they are not open to public viewing. He is buried in the churchyard in the village.
• In Noël Coward's play Hay Fever, retired actress Judith Bliss and her family live in Cookham.

Historic figures[link]

• Simon Alleyn, the supposed Singing Vicar of Bray
• Dr. William Battie d. 1776, the editor of Isocrates & founder of the University Scholarship at Cambridge
• Henry Dodwell 1641-1711, the scholar and theologian
• Kenneth Grahame, writer of the Wind in the Willows
• Nathaniel Hooke d. 1763, the historian
• Isaac Pocock 1782–1835, the artist and dramatist buried in Cookham
• Rev. Thomas Whateley 1797–1837, vicar, a leading promoter of the principles of the new Poor Law
• Guglielmo Marconi, wireless pioneer, lived on Whyteladyes Lane, and is reputed to have conducted experimental transmissions from there in 1897.
• Henry Thomas Ryall 1811-1867, the engraver
• Frank Sherwin, railway poster artist
• Sir Stanley Spencer, the artist
• Ralph Thompson, the animal artist and illustrator
• Frederick Walker ARA
• Admiral Sir George Young, proposer of the settlement of New South Wales

Celebrities[link]

Cookham is also home to celebrities such as:

• Businessman Gerald Ratner
• Comedian Chris Barrie
• Comedian Tim Brooke-Taylor
• TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson
• TV presenter and artist Timmy Mallett
• Singer Chris Rea
• Sports presenter, Jim Rosenthal
• 2003 Rugby World Cup winning coach Sir Clive Woodward
• Former London Irish and Ireland Rugby player Conor O'Shea
• Cartoonist, writer and creator of Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds
• Conference marketing guru Sara Taylor
• Queen's John Deacon
• Downton Abbey actress Jessica Brown Findlay
• Record producer Stuart Epps

In 2002, Timmy Mallett painted a series of portraits of well-known village residents as part of the celebrations for the Queen's Golden Jubilee. A selection of the portraits can be viewed at his web site [1].

Town twinning[link]

Cookham participates in town twinning to foster international relations.

• Saint-Benoît, Vienne, a village near Poitiers, France.

Trivia[link]

• In 2002, Cookham was at the centre of a row over the Department for Work and Pensions' description of the village's social profile as somewhat spoiled by the gin and jag brigade [2].

• In 1997, 1999 and 2006 Cookham had its own radio station Cookham Summer FM which took place at the railway station waiting room and included a large number of Cookham residents. [3].

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cookham

• Cookham's community website
• Cookham Parish Council
• Royal Berkshire History: Cookham
• Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead: Cookham
• Royal Berkshire History: Kenneth Grahame
• Cookham Dean Cricket Club

Sir Stanley Spencer (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Much of his work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land but in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent most of his life. He referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven." Fellow-villagers frequently stand in for their Gospel counterparts, lending Christian teachings an eerie immediacy.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Spencer's birthplace

Spencer was born and spent much of his life in Cookham in Berkshire. His father, William Spencer, was a music teacher. His younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979), was a painter of landscapes.

From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art at University College, London under Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg.^[1] So profound was his attachment to the village of his birth that most days he would take the train back home in time for tea. It even became his nickname: his fellow student C.R.W. Nevinson dubbed him Cookham, a name which Spencer himself took to using for a time.

War service[link]

After a long period of agonising whether or not to join up, in 1915 Spencer volunteered to serve with the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital (which later became Glenside).^[2] In 1916, the 24-year-old Spencer volunteered for service with the RAMC in Macedonia, and served with the 68th Field Ambulance unit. He subsequently volunteered to be transferred to the Berkshire Regiment. His survival of the devastation and torment that killed so many of his fellows indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death. Such preoccupations come through time and again in his religious works.

Towards the end of the war he was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to paint what became Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (now in the Imperial War Museum). It was visibly the consequence of Spencer's experience in the medical corps. A further major commission was to paint murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere dedicated to the war dead. The altarpiece depicts the Resurrection of the Soldiers.^[3]

In 1939, he went on a painting holiday at the suggestion of one of his friends, William Rothenstein, to Leonard Stanley in Gloucestershire. This holiday extended to two years; Stanley stayed at the White Hart Inn and created many of his important works in his room above the bar which he used as a studio, including 'Us in Gloucestershire' and 'The Wool Shop'.

Spencer's work as a war artist in the Second World War included his epic depiction of shipbuilding workers and their families at Port Glasgow on the Clyde. When the war ended he again took up, as did certain other British neo-romantic artists of the time, his visionary preoccupations — in Spencer's case with a sometimes apocalyptic tinge.

Marriages and later years[link]

In 1925, Spencer married Hilda Carline, then a student at the Slade and sister of the artist Richard Carline. A daughter, Shirin, was born in November of that year and a second daughter, Unity, in 1930. Spencer met the artist Patricia Preece in 1929 in Cookham. He became infatuated with her. Carline divorced Spencer in 1937. A week later he married Preece, who persuaded him to sign over his house to her; she, however, was a lesbian. She continued to live with her partner, Dorothy Hepworth, and though she frequently posed nude for her husband, she refused to consummate the marriage.^[4][5] When Spencer’s bizarre relationship with Preece finally fell apart (though she would never grant a divorce), he would visit Hilda, an arrangement that continued throughout the latter's subsequent mental breakdown. Hilda died from cancer in November 1950.^[6] The painful intricacies of this three-way relationship became the subject in 1996 of a play by the feminist playwright Pam Gems. Titled Stanley, it starred Anthony Sher, at the National Theatre and, later, on Broadway. Nominated for a Tony Award, it won the Olivier Best New Play award for 1997.

Spencer has been the subject of several biographies. The diminutive survivor of turmoil domestic and military is depicted in his later years as a "small man with twinkling eyes and shaggy grey hair, often wearing his pyjamas under his suit if it was cold." He became a "familiar sight, wandering the lanes of Cookham pushing the old pram in which he carried his canvas and easel."^[7] The pram, black and battered, has somehow survived, to become the most curious exhibit in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, which is dedicated to its owner's life and works.^{[citation needed]}

When a member of a British Council delegation to China not long before his death, Spencer is said to have introduced himself to Premier Zhou Enlai with the words, "Hello, I'm Stanley from Cookham."^{[citation needed]}

Spencer was knighted in 1959. He died of cancer at nearby Cliveden later that year.

Art[link]

Spencer has been described as an early modernist painter. His works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith. This is especially evident in the scenes that he envisioned and depicted in Cookham. Very evident in these too is the compassion that he felt for his fellow residents. His quirky romantic and sexual obsessions were also expressed within this home environment, but it is a mistake to regard him merely as some sort of quaint village innocent, inextricably tied to small-town England. His works originally provoked great shock and controversy. Nowadays, they still seem stylistic and experimental, whilst the nudes that arose through the futile relationship with Patricia Preece, such as the Leg of mutton nude, foreshadow some of the much later works of Lucian Freud, who expressed admiration for Spencer.

Spencer's early work is regarded as a synthesis of French Post-Impressionism, exemplified for instance by Paul Gauguin, plus early Italian painting typified by Giotto. This was a conscious choice, and Spencer was a key member of a group who called themselves the "Neo-Primitives." Allied with him were David Bomberg, William Roberts and other young contemporaries at the Slade.

His most ambitious work was the consequence of his Great War experiences: a cycle of 19 wall paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel (see above), which took five years to complete. During the Second World War, he was recruited by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to help in the war effort by recording activities that were taking place on the home front. Spencer chose to paint Clyde shipbuilders at work; when the war ended, he was in the process of planning a three-tier frieze 70 feet long representing their work.^[8]

Today, works such as The Resurrection, Cookham (1923–27), clearly set in the village and with actual residents taking part, rarely come up for auction, but when they do, they sell for immense sums. However, during Spencer's lifetime, it was his landscapes that were in demand. His dealer would press him to produce more, but Spencer expressed impatience, and professed that they were a chore. Nevertheless these landscapes of Cookham and its environs are still favored by many of the public.^[9]

Spencer made only three lithographs, all under the guidance of Henry Trivick.^[10]

Legacy[link]

In November 2006, the Imperial War Museum asked Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson to lead a campaign to fund restoration of Spencer's paintings of Port Glasgow's shipyards in wartime and certain other works. Ferguson, whose father, brother and an uncle were working in the yards while the artist was there, took up the challenge.^[11]

Spencer's house near Cookham Rise Primary school is still in private occupation. The village's Methodist Chapel where the artist worshipped is today the Stanley Spencer Gallery. It mounts two exhibitions a year and holds over 100 items of his work.

Memorial[link]

Spencer was cremated and his ashes laid in Cookham Churchyard, beside the path through to Bellrope Meadow. A discreet marble memorial marks the spot.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Stanley Spencer

• Stanley Spencer Gallery
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Sandham Memorial Chapel
• Art and Vision of Stanley Spencer
• Berkshire History biography
• Tate Gallery
• Artcyclopedia
• Love, Desire, Faith: Kendal exhibition, 2002
• 251 Spencer images
• Stanley at the National Portrait Gellery
• Stanley in Leonard Stanley Gloucestershire - Stonehouse History Group