Liz’s choice of circuit may have been determined by the fact Elizabeth (Liz) Cooke that she had by this time married James, and bought a small (née Greenwood, 1964) house in Charlbury. A decade later, in 1979, they found Tulip Tree House in Great Tew, in need of the care and attention which it would receive in abundance over the next forty-five There are some people whose years. When their son Oliver (Ollie) was born the following year, name alone evokes the idea of Liz decided to leave the Bar and devote herself to her son, her Somerville – women like Emily house and her garden. This decision was to have far-reaching Penrose, Dorothy Hodgkin and consequences for Somerville. Janet Vaughan. Our dear friend Liz had always kept in touch with her Somerville friends, and it Liz Cooke would have hated the was those friends, aided and abetted by Daphne Park, who had suggestion that she should be the foresight in 1987 to propose Liz as secretary of the current included among such distinguished College appeal. The briefing note prepared for Daphne Park by company, but it is nonetheless true. one of Liz’s friends captures a glimpse of Liz at that time, and To the thousands of Somervillians the high hopes placed on retaining her: ‘She is by temperament whom Liz brought back to this ELIZABETH COOKE high-powered, by profession a barrister. The best approach College after they graduated, Liz would be to ask her to lunch saying casually you may be able in a very real sense was Somerville: a living embodiment of to offer something to fill in her time, without saying quite their College’s intelligence, kindness, good taste and often what. Then once you have her there and can exercise your fatal mischievous joy in life. charm, slowly reveal the full horror of what you have in mind!’ Of course, to her family and closest friends, Liz was more than Of course, for Liz, working at Somerville was never really a job just her life at Somerville. They knew her also as a devoted and far from being onerous. It was a calling, and one that gave mother and grandmother, a devotee of old films and the her immense pleasure. On receiving Daphne’s offer, Liz replied singer Meatloaf, a collector of shells and chinaware, a brilliant simply: ‘If I can be of use to Somerville, I shall be delighted.’ gardener, a fixture of village life in her beloved Great Tew and a lover of the sea, who swam in it fearlessly whenever she So began a new era for Somerville and its alumni community. could. It is not easy to say all there is to be said about a woman It was not the easiest of starts, however. When, in 1993, who meant so much to so many. As one contributor to Liz’s Ollie went to Radley as a boarder, Liz was able to take on the condolence book noted, Liz was the very epitome of all that additional role of Secretary to the ASM, which later became Somerville stands for – doing the right thing and doing the the Somerville Association. Liz’s appointment coincided more thing right. or less perfectly with the Governing Body’s announcement of their decision to open the college to men – a decision that had Born one month before the end of the second world war, been taken to a tight timetable, with no prior consultation of Liz Greenwood, spent her early years at the family home in either Somerville’s student body or its alumnae. Somervillians Finchley, North London, where her father was a teacher at the have always prided themselves on plain speaking, and on this Friern Barnet Grammar School. When Liz was seven, the family occasion there was some very plain speaking indeed. While moved to Cambridge to live with Liz’s grandmother. A few the Principal and Fellows were kept busy attempting to pacify years later, the family moved to King’s Lynn. Liz attended the their revolting students, and with the legal and administrative convent in nearby Swaffham and, alongside her brother John, complications of their decision, Liz, who had been kept in the spent the school holidays in their grandmother’s new home in dark as much as everyone else about the decision, was left Hunstanton. It was here, swimming up and down the shoreline almost single-handedly to confront the wrath of the alumnae. in the cold North Sea waters of the Wash, that Liz acquired her She was helped in the difficult task of reconciling the Somerville lifelong love of the sea. alumnae by the fact that she herself was a Somervillian through Liz was always academically gifted. Public exam success at and through. So many of the qualities which we admire, and like the convent in Swaffham led to a scholarship at Somerville, to to flatter ourselves that we possess, were hers in abundance. read History. It was at Oxford that Liz met her future husband Liz was clever, principled, quirky, unsentimental, generous, James Cooke and, as her brother John recalls, graduated from hospitable, and very brave. Her forthrightness was cloaked being the kind of teenager whose favourite food was chips with plenty of vinegar to someone who loved dinner parties and the finer things in life. John recalls that it was during her student days at Somerville that he first saw the woman she would ultimately become: glamorous, impossibly sophisticated, and completely at home in the place she loved for the rest of her days. Upon graduating, Liz left Oxford for London. She had decided to become a lawyer and was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1966, supported by a reference from Barbara Craig who noted her ‘sense of irony and humanity’. In London she lived in an elegant flat in West Kensington and was called to the Bar in 1969. She joined the Chambers at 1 King’s Bench Walk, (L-R) SHIRLEY WILLIAMS MP, DR FRANK PROCHASKA, LIZ AND deciding to practise as a criminal lawyer on the Midland Circuit. CO-SECRETARY OF THE SOMERVILLE ASSOCIATION, LISA GYGAX 40