Elizabeth Cook obituary

Elizabeth Cook, who has died aged 81, was a music teacher of particular energy, intelligence and empathy. As head of music at Tapton secondary school, in Sheffield, she supported and shaped rich cultural lives of generations of students through inspired teaching, the direction of many in-school performing groups, and by her example of a sympathetic and approachable presence, devoted to excellence. I was her student between 1977 and 1983 and, like many others, can say that she changed my life.

Born in Bolton to Norman Weir, a Royal Navy sailor then telephone engineer, and Ada (nee Keys), Elizabeth attended Hindley and Abram grammar school in Wigan. Her talent as a pianist grew evident, and in 1954 her parents bought and ran a grocer’s shop in Bolton to help fund her studies. After taking O-levels a year early, she won a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music (now the Royal Northern College of Music).

Although she was accomplished enough to give public piano recitals, by the early 1960s she had dedicated herself to teaching in schools. It was while working in her first teaching post, at Wintringham grammar school in Grimsby, that she was introduced to Fred Cook, an English literature academic. They married in 1962 and their daughter, Imogen, was born two years later.

In 1968 they moved to Sheffield, where Fred became head of department at Sheffield College of Education (later part of Sheffield Polytechnic, now Sheffield Hallam University). In 1970 Elizabeth took a job teaching music at Tapton, where she remained for nearly two decades until she retired in 1989.

Her energy and imagination made an immense impact. She started and directed many performing groups, including choirs, a madrigal group (a magnet for foppish youth), a wind band, a string orchestra and a full orchestra as well as staging operettas and musicals. In all of these, excellence was somehow made compatible with enjoyment for the participants; the slight and likable, but always authoritative, figure at the front held everything together. Outside school, she was a popular piano teacher, which continued to keep her busy in retirement. In 1999 she completed a master’s degree for music teachers.

She had time for individuals to an astonishing degree, and the regular school concerts would include a fifth-former hammering through Bartók, a Mozart oboe concerto or even less obviously crowd-pleasing fare. If it was excellent, she rightly believed, people would enjoy it.

She spent many hours with me, when I was 13 and covering acres of music paper with ideas for 12-tone string quartets, sympathetic, interested, and constructive in what she had to say. A modest person herself, she would have been astonished to hear of the huge impact she made on the lives of hundreds of students.

Fred died in 2018. She is survived by Imogen, her grandson, Thomas, and her brother, Norman.