Anne Cooke (1946-2009)

Anne died very suddenly at her home in Cheltenham on 29 October 2009. She was not a Walsingham pilgrim and you probably will not have known her, but she had much to do with this website. She had been a colleague of the Honorary Archivist when they were both working in archive posts, and in retirement she continued to be an archive assistant, typing most of the Our Lady's Mirrors, press cuttings and other modern texts for inputting on the site, as well as doing other routine archive jobs. She was currently working on early copies of the Review, and, as she said, coming from a Welsh chapel background she was "learning all the time". She visited Walsingham several times to give hands-on help, and her love of driving was even more of a help: she always insisted on driving the 200 miles-each-way journey from Cheltenham herself without asking the archivist to share it. The website still has a long way to go, but the distance it has come since launch would have been much shorter without her. I will miss her greatly, and have been touched by the messages I have received via this site: Anne was a very good friend as well as colleague and having worked closely together for eleven years we always thought we made a great team, despite our advanced ages. "Her enthusiasm was written all over her face when she came with you to Walsingham: she was a great character." "She was so interested to see Walsingham in real life after having typed about it from dozens of Mirrors and press cuttings." "She told me that the only thing she was fed up with about Walsingham was having to write about the endless doings of Fr Colin Stephenson's cats which he related in the Reviews when he was Administrator!" [She was very much a dog person.] She would have been amazed to think that anyone even noticed her, and I am sad that it has taken her death for me to be able to acknowledge publicly her contribution to our archive facility: she would never have allowed me to do so in life. She was brought up in Penpergwm near Abergavenny, and is now buried at the Chapel there that she had known all her life. May she rest in peace.

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