COOK, Robert Jewel (1833-1916) — London
Printer, lithographer and photographer; mapmaker. Agents for the Ordnance Survey. Produced England & Wales 1866; his own London railway travelling made easy 1870; G. W. Hemans, Railway map of Ireland 1872; compiled and lithographed Railway map of the United States of America 1872; Kington & Eardisley Railway : extension to New Radnor. Plans & sections 1873; Brecon and Merthyr-Tydfil Junction Railway 1873; Worcester & Aberystwith Junction Railway : plans and sections 1873; Map shewing routes proposed for new railway to High Wycombe 1874, and numerous similar railway maps; Plan shewing the Gorwydd Colliery, Glamorganshire 1874; Plan showing the Fawler Iron Ore property, Oxfordshire 1874; H. F. Woolfield Harding, British lighthouse chart of general coast lights 1874; Dwellings for the labouring classes : plan showing plots in Great Eastern Street 1881, for the Metropolitan Board of Works; Hampstead Heath 1885, for the Metropolitan Board of Works; railway maps of the United States; Hertfordshire 1888; James Livesey & Son, The railway and mineral map of Peru & Bolivia 1889; Railway map of part of South America, shewing the Argentine Republic 1890; Royal Exchange and Waterloo Railway 1891; two maps for Henry Lawrence Cripps, “The position of the London water companies” 1892; as “Cook, Hammond & Waud”, Plan of Colehill House Estate, at the south end of Fulham Palace Road 1892; Housing of the working classes. Boundary Street, Bethnal Green 1894, for London County Council; The Cedars Estate West Kensington 1896; Andrew Murray, Plan of Spitalfields Market 1900; The Metropolitan Electric Tramways Limited 1903; Frank Sumner, General plan of the City of London 1914.
Cook was born 17 Nov 1833 in Bethnal Green, the son of Robert Cook (1801-1870), a clerk in the London Docks, later a tobacconist, and his wife Eliza Tarrant (1805-1884), who married at St. John Hackney 25 Dec 1832. Baptised Robert Jewell Cook 1 Mar 1835 St. Matthew, Bethnal Green. He later preferred the spelling Jewel. He was already working as a lithographic artist at the age of eighteen in 1851, and was employed as a draughtsman by the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in 1855. He married Mary Ann Barnaby (1832-1909), with whom he had a number of children, at St. Bride Fleet Street 6 Nov 1858. In 1861, he was recorded as working in the Survey Department of the Inclosure Commissioners. His partnership with William Henry Cressy Hammond, founded at about this time, specialised in printing the plans required for Parliamentary Bills relating to railway building. By 1871, now recorded as a survey lithographer, he was employing eight people, a figure which had increased to twenty by 1881. A freemason, initiated at the Pattison Lodge at Plumstead 5 Dec 1872, Cook was appointed a provincial grand officer in 1890. Traded in parallel as “Cook, Hammond & Waud” until that partnership was ended in 1903. Cook retired in 1903 at the age of seventy, but the firm survived, latterly as CHK (incorporating the businesses of Cook, Hammond and Charles Frederick Kell — see BME 2011) on into recent times. Cook died at his home at 13 Vanbrugh Park, Blackheath, aged eighty-two, on 16 Mar 1916 and was buried at Charlton Cemetery 21 Mar 1916. The value of his estate was reported as £17,426.0s.7d, with net personalty £16,676 (Woolwich Gazette, 30 May 1916). Probate was granted to his sons and successors, Frederic William Cook (1859-1821), surveyor, Herbert Cook (1862?-1934), lithographer, and James Robert Cook (1870-1935), also a lithographer.
268 High Street, Poplar (home) — 1841-1851
16 Sussex Road, Upper Holloway (home) — 1861
13 Wood Street, Woolwich (home) — 1871-1872
Broadway, Westminster — 1872-1896
— and 29 Charing Cross — 1874
1 Wellington Road, Charlton (home) — 1881-1891
— and 6a Great St. Thomas Apostle — 1892-1900
2 & 3 Tothill Street — 1900-1911
47 & 49 Tothill Street — 1914-1916
Heathcote, 13 Vanbrugh Park, Blackheath (home) — 1901-1916
BNA. Census 1841-1911. Hyde. LG. LHD. LMA. Tooley.