Anthony Cooke was born in Hampstead, London, in 1938. He attended Harrow County School until he was 16. After completing his O levels he joined the Meteorological Office where he worked as a meteorologist. In 1956, Cooke was called up for National Service and joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), becoming a senior aircraftman immediately after training due to his career as a meteorologist. After spending a year working on Upper Air Soundings with a Balloon Unit in Bedford, Cooke volunteered to go to Christmas Island for Operation Grapple, where he worked on upper air meteorological soundings for the nuclear tests. After his National Service, Cooke retrained as an industrial chemist, which enabled him to travel to more than 80 countries. After retiring, Cooke became a renowned mouse and guinea pig breeder and shower, winning multiple awards and writing a book entitled Exhibition and Pet Mice (1977). He currently lives in Petersfield, Hampshire, with his wife Gill. They have two children and four grandchildren.
Interview extracts
Description
Born in 1938, Anthony Cooke joined the RAF after his National Service. He volunteered to travel to Christmas Island to take part in Operation Grapple. In this clip he describes his reaction to hearing the countdown to a nuclear detonation, then feeling the blast and seeing the mushroom cloud. Cooke also spent time on Malden Island as part of the test series. He later travelled through his work with a firm linked to Imperial Chemicals Industries, including trips to the USSR.
This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Anthony Cooke was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Fiona Bowler. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.
Transcript
… Christmas Island for the test itself. That was, I say, the end of April. I worked the night before, so I should have been going to bed round about the time that everyone else was sort of getting excited, but they wouldn’t let me go to bed in case there were any issues. If they had to evacuate they wanted to remove people quickly, so I had to stay awake until afterwards. And we did the countdown, sort of ten, nine, eight, da-da-da-dum, and then the, the heat on your back, and then the sight, and then eventually the mushroom. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it’s… you only ever want to see that once, thank you very much. Scary, scary. Then I went to bed.
And it was scary at the time watching it, you thought this is scary?
Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean the power involved. I mean this was ten times anything that was dropped on Japan.
[ends at 0:01:02]
