“Our Man in Phuket” is the story of a child borne a few years before WW II, not a deprived childhood but no more than a working class family going through the motions of rearing three children whilst the eldest son was off doing his bit, all six years of it, in the longest battle of the war. The Battle of the North Atlantic. The family home was well within central orbit of the London blitz and later the so called buzz bombs, or in today’s parlance Nazi cruise missiles. The author was twice evacuated, which did nothing to enhance his education which was patchy to say the least, and completed his schooling to the recognised level leaving school a few days before his fifteenth birthday.
Here was a lad bright enough to be aware of his educational limitations, but prepared to recognise and address them.
Signed up for three years in the British army Corps of Royal Engineers just as soon as he was old enough, volunteered for everything that he could, along the way qualifying as a Royal Navy Diver to 180’, the limit of ‘air’ diving.
On demobilisation just after the Suez Canal crisis in 1956 he had two immediate objectives. To find work and experience in the UK marine underwater construction industry utilising his recently gained skill as a diver, and to obtain work overseas away from the poverty and austerity of an exhausted country that was just about flat broke after the war. Finding work overseas was very difficult at that time.
However both objectives were achieved within a relatively few short years. Over the next few decades he worked continuously on marine construction projects around the world and gained an enviable reputation for his expertise, problem solving, and bring difficult underwater construction tasks to a successful conclusions.
With a successful career behind him he retired at the relatively early age of 57 to the tropical island paradise of Phuket on the west coast of Thailand. As he had planned he took life very slowly, hung out with friends and took life very easy.
After a couple of years his commercial instincts started to stir as more to life was required than hanging out with the boys and swilling beer all day and then taking in the night life.
Within no time at all he had first one successful business up and running, followed by shortly after another, thereafter he kept his business activities, to low key land buying and selling, and the financing of other enterprising possibilities.
After a few years he was approached by the British Embassy in Bangkok and asked if he would consider taking on the onerous and responsible position of the British Honorary Consul for Phuket. This position he was proud to accept and held for eight years, until health decided he step aside. During his eight years he dealt with many situations and emergencies, for which he was honoured by Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
Once again with time on his hands and land that he could allocate to the project he built his own cricket ground, known island wide as the Alan Cooke Ground. Among the many sports played he shortly anticipates introducing baseball to the island.
Now as a final epitaph he has written his memoirs “Our Man in Phuket”, which is a British way of referring to our Honorary Consul, as well as a play on words by the famous British author Graham Greene “Our Man in Havana” a novel set in Cuba in 1958.