In 1937 he produced a Sonata for Two Pianos commissioned by Adolph Hollis and

In 1937 he produced a Sonata for Two Pianos commissioned by Adolph Hollis and Franz Reizenstein, heard at the Wigmore Hall Cooke had known Reizenstein in Berlin. Cooke made his first appearance at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert on 30 August 1934, when Sir Henry Wood presented his Concert Overture No 1, which had come third in a competition run by the Daily Express. Throughout the Thirties he enjoyed performances of his latest works, largely of music for small combinations, although in 1936 Havergal Brian, writing in Musical Opinion, hailed Cooke’s early short cantata Holderneth as “his finest work” at the time. From 1929, again influenced by Dent, he went to Berlin, where he remained for three years. In 1932 Arnold Cooke succeeded another British Hindemith pupil, Walter Leigh, as musical director at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, writing music for Peer Gynt and The Merchant of Venice, but soon moving to Manchester as Professor of Composition and Harmony at the Royal Manchester College of Music (1933-38). His education was a typical middle-class inter-war one of prep school, Repton and Cambridge.

He went up to Gonville and Caius College in 1925, at first to read History, but then moving on to Music, under the influence of Edward J Dent, then newly appointed as Professor of Music. On his return to England, he went on to build a national reputation as a composer and over the 40 years following the Second World War, when he was at his most prolific, wrote in almost all forms.
The second of three brothers, Arnold Cooke came from a comfortable middle-class family at Gomersal, near Leeds, his father a director of a company manufacturing carpets Arnold was influenced by his violin-playing grandfather. Arnold Atkinson Cooke, composer: born Gomersal, Yorkshire 4 November 1906; Director, Festival Theatre, Cambridge 1932; Professor of Harmony, Counterpoint and Composition, Royal Manchester College of Music 1933-38; Professor of Harmony, Counterpoint and Composition, Trinity College of Music, London 1947-78; died Five Oak Green, Kent 13 August 2005. I was very close to him in the All Party Chemical Industry Group, which he served as vice-chairman, 1982-90. Following boundary changes, from 1983 he continued as MP for the newly created seat of Halton; after his retirement in 1997, away from Westminster, his health improved.A special interest throughout his parliamentary career had been the Ordnance Survey and he was an expert on the history of maps and mapping.Tam Dalyell.

Arnold Cooke was one of the last British musicians to study with Paul Hindemith at the Berlin Hochschule f?usik in Berlin before the Nazi rise to power. He devoted his energies to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, of which he became a member of the executive, 1979-97, and to the All Party Energy Efficiency Group. Among his causes were adult literacy programmes and the establishment of polytechnics He was especially interested in teacher training. I admired him because one felt that here was a minister who was prepared to take endless trouble, to use modern parlance, on “less than sexy” educational subjects.After Labour’s defeat in 1979, Oakes was the opposition spokesman on the environment, but withdrew from the front bench, becoming somewhat disillusioned about the bitter controversies in the Labour Party at the time. He was the first minister in any British government to take recycling and waste management seriously and in this he was 10 years or more before his time.Rightly, Oakes gained promotion in 1976 to the position of Minister of State for Education and Science. He was the obvious choice for the Widnes seat when his friend James MacColl died, causing a by-election in September 1971. In 1974 Oakes naturally went onto the government front bench as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of the Environment, where the press dubbed him “Minister for Waste”.

This was at a time when the cause of the treatment of prisoners was less than fashionable; characteristically, Oakes interested himself in matters where there were few or no votes to be had.In 1970, Oakes lost Bolton West, and with Labour in opposition became a spokesman on local government and the environment. I believe that it was partly due to Oakes’s consistent pressure that selected long-term prisoners were sent to hostels and had arrangements made for them to work for outside employers. As a solicitor, he had become deeply concerned about clients in prison who were about to be released and what society was doing to facilitate their return to normal life. The winner was Frank Taylor with 9,533, with the Liberal taking 6,447, forcing Oakes into third place with a total of 5,980. However, such was his performance in the face of adverse conditions for the Labour Party that he was given the marginal seat of Bolton West where in 1964 he ousted the sitting MP, the Liberal Arthur Holt, who had held the constituency since 1951.My first clear recollection of Oakes was as a new member asking for the re-establishment of centres for prisoners similar to those set up by the National Assistance Board.

Combining council work and the articles involved, he was admitted as a solicitor in 1956. Such was the regard that he was held locally that he became Mayor of Widnes in 1964-65, which he combined with being the new MP for Bolton West.He had been a candidate in 1959 in Bebbington, which he lost with 33,705 votes going to the Conservative and Oakes taking 23,884. This was considered so creditable a performance that he was chosen as the Labour standard-bearer in the difficult Manchester Moss Side by-election of 1961. This was not because he was ineffective, but because he genuinely believed in achieving his object without fuss and bother. He was one of comparatively few politicians who was not greatly concerned to claim credit for himself.Gordon Oakes was born in 1931 into a professional family and went to Wade Deacon Grammar School in Widnes and Liverpool University, where he gained a degree in English in 1952, the same year when, at the age of 21, he was elected to Widnes Council. His approach to political life was that of the Mayor of Widnes and the responsible councillor he had once been.Unlike many politicians, Oakes’s main concern was to search for practical solutions to problems.