Public historian Tim Cook told compelling stories about Canada’s soldiers

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Tim Cook, the Canadian War Museum’s chief historian, liked to walk when he talked. At work, his co-workers and visitors often found themselves discussing business during a wander through the museum’s exhibits.

His colleague Michael Petrou, historian of veterans’ experience at the museum, says, “The advice he gave me … was to walk through the exhibitions. We almost never had a sit-down meeting. We might walk along the Ottawa River on a nice day, but we often walked through the galleries. He would also do that on his own. … He wanted to see how the public was engaging.”

Author of 18 respected books on Canada’s military past (a 19th is due out next year), Dr. Cook brought his passion for storytelling to the museum in 2002, three years before it officially opened, adding his deft touch to the gallery that focused on the country’s participation in the South African (Boer) War and the First World War.

Labelling himself “a public historian,” he devoted his career to sharing the story of Canada’s wartime soldiers and civilians on both the printed page and inside the concrete labyrinth of the bunkerlike museum. In 2020, he was named the museum’s chief historian and director of research.

In a podcast produced earlier this year, Dr. Cook told journalist Paul Wells, “I believe in the importance of telling these stories and I know Canadians want them,” adding later, “This is our history and it’s up to us to tell it.”

Dr. Cook died on Oct. 26 after a brief recurrence of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that had first been diagnosed in 2012. He was two weeks from his 54th birthday and his sudden death shocked his friends and colleagues. In late September, he had written to his friend, historian Charlotte Gray, that his “health had been dodgy of late” but he planned “to keep on keeping on.”

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Although Dr. Cook served part-time as an adjunct research professor at Carleton University for 13 years, his 24-year career at the war museum allowed him to reach beyond the confines of academic journals and textbooks. Nick Garrison, his book editor for the past five years at Penguin Canada’s Allen Lane imprint, marvels at how Dr. Cook brought his human subjects to life.

“His eye and ear for detail allow personality to emerge,” Mr. Garrison says. “He could see in a stack of letters from 1916 a human being that was just like a person who would emerge from a novel.”

Penguin Canada will publish his final book, The Unquiet Western Front, next year.

While his colleagues remember Dr. Cook as a kind and generous mentor with the ability to listen as well as teach, they also marvel at the depth of his research. His books typically offered scores of pages of end notes, footnotes and bibliographic references.

“He did it [his research] all himself,” Dr. Petrou recalls. He marvels at Dr. Cook’s “monastic” hours that saw him writing from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning before he started his family and work routine. “He had a workmanlike, driven approach … perhaps in part because of the health challenges he was facing.”

Timothy Raleigh Brown Cook was born Nov. 10, 1971, in Kingston, at the end of his parents’ undergraduate years at Queen’s University. Months later, his breadwinner mother, Sharon Cook (née Killin), started teaching high-school history classes in Ottawa while his graduate-student father, Terry Cook, took care of household chores before disappearing into the stacks of the Public Archives of Canada each evening.

“Our household was one that respected scholarship, particularly historical writing and analysis,” says his mother, Dr. Sharon Cook, now professor emerita at University of Ottawa who returned to graduate school in 1987 after her sons, Tim and Graham, reached high school. Their father went on to become a renowned archivist who remained focused on his family, motorcycles and rock ‘n’ roll music amidst his international acclaim.

Tim showed little inclination toward academics initially, preferring football and hockey to studying. But a trip to First World War battlefields as a teenager sparked an interest in Canadian history. His mother remembers, “He was astonished at the young ages of the fallen soldiers and could not tear himself away from the headstones. I remember the rest of us stood waiting for him as he wandered through the cemeteries.”

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His interest in Canadian history blossomed at Trent University and led him to a Master of History degree in war studies at Kingston’s Royal Military College in 1996. Upon graduation, he took a job as an archivist at the Public Archives of Canada in Ottawa, specializing in the military collections. His day job spread into his free hours as he delved into diaries letters, and official records to research his first book, No Place to Run, about Canadian soldiers’ experiences with gas warfare during the First World War, published in 1999. The book won the C.P. Stacey Award for the best Canadian military book of the year. He followed it with a new title every couple of years for the rest of his life.

During this time he met archivist Sarah Klotz, who is now the director of the Government Archives Division at Library and Archives Canada. They married in 2003.

The archives also connected him to Serge Durflinger, a historian at the Canadian War Museum, who convinced him to apply for a job as the museum’s specialist in Canada’s turn of the 20th-century wars. At the age of 31, two years before he earned his doctorate from the Australian Defence Force Academy, he began sharing his insights into Canada’s military stories in three-dimensions as well as sound and touch.

Dr. Durflinger says that “he went from being a pen-and-paper guy to being a collections-and-artifact guy. … Tim fit into the team instantly and was adored instantly. He worked like a Trojan … and combined his intellect and body of knowledge with an easy character. He had a softness that was disarming.”

Patrons of the war museum may not have recognized Dr. Cook’s personal hand in their visitor experience, but his books clearly carried his personal stamp. As an author, he would get out of the way to let his characters tell their stories.

“Tim wrote a lot about ordinary soldiers … and the culture of the trenches,” Ms. Gray says. “He understood their experiences.”

Anthony Wilson-Smith, president and CEO of Historica, the organization devoted to sharing Canadian history through online portals and televised historical minutes, says, “Tim has taken up the torch from Jack Granatstein and Desmond Morton as a new generation’s pre-eminent voice in the field. … He made complex subjects understandable. … He had a common touch.”

“Tim is irreplaceable,” is how his literary agent of 19 years, Rick Broadhead, sums up his friend’s contribution to Canadian publishing.

Dr. Cook’s touch extended to all aspects of his life. His friends, neighbours and sports teammates all remark on his generosity and kindness. And he took the lessons learned from his father to heart, always making time for family amid a busy schedule.

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He and his younger brother, Graham, also inherited their family’s sense of humour, taking it to outrageous levels after the death of their father from pancreatic cancer in 2014. They honoured his love of rock ‘n’ roll by cremating him in a favourite ZZ Top T-shirt and acknowledged his aversion to unnecessary expense by collecting his remains in tin coffee cans instead of a $600 urn.

When Dr. Cook’s first cancer diagnosis in 2012 ended his goalie duties for his own hockey team, he took up coaching for his daughters’ team. Graham Cook, a lawyer with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, remembers him as an athlete with “a body of steel” who excelled at rugby at Trent University.

“He was a warrior, through and through. … He had his greatest glory on the rugby field. … He’d come over after [a game], drenched in sweat, often bleeding from one or more places, caked in mud if there had been rain. … These would have been the defining moments of glory for most lives. For Tim, it was all just prelude.”

His experiences on the sports field gave Dr. Cook insight into the mindset of young Canadians in combat, telling a CBC interviewer once how the bravery of ordinary soldiers on the battlefield could be best understood in terms of loyalty to their teammates rather than notions of patriotism. Soldiers in battle did not want to let their friends down.

While his most popular books on the First and Second World Wars sold hundreds of thousands of copies, Dr. Cook worried that Canadians were losing touch with their history.

Speaking passionately on the Tattooed Historian YouTube podcast in 2021, he explained, “I see history as a fight, a struggle, a clash. … We have these fierce debates. What is not good is silence … apathy. What is not good is the failure to tell your story or even to make the effort.”

Dr. Cook’s fight for Canadian history brought him numerous awards and honours. He was changing a diaper when informed by phone he had won the $25,000 Charles Taylor prize for literary non-fiction in 2009. In 2014, he was named a member of the Order of Canada, and in 2019, he was elected to the Royal Canadian Society of Canada for his scholarship.

Most recently, The Good Allies (2024), a timely examination of Canada’s tenuous relationship with the United States during the Second World War, was nominated for America’s prestigious US$50,000 Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize, to be awarded next month.

Dr. Cook leaves his wife, Sarah Cook; their three daughters, Chloe, Emma and Paige; his mother, Sharon Cook; and brother, Graham Cook. He was predeceased by his father, Terry Cook.

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