On his return to the US in 1937 and throughout the Second World War he continued to contribute talks to the BBC. On St Valentine’s Day 1946 he proposed the idea of Letter from America, describing it as a weekly personal letter to a Briton by a fireside about American life and people and places in the American news. Hastily he telephoned Cooke and asked him to race to Broadcasting House and beam over a news despatch for NBC before the midnight circuit which the rival radio network, CBS, had booked. Cooke did so, and for the next 10 days of the abdication crisis he broadcast to America six or seven times a day.Cooke perfected his broadcasting technique in the heyday of the scripted talk; the art of colloquial writing and informal delivery that concealed the art of reading Like Harold Nicolson, J.B. He cabled Broadcasting House offering to catch the first liner back if shortlisted for the post, having prudently first confirmed with the Commonwealth Fund Trustees that they would pay the fare. The NBC representative in London at that time was Fred Bate, a close friend of King Edward VIII.

When the story of the King’s affair with Mrs Simpson, and the possibility of an abdication, suddenly broke on a startled world, Bate had the misfortune to be on holiday in New York The fastest way back to London then took five days. So began one of the most successful, and certainly the longest, career in broadcasting.In addition to reviewing Hollywood films Cooke was soon giving talks about other aspects of American life, and some of these BBC programmes were relayed in the US by the National Broadcasting Company. He was the Cambridge dramatic critic of The Nation and Athenaeum, he wrote sketches and played music for revues. At the age of 23 he was awarded a coveted Commonwealth Fund Fellowship for two further years’ study in America with instructions to spend the summer of 1933 travelling through as many states as possible.Cooke went, mostly by car, the length and breadth of the US, spending several weeks working with Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood. He read English, founded the Mummers – the first university dramatic society to recruit members of the women’s colleges for the female roles – and edited The Granta.

Sometimes self-justification led him to paint too rosy a picture of developments in the country to which he had transferred his allegiance.Cooke’s love affair with the US began in 1932 when he crossed from Cambridge to the Yale Drama School, later moving on to Harvard to study the history of the English language in America. From Blackpool Grammar School Cooke had won a scholarship to Jesus College where Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, one of his schoolboy heroes, was then a professor.His five-year career at Cambridge was spectacularly successful. British Information Services in New York showed him a very cold shoulder. This official displeasure was publicly expunged only in 1973 when the Queen awarded him an honorary knighthood. It was one of many honours, from both sides of the Atlantic, civic, academic and professional, which Cooke received.For Americans, however, this New York-based journalist, who for more than three decades had written despatches in turn for The Times, the Daily Herald and the Manchester Guardian, and had broadcast regularly for the BBC, must be typically British Hence Cooke’s personal mid-Atlantic rootlessness. Yet for decades he had been broadcasting his weekly Letter from America to a British radio audience which regarded him as a particularly sympathetic kind of American.