John Manuel Cook was Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at Bristol University from 1958 until his retirement in 1976. He was educated at Marlborough College and King's College, Cambridge, where he won winning the Sir William Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode and the Members' Prize for a Latin Essay. He taught at Edinburgh University from 1936 to 1946, first as Assistant to the Professor in Humanities and then as Lecturer in Classical Archaeology. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Scots and in the British Military Mission in Greece. After the war he took up the Directorship of the British School of Archaeology, a position in which he served until he took up a lectureship at Bristol University in 1954.