Joe Cook
Forty-eight hours after the Sichuan earthquake struck, in May 2008, Joe Cook set out from Shanghai with a fleet of six JCBs and a team of operators. Three days later they reached Chengdu. There they met up with the Chinese army who escorted them down into the disaster area where they set about opening up roads that had been buried by rock falls and mudslides, reconnoitring areas that were inaccessible to other vehicles and eventually helping to clear ground for temporary housing.
‘It was incredibly challenging,’ Joe recalls, ‘very hot and very wet. Every day we were with people who had lost literally everything. We worked a lot with schools where many children had been orphaned. There was appalling suffering everywhere. But we had a job to do. We couldn’t afford to let it get to us.’
After a couple of weeks working round the clock, snatching sleep in the cab of his vehicle, Joe returned to Shanghai, leaving his team to continue the work of training the Chinese to operate the vehicles. These had been donated by JCB at the instigation of the chairman, Sir Anthony Bamford, himself an Old Amplefordian.
Now 30 years old, Joe joined JCB straight from Newcastle University, where he studied agricultural business. Since then he has spent four years living in Brazil and travelling throughout Latin America and today his work takes him into all corners of China, where he currently lives and where it’s not only natural disasters that prove challenging. ‘The classic JCB digger is a completely new concept to the Chinese,’ he explains. ‘They’ve never seen anything like it and they don’t understand it. They’re used to things that either move or dig, but not both at once. Most Chinese don’t drive so you have to be very resourceful and very patient.’
Recalling his time at Ampleforth, Joe talks a lot about the scope he felt it gave him for being creative; how the sense of space, the grounds, the farm, the valley itself encouraged him to feel a certain freedom. He was inspired too by the enterprise that went on around him, the farming and forestry, the business of running the school and monastery. ‘I loved the fact that the monks had sunk their own borehole, maintained their own orchards, ran their own fire brigade,’ he says. ‘I learnt about thinking of new ways to solve problems, being an individual.’
Now Joe visits whenever he’s back in the UK. He comes to see the monks and speaks affectionately of their dedication. ‘They gave me an amazing education in an amazing place. They taught me to interact socially, set me up to travel the world, and gave me the religion to back me up when I’m down.’
For Joe, nothing can have tested the Ampleforth ethos more dramatically than the death of his father, when he was 16. ‘I couldn’t have been in a better place,’ he says. ‘Father Edward, my housemaster, gave me a little time every day. He understood, and said the right things, and helped me to be at peace. They really know what they’re doing over things like that, the monks.’