John Peter Cooke (1818-50) was educated at St. Edmund’s, Ware and at the English College in Rome under the rectorship of Nicholas Wiseman. While at Rome, he was a member of the Little Oratory and used to visit the hospitals. Owing to his own poor health, he was for some years a professor at a college in France.

Newman described him in a chapter address of 1878:

He was a religious, well-educated priest, as his books in our library show; a theologian and a good ritualist, but a stranger to us, and a friend of Dr Wiseman’s, he was in a consumption and came to die in the Oratory. He was with us 14 months from first to last. We shortened his noviceship, and he died a triennial [on 12 November 1850]. He was buried at St. Wilfrid’s, near Alton Towers.