Cook Testimonial Prize
The Cook Testimonial Prize was founded in 1847 from a public subscription in memory of St Andrews professor George Cook (1773-1845).
Cook had been professor of Moral Philosophy, but was also an ecclesiastical historian, and a Church of Scotland minister who had served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1825. He was part of the extensive Cook-Hill network of St Andrews professors who were related to each other. Through his wife Diana (married 1801), he also had connections to the East India Company, where his brother-in-law Henry Shank was a director of the East India Company. George and Diana’s third son, George, became a Church of Scotland chaplain in Bombay, and their fourth son, Henry, became a civil servant with the East India Company.
After Cook’s death, Duncan Macfarlan (1771-1857) of the University of Glasgow set up a public subscription to raise funds for a prize ‘to commemorate the eminent services rendered to the Church of Scotland’ by Cook. The prize would later be renamed the Cook and Macfarlan Testimonial Prize to acknowledge Macfarlan’s own contribution to the Church of Scotland (and a similar prize was instituted at the University of Glasgow). The trustees of the St Andrews prize were the Principal and professors of St Mary’s College, as well as professors of Greek and Moral Philosophy in the United College, and a senior member of the St Andrews Presbytery.
In the 1890s, the prize was worth £21, and was awarded to a student who had already studied at a university for three years, and now wanted to study divinity at St Mary’s College.