Frank Cooper

Sir Frank Cooper, (2 December 1922 – 26 January 2002) was a British civil servant. He was Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Ireland Office and Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence. Biography Cooper was born in Droylsden, Manchester, the younger child of Valentine Holland Cooper, a commercial traveller, and later a manager for a chocolate making firm, and Wynnefred Louisa, née Gardner, a teacher. His sister was the social worker Joan Davies Cooper. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, before beginning training as an accountant in 1939. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1941 and was commissioned in 1942. After pilot training in the United States, he flew Spitfires in the Italian campaign. In 1944, he was shot down and was posted missing. Captured by German troops, he managed to escape and rejoined his unit with the help of Italian partisans. He became a flight commander in the No. 111 Squadron, and ended the war in the Far East. He declined the offer of an extended commission and was demobilized in 1946. Cooper then went to Pembroke College, Oxford, taking third-class honours in Modern History in 1948. He then joined the Home Civil Service, becoming an Assistant Principal at the Air Ministry in 1948 and a Principal in 1951. He was Private Secretary to the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Air, Aidan Crawley, from 1950 to 1951, to the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Air, Sir James Barnes, from 1951 to 1953, and to the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir William Dickson, from 1953 to 1955.