POST 143: TOM BROOK, BBC JOURNALIST ON SCENE THE DAY JOHN LENNON DIED

 

Note: In this post, I discuss a fourth cousin, familiarly known to his BBC News followers as Tom Brook, who was one of the first British journalists to report live outside John Lennon’s home on New York’s Upper West Side following his murder on December 8, 1980. Serendipitously, I was recently contacted by Tom’s second cousin, a lady from Wolverhampton, England, who is currently translating her grandfather’s memoir which happens to contain references to my earliest known Bruck relatives from Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. In upcoming posts I will begin to discuss documents I’ve recently uncovered related to some of these early family ancestors.

 

An application on Geni World Family Tree allows you to enter the name of two people and have it tell you how these people are linked, often a convoluted and rather uninteresting connection. Since we’re all ultimately related, I’ve never personally availed myself of this Geni function though others whom I converse with through my blog have on occasion sent me graphics illustrating our “kinship.”  I’m aware of but again have never used a different application available elsewhere that allows someone to determine how they are related to famous people. Since I’m decidedly not a “stargazer,” this is of no interest to me.

At various times, I’ve mentioned that I have a family tree on ancestry.com’s platform with between 1200 and 1300 names. While this may seem like a large number, I’ve seen trees with more than 100,000 names. As I’ve periodically told readers, I use my tree mostly to orient myself to the people about whom I write. However, regular readers know that over time I’ve started writing about much more than my own family in the interest of retaining and expanding my readership.

At the risk of offending distant relatives, I tend to lose interest in next of kin beyond fourth cousins. That said, whenever someone contacts me asking whether we might be related or telling me they think we are related, as an intellectual exercise, I will take pencil and paper to try and work out our ancestral relationship. Occasionally, this leads to hearing from people with a captivating pedigree or making engaging connections. This post is about just such a person, plus a more recent contact from a different individual who I discovered is the second cousin of the person who originally reached out to me. Long-term followers of my blog know that uncovering connections between seemingly unrelated people and events is something I find particularly engrossing about doing ancestral research.

Around Thanksgiving of 2022, I received an email from a genial journalist named Thomas Friedrich Brook (b. 1953) (Figure 1), more familiarly known as Tom, who’s lived in New York for 40 years. After stumbling on my blog, Tom wondered whether we might be related. Given our identical surnames, this makes sense. He briefly explained his lineage, telling me his father was born Caspar Friedrich Bruck (1920-1983) in Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], and that his grandfather was Werner Friedrich Bruck (1880-1945) (Figure 2), a university professor in Münster, Germany until 1933 when Hitler came to power. Werner’s brother, Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960) (Figure 3) was a prominent lawyer, whom Tom told me he’d met a few times growing up.

 

 

 

 

Tom’s family settled in London in 1948, and like my family when they came to America, changed their surname to “Brook.” Following his grandfather’s divorce, Werner ended up teaching at the New School in New York until his death in 1945.

Since all of Tom’s family are in my tree, including Tom whose name I had stumbled across during my research, I was quickly able to establish that he and I are fourth cousins.

Tom Brook’s mention that he is a journalist caused me to Google his name, and I learned he is a New York-based journalist working primarily for BBC News and is seen primarily on BBC World News and BBC News Channel. He is the main presenter of its flagship cinema program “Talking Movies,” and has presented every episode since it was first broadcast in February 1999.

In a subsequent email Tom mentioned that he has a large photo album with pictures of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, plus a drawing of a visit from Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s last Kaiser. The existence of this drawing reaffirms my family’s connection to Kaiser Wilhelm. It’s my great hope that despite Tom’s dreadfully busy schedule, we might eventually connect so I can view his family heirlooms.

Fast forward to late September of this year when I was contacted by an English lady named Helen Winter née Renshaw (b. 1948) (Figure 4) from Wolverhampton, West Midlands, in the central part of England. Like most of my contacts these days, Helen stumbled on my blog while researching the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the hotel my family owned there for three generations. She told me her grandfather Eberhard Friedrich Bruck had mentioned the family hotel in a memoir he wrote for his daughter, Margot Renshaw née Bruck (1917-1985), that’s to say, Helen’s mother. This is when I realized that Eberhard happens to have been Werner Friedrich Bruck’s older brother, making Helen Winter and Tom Brook second cousins.

 

 

Becuase Tom and I have lost touch since our initial contact in 2022, I asked Helen whether she knew of her second cousin and, if so, how to contact him. She explained that while she was aware of him, they’d never met though her older sister had met Tom when she was younger. Intriguingly, she mentioned something I overlooked when initially reading Tom’s Wikipedia entry, namely, that he had been the first British journalist to report live from outside John Lennon’s home in the famed Dakota Apartment building (The Dakota – Wikipedia) on New York’s Upper West Side, following the murder of the former Beatle.

I must briefly digress. Long-term watchers of the CBS News Hour may recall Steve Hartman’s regular award-winning program “Everybody Has a Story.” For those unfamiliar with this series, Hartman would throw a dart at a map and then randomly choose an interview subject from the local phone book. Steve would uncover something alluring or unusual that had happened to that person, and fashion a human-interest story based on their conversation. Running for seven years beginning in 1998, Hartman produced more than 120 pieces in this series. While Tom Brook will better be remembered for his career as a BBC journalist and his long-running entertainment show, I couldn’t help but think that if Steve Hartman had randomly selected his name from a local phone book, Tom’s reportage of John Lennon’s murder outside his apartment building in New York City would have stood out as an unusual occurrence in his life.

On the 40^th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, which took place on the 8^th of December 1980, Tom penned an article in which he basically conceded the point I’m making. Quoting: “Lennon continues to define my career. I have been a broadcast journalist for more than 40 years. In that time, I have filed more than 3,000 stores for BBC outlets and have interviewed most of the big names in the movie industry.

But all people want to know when they meet me is what it was like to cover John Lennon’s death.”

As we speak, Helen Winter is in the process of translating her grandfather Eberhard’s memoir. While he was a lawyer in Bonn, Germany, and like his brother Werner lost his position in 1933 when Hitler ascended to power, his memoir also discusses his early Bruck ancestors from Ratibor. Helen has teased me with some of the facsinating things Eberhard wrote about them that may reveal more about my family’s earliest connection to this town. Stay tuned.

REFERENCE

Brook, Tom (8 December 2020). “John Lennon: I Was There the Day He Died.” BBC News. London. Archived from the original on 8 December 2020.