William Peter Cooke was born in 1932 in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, son of Douglas, the county’s chief education officer, and Florence (née Mills), a part-time civil servant. A younger sister, Margaret, taught in Oxford before emigrating to New Zealand.

In his early childhood he lived in Aylesbury, and at the start of the Second World War the family moved to Colwyn Bay, north Wales. Douglas stayed in Buckinghamshire, visiting occasionally. His mother worked for the Ministry of Food, driving officials around.

At Christmas 1941 they returned to Buckinghamshire and Peter went to RGS aged nine, two years before time. “We had our fair share of V-1s, or Doodlebugs, in the latter stages of the war,” he said. “But nothing nearer than about half a mile from the school. When the sirens went we were all herded into the main ground-floor corridor.” He retrieved a piece of V1 wreckage near his home and kept it as a trophy on the top of his wardrobe.

Cooke started National Service in the Royal Artillery in 1951, but contracted rheumatic fever and was invalided out. In his spare year before going to read history at Merton College, Oxford, he taught English in France. Cycling trips there ignited a passion that took him around Europe on holidays.

In his final year he met Maureen Haslam-Fox, a fellow history student at Lady Margaret Hall, and they married in 1957. Maureen, who died of cancer in 1999, became an early specialist in teaching dyslexic children. They had two sons and two daughters. Nicholas is a GP living in Australia; Caroline has been in Spain for nearly 40 years, teaching; Andrew runs his own consulting firm in Australia; Stephanie was a book editor before becoming a teacher.

In Singapore Cooke met Julia Bain (née Warrack), a sculptor, Russian-trained ballet dancer, and widow of a surgeon. They married in the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor, in 2005.

Cooke was at the heart of two of the world’s key financial organisations, the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements, in the 1980s when the global money system was undergoing dramatic change.

“When I was a bank supervisor,” Peter Cooke said, “my recurring nightmare was a mega international conference hotel at which a whole fleet of stretch limos was drawing up to the entrance, disgorging their cargoes of prosperous bankers. On the back of each limo was an identical bumper sticker: ‘Two million lemmings can’t be wrong.’ ”

He spent 33 years at the Bank of England, for many years serving as Head of Banking Supervision, 1979-1986, and retiring as Associate Director (a member of the Court of the Bank) in 1988. From 1979-1988, Peter Cooke was chairman of the so-called Cooke Committee at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, more formerly known as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The Committee was responsible for the formulation and introduction of the first risk-weighted capital rules for major international banks.

As chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the laconic, self-deprecating Cooke laid down an across-the-board 8 per cent ratio, meaning a bank with £8 billion capital could lend a maximum £100 billion. “That figure was seat-of-the-pants stuff,” he said. “Seven and a half per cent was what we felt comfortable with, and we added a half a per cent cushion for good measure.”

Cooke at Buckingham Palace in 1997 with Stephanie, Maureen and Andrew

After retiring from the Bank in 1988, Cooke chaired the global regulatory advisory practice of the PricewaterhouseCoopers professional services network in London. He also held various non-executive directorships and school governorships and was president of the Merton Society.

Cooke was a lifelong England and British Lions rugby union fan, calling it “the game they play in Heaven”. He loved going to Twickenham, latterly watching from home as an armchair expert.

Peter Cooke CBE, banking supervisor, was born on 1 February, 1932. He died in his sleep on 5 August, 2022, aged 90