A. J. Cooper-Oakley
Alfred J. Cooper-Oakley was an English Theosophist who went to India with his wife Isabelle Cooper-Oakley and H. P. Blavatsky in 1884. According to Readers Guide to The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett:
He served for a time as one of the Recording Secretaries of the TS. (Mrs. Cooper-Oakley returned to England in 1885). He became a pupil of T. Subba Row and left the TS when his teacher died. He settled in India and became a schoolteacher. ML, pp. 462, 466-7; LMW I: 113-16; D, p. 566; SH index.[1]
C. Jinarājadāsa wrote of him:
Nothing that Mr. Cooper-Oakley did showed that he ever aspired to chelaship...
Mr. Cooper-Oakley was a Cambridge man and so presumably scholarly; but he was introspective and given to fits of deep depression and gloom. Though he went to India with H.P.B. and stayed at Adyar for some years as assistant to Colonel Olcott, he was tepid in this devotion to Theosophy. He left Adyar to become the Registrar of the University of Madras, and was found one morning dead in bed, due to an overdose of a narcotic. There is nothing on record to show that he ever felt any personal attachment to H.P.B.[2]