William Cox

by Richard Cox

  Prior had lived there in 1664, and probably dates from the late sixteenth century, but was added to in the eighteenth century. Even so, with its low ceilings, half-timbered construction and lathe and plaster walls, this was not a gentleman’s residence. It was at best a somewhat poky middle-class dwelling in a dawning age of elegant town houses, such as a few in Wimborne still are (they suffered an onslaught of demolition in the 1950s). It is now known as St Joseph’s.7

  Portrait of William’s mother at Clarendon (Author’s photo)

  After William and his family moved to New South Wales the matter of what defined a gentleman and what constituted a gentleman’s residence would become of disproportionate importance, with William and his sons naming houses to reflect a Dorset ancestry the significance of which had, in reality, been lost. William’s origins were of great significance to him. According to an unpublished family genealogy armorial bearings were first allowed to his ancestor Thomas Cox and to Thomas’ first cousin, Francis, Prebendary of Wisborough in Chichester Cathedral in 1554. Francis was also King’s Almoner. They were descended from John Cox of Monmouth, c.1400. His coat of arms is reproduced in William’s Memoirs, although the motto of Fortitudo in Adversis is commonplace.8 Francis’ son, Sir Richard Cox, was the Clerk Comptroller to the household of King James I. His coat of arms is in the frontispiece of a family bible now in the Mitchell Library. In the 1660s family members settled at Wimborne. According to a family memoir in 1661 ‘the Revd Henry Cox occupied the church and rectory at Exton. Other family members went to Wimborne, where their landed property “Fern Hill” was at the edge of the Fir Forest, which runs down to Poole, where they became ship owners’.9 Burke’s Colonial Landed Gentry merely says that ‘the family was at one time seated in Dorsetshire’.10

  The Cox family coat of arms (Author’s photo)

  Fern Hill, on the road to Poole, was where William’s grandfather had lived. It stood on the edge of the heathland later portrayed in Thomas Hardy’s novels as Egdon Heath. A map of July 1795 shows neither Fern Hill nor a forest.11 However, it is shown in plan view on the Ordnance Survey map of 1811 as a house, though certainly not a mansion, across the road from, and further south than, the country house estate of Merley. There is no indication of a forest (although there is on the 1909 map).12 This later map does show a square half mile of land behind the house. Today, the whole area east of the road is a housing estate, although there are stretches of conifers further down the road. By the 1780s the land presumably could not provide a living, because Robert Harvey Cox, William’s elder brother by ten years, started a factory making fusee chains for watches at the nearby town of Christchurch.

  In the compacted form of Fernhill, this house later provided the name for Edward Cox’s mansion at Mulgoa in New South Wales, and for one of James’ properties in Tasmania, underlining this strong sense of inheritance, which must have been instilled in them by their father and seems to have been a motivating force for both generations. What is harder to understand is why William himself gave the name Clarendon to his estate on the Hawkesbury. Clarendon Park, three miles from the medieval Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire, was a royal palace and hunting estate owned by the Plantagenet Kings, but their dynasty came to an end in 1399. By the 1550s, when Francis Cox was the King’s Almoner, it was no longer used by the Sovereigns and was given by Charles II to the Royalist Earl of Clarendon in 1651, after the restoration. Yet William must have felt he had a connection there and in 1834 his son James also gave the name to his magnificent mansion in Tasmania, now owned by the National Trust, although that could have been out of filial loyalty. Behind all these names in the colony there lay a clear sense of deprived ancestry in England.

  That immediate ancestry is graphically illustrated by two splendid portraits, of William’s mother and of her father-in-law, which now hang at the Tasmanian Clarendon.13 The portraits are compelling, both in ornate gilt frames. William’s mother’s likeness is of a dark-haired, slightly angularfaced, young lady in an elegant silver/grey gown, with a very full skirt below a tight bodice and having flounced sleeves trimmed with lace. Her slim fingered right hand rests demurely in her lap, her left elbow on a marble and gilt side table, as artists of the time often depicted ladies. Since Jane Harvey was born in 1732 and bore her first child in 1754, but here wears no wedding ring, the picture can be confidently dated at around 1750– 52, when she was 20. She was dressed as, and looked like, a lady. That had great importance. Social snobbery is alive and well today in the Shires. It mattered even more then, when it was said that a gentleman could not live properly without a manorial estate.

  Equally, the portrait hanging alongside Jane’s at Clarendon, of William Cox’s grandfather, William the ship owner, depicts him as a fashionable and rich gentleman, with a landscape behind him including the distant sea. Born in 1695, he is here in another typical early eighteenth-century pose, wearing a generous, unpowdered wig right down to his shoulders. His fulllength blue coat, perhaps of velvet, has deep pockets and extravagant cuffs, reaching back almost to his elbows. His right hand rests on his hip, his left on the handle of a sword. His wig dates the portrait at before the 1750s, after which time wigs were much shorter, were curled above the nape of the neck and were powdered white.14 One wonders where Jane would have found wall space for these portraits in the low-ceilinged Poet’s House. They were taken to Australia by Commander Nigel Cox, RN, in the 1960s and lent by his son, Tim, to the National Trust in Tasmania.15

  Happily, Wimborne did have its compensations for the young William. Attending the Queen Elizabeth I Grammar School was to place him among the best educated men in New South Wales when he arrived there, not to mention facilitating his obtaining a commission in the Militia. It would have contributed to his being appointed a magistrate at Parramatta only two years after arriving in the colony.16 The school was of ancient lineage. In 705 Saint Cuthberga had founded a nunnery at Wimborne, but it was to be seized during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1529. By then the school was already part of the nunnery, having been founded in 1496 with an endowment from the mother of Henry VII. Subsequently some of the land was restored to it by Queen Elizabeth I, who gave the school a new charter in 1562. This was ‘for the instruction of all her subjects’ sons in learning good manners and virtue, according to the customs of Winchester and Eton’ and to be ‘general, free and common [open] to all subjects of the Crown’.17

  Grammar schools were an essential part of English social history from the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. They provided a steady flow of scholars, scientists and professionals to the nation, from the new learning of the Renaissance onwards. Both Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare were the product of grammar schools, which gave as good an education as the more famous public schools. Indeed the most famous, Eton, originated as a grammar school.18 By William’s time the Queen Elizabeth I school was charging fees and educating the sons of the middle and upper classes from a wide area. Two centuries after the Queen made her endowment, to compare her school with the great boarding institutions of Eton and Winchester might have been stretching the imagination. Nonetheless the grammar school boys’ education was good enough that they could have gone on to Oxford or Cambridge, if their parents could afford it, or they won scholarships.19

  Aristocratic sons took a different route, often starting with private tutors. William’s contemporary, Henry Bankes (1757–1834) of nearby Kingston Hall, attended a private boarding school in Marylebone, London, followed by Westminster School and Trinity Hall Cambridge. He then embarked on a four-year Grand Tour of Italy.20 William Cox did not go to university. A realization of what he missed is likely to have been behind his leaving funds for his son Thomas, by his second marriage, to go to Cambridge.21 For the older sons by Rebecca this would not have been possible financially.

  Descriptions of the Queen Elizabeth I school were given in the Memoirs of David Parry Okeden, a boy who was there in 1779, around the time when William would have been about to l
eave. He recorded: ‘The boys of this school used occasionally to form the school room into a theatre and represented the most celebrated plays to an audience of their friends and the neighbouring Gentry’. According to tradition, one of the duties of the Master was to give instruction in cockfighting on Shrove Tuesday.22 A previous Usher (second master) had been Fill Cox, BA, of St John’s College, Oxford, who died in 1763 and had been a relation.23 Cock fighting was one of the popular entertainments exported to New South Wales, along with bare knuckle fighting.

  William would have left the school when he reached the age of 15. What he did for most of the next ten years is unclear. Neither he nor his older brother, Robert, seems to have considered following in their grandfather’s and father’s shipping footsteps, possibly because of the drowning, possibly because the Cox shipping operation had collapsed with its owner’s death. When dealing with many aspects of William’s early life there are so few records that one depends on reasoned speculation as to causes. At the end of the 1780s he worked as an apprentice for Robert in the latter’s Watch Chain Manufactory at Christchurch, founded around 1790, ten miles from Wimborne down the River Stour. Here some 500 nimble-fingered women made the delicate fusee chains for the watches of the time. The mechanism is described in the OED as follows: ‘there is a conical pulley or wheel of a clock or watch on which the [fusee] chain is wound and which equalises the power of the mainspring’. These tiny chains had 20 links to the inch and were indeed delicate. Robert’s building is now the Redhouse Museum.24

  William could well have met his future wife indirectly through the factory, since her father, James Upjohn, made watches using those chains and had a house in the north Dorset town of Shaftesbury. The Memoirs merely say, ‘Then he moved to Devizes in Wilts, where he married Rebecca Upjohn in 1789 at the age of 25’.25 Recent Cox family researches suggest that William, having been apprenticed to his brother, was then set up ‘in that field’ in London. This could only have been for a few years in the early 1790s, before he married and they settled in Devizes.26 Their reason for choosing Wiltshire is not known.

  A pivotal aspect of William’s motivation for eventually emigrating must have not only been lack of opportunity for young men without a fortune, but the conditions in the countryside, which he saw around him. These were not only intensely miserable for the poor, but offered no career opportunity for an educated young man without a fortune. Broadly speaking, one can identify three influences to which William can convincingly be thought to have responded. The first and most significant was that the ownership of land spelt wealth and power, a theme running through William’s entire life. Numerous contemporary writers and later historians confirm this. In the words of one who wrote about emigration to Australia, ‘Property was after all the economic prop of gentility’.27

  Susan Watkins, a biographer of that supreme English social commentator, Jane Austen, explains the imperative of land ownership:

  It was land that counted for everything in English society during the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century. Wealth, status, political power and even marriage prospects were directly affected by the size of one’s property. The squire of a manor was like a little monarch in his village.28

  Landlords formed the largest unit of economic and social power in Dorset. Even maintaining a modest estate necessitated a capital outlay of about £30,000 for its owner to live the leisured life of a gentleman.29 This was far beyond anything the Coxes possessed.

  The second influence was the value of making improvements. The third was a vivid understanding of the backwardness of Dorset and of the miseries which the enclosures of common land were inflicting on the rural population in the name of progress – and of landowners’ profits.

  His actions in the colony reveal that one of the qualities William brought with him when he emigrated, as well as humane attitudes, was a strong belief in making improvements. There was certainly stimulus for this in Dorset, if not in Wimborne itself. The nearby town of Blandford Forum, rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1731 (and today a World Heritage site), was a cultural centre, relatively speaking brimming with ideas. Not so much further away was the city of Bath, where the Bath and West Society, which still runs the annual Bath and West Show, was founded in 1777 ‘to encourage higher standards of farming’. The society helped to bring into use new crops and new techniques.30 The Wiltshire County records state that he was a farmer, though not where (but not that he was a clockmaker). If so, as he was an educated man and from Dorset, he was almost certain to have known of the enlightened agricultural initiatives at Blandford and at the Bath and West, if not necessarily being aware of the Enlightenment thinking inspiring them.31 The aims of the Agricultural Society of New South Wales, of which he became a founder vice president in 1822, were almost identical to those of the Bath and West.

  Despite the high clerical status of the Minster, its grammar school, and its being a market town first settled around 300 BC, Wimborne was backward compared with the other Dorset towns of Blandford and Dorchester. So were its transport links. An Act of Parliament of 1755 had denounced the Dorset roads as being ‘in a ruinous condition’. In consequence turnpike tolls were instituted, as they later would be on the road from Parramatta across the Hawkesbury. Gradually pack horses and wagons were superseded by coaches and carriers. The London Directory of 1772 announced a coach three times a week from London, but to travel on it was an expensive luxury. Most country transport was as depicted in Gainsborough’s 1786 painting of The Market Cart, laden high with stores and trundling bumpily along a rutted lane on a single pair of huge spoked wheels.32 Alongside the track is a woodcutter gathering fuel, a favourite addition to Gainsborough’s paintings. The enclosures would later have prevented him from doing this.

  Although Wimborne had been founded at the confluence of two rivers, which was an important factor for pre-medieval settlement, that value had long waned and by the eighteenth century the town’s isolation was mirrored by its lack of economic development. It was away from the uplands where farming revolved largely around the famous Dorset Horn breed of sheep, with its splendidly curled horns. In the 1720s Daniel Defoe was informed that 600,000 sheep grazed the downs within six miles of Dorchester, to the north.33 The chalk uplands of Dorset and Wiltshire were devoted to sheep, involving water meadows to grow early Spring grass and the folding of sheep into pens at night, to keep them mutually warm and to provide manure for the arable fields in the valleys. The system was ‘an integrated whole, with the sheep and grasslands together supplying the manure which maintained corn production’.34 The production of wool, though vital to peasant families, was subsidiary. In New South Wales, folding turned out to be unnecessary in the quite different physical conditions, but was useful to keep off night attacks by dingoes.

  In 1793, four years after William had moved to Devizes in Wiltshire, a thousand women and children were still employed making stockings from fleeces. Set against that, production of cheap cotton goods had increased tenfold in England between 1760 and 1787 and this home industry, where every cottage had its spinning jenny, was soon to be all but destroyed by the products of the new cotton gins. By the time William was grown up many of the Dorset women lived in the poorhouses. That so many women were desperate to find work reflected the virtual extinction of the yeoman class of smallholder and the general rural poverty, which had been created by the enclosures.

  There was an enormous disparity between rich and poor, between gentry and labourers. Sir Frederick Morton Eden was an insurance company chairman, who applied the principles of Adam Smith to his investigations into the condition of the poor. He toured much of England in 1795.35 Writing on The State of the Poor, he found that at Blandford ‘the rapid rise of the Poor’s rates, in this parish, is generally attributed to the high price of provisions; the smallness of wages and the prevailing spirit, among the gentlemen of landed property in this neighbourhood, of consolidating small farms; and the consequent depopulation of villages; the effects of
which, it is said, oblige small industrious farmers to turn labourers or servants’.36 His contemporary, William Marshall, an agriculturalist and originator of the Board of Agriculture in 1793, noted that ‘bread is now [1801] nearly four times its price of late years; beef not more than twice’. But he drew no conclusions from this.37 Families like William’s were forced to: they economized.

  Far from poverty being alleviated over the years, it grew worse as the ‘improving’ enclosures progressed. In the 1820s William Cobbett wrote (on 11 November 1825), ‘the honest labourer is fed worse than the convicted felon’.38 Labouring wages in Sussex were then 7d a day, less than the seven shillings a week which Eden had reckoned a Dorset labourer could not feed his family on thirty years before. Although by then William and his family were in the colony, poverty in England had an effect out there. Eden had deplored ‘driving, as we annually do, many thousands of useful hands from us, into distant realms, for want of employment and food’.39 It drove some of them to New South Wales in two starkly different ways. Gradually mounting rural unrest culminated in the Swing Riots, while the famous Dorset case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1832 led to the men’s transportation for trying to form a farm workers’ trade union. At a less dramatic level several of Rebecca Upjohn’s farm worker relatives were transported for minor crimes of the kind that usually resulted from poverty. The other route was voluntary. Much later, in the 1830s, Dorset yeomen also went to the colony under the assisted emigration schemes, introduced by Viscount Goderich in 1831, described in Chapter 10. Ironically, some of the assisted immigrants came from one of the most troublesome villages in Dorset, Sixpenny Handley, but settled successfully on the Macarthur estates.