William Cox
Page 15
To return to Clarendon, this was where William, in the words of Barrie Dyster, ‘created the pattern of an ambitious landholder’, as well as on estates at Mulgoa, and west of the mountains. The management of those estates might have had an English inspiration, but was achieved in an ‘indigenous’ manner which evolved in the colony, yet is often not recognized as having been distinctive.13 In reality the colonial model owed little to English landed traditions, even though it was the ideal of the English landed gentry which had motivated the pastoralist settlers from the start. The evidence which William gave to Commissioner Bigge on agriculture in 1820, after he had left Bathurst, provides details of his enterprise which would not otherwise be available.
The acquisition of land in the colony was a totally different endeavour to anything which William, or his contemporaries, could have attempted in England in three respects. First, the estates were created with grants or purchases of uncleared land from the government, which was not comparable with the enclosures of common land in England. Second, miserable as the pay and conditions of farm workers at home were, the colonial estates were built on the foundation of actual forced labour, with all the attendant problems of motivation and competence. Third, many were developed as family enterprises, like William Cox’s, the Lawsons’ and the Macarthurs’.
The family enterprise was possible because the inhibitions of the English primogeniture system were seen to be irrelevant in view of the wide availability of land. Thus the estates of Cox and Lawson were expanded jointly with their sons. William’s comparatively small landholdings at Mulgoa adjoined those of his sons Edward and George, and he had built The Cottage there for them around 1811, although Clarendon remained entirely his. There were also problems in educating children, which seldom occurred in England. William himself had been educated at a first-class grammar school, literally around the corner from his mother’s house. Tutors were easily available for the children of aristocrats at home. But in the colony all such facilities had to be created from scratch, often depending on convict teachers. Finally, there was the role of women in the management of the estates, wives whose lives were a far cry from Jane Austen’s country ladies in that first generation.
There was a further, peculiarly colonial, social dimension to this, directly influencing how estates were run. While Marsden, Bell and others opposed the admission of emancipists to society, William did not. He ran Clarendon personally, as did John Macarthur at Camden Park. But unlike some non-resident landowners, he therefore gained an understanding of convicts’ thinking (which Bigge could not really comprehend, either in terms of how the convicts thought or of why William was interested). His first manager, the Irish exile Joseph Holt, in the early days at Brush Farm, recorded that ‘His good treatment of the convicts in his service had the happiest effect upon many of those who were so lucky as to get into his service’.14 William’s idea of a desirable relationship between master and servant was encapsulated when, in the later interview on convicts, he told Bigge that ‘where the man is capable of performing the task with ease to himself, he pleases his Master who makes his life more comfortable’.15
In agricultural terms, William was among the leading settlers. Bigge had been told by Bathurst that ‘The Agricultural and Commercial interests of the Colony will further require your Active Consideration’.16 He responded to this instruction in his Report on Agriculture, saying: ‘The estates that are in the best state of cultivation, and exhibit the greatest improvement, are those of Mr Oxley, the Surveyor General, Mr Cox, Sir John Jamison, Mr Hannibal Macarthur’. He also listed four others and named William, along with ‘Mr M’Arthur, Mr Wentworth and Sir John’, as owning ‘the herds in which the greatest improvements have been made’.17 These were serious compliments.
The best documented of the estates William owned (after his bankruptcy) were at Clarendon on the Hawkesbury, at Mulgoa on the Nepean, and later at Bathurst, where family cooperation came fully into its own. It is not easy to disentangle his land ownership from that of his sons. A list of his land holdings in 1823 (undated, but probably early January) had him with 5530 acres, out of a total held by the family of 10,690, including 850 at Mulgoa, as shown on a contemporary map.18 After his return from England he had added progressively to the 800 or so acres which the family collectively owned in 1810. There is relative clarity over the subsequent extensive acquisitions across the mountains, described later.
William’s primary estate of Clarendon, close to the river on the Hawkesbury, was a very substantial establishment. He had begun preparing for this self-sustaining community little more than a year after his November 1809 return from England. In 1811 he began buying implements at auction and also trading himself, as described in Chapter 4, in concert with his sons. These were early examples of the family members acing in consort. Well before the time of Bigge’s visit Clarendon had become a self-sustaining community. William told the Commissioner:
We manufacture clothes for Prisoners & frocks from our own wool & boots and shoes from hides tanned upon the estate, we grow our own flax here and make our own harness, we keep a Taylor to make up the cloathing … blacksmiths’ forges and a carpenter also a wheelwright when we can get one.19
In this interview he referred to himself and his sons jointly employing convicts. Quite apart from this possibly being a device to make his own numbers seem less, it shows how his sons’ participation in the enterprise was growing. The second son by William’s second marriage, Alfred, recalled Clarendon when he was a boy in the early 1830s, when it was at its height. In his ‘Reminiscences’ he wrote:
The house … was built of brick and in cottage form, containing many rooms with windows on all sides of it … There were extensive orchards and gardens on one side of the house. Some 50 to 60 outdoor servants were engaged in various industries. There was a flour mill, a cloth factory, a tannery, meat curing house, blacksmith’s forge and buildings in which were to be seen every day at work carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, saddlers, tobacco curers and of necessity butchers and bakers, having quite the appearance of a village.
He remembered a watchman, who had been a convict, and ‘in my mind’s eye I still see nurses young and old, overseers as they were called, and men over whom they were placed in authority. Our head nurse was in her way a somewhat remarkable woman.’20 It is notable that women were placed in charge of male convicts.
The character of the house was of importance, both because it reflected the way William looked at life and because it was the focal point of a community. Rather in the manner of Kenyan and Rhodesian settlers a century later, he added rooms as he needed them.21 Indeed the author Douglas Woodruff has remarked that: ‘Australia … was the Kenya of early Victorian England’, because of that colony’s opportunities in a largely untouched land.22 That comparison is particularly meaningful to this author, who lived in Kenya for many years. William only added an ‘extraordinarily highly finished’ dining room to Clarendon in the 1820s, after his second marriage, presumably to satisfy his new wife’s social aspirations.23
Sadly Clarendon did not have a happy later history. In 1834, having himself been unwell since 1828 and needing medical attention, William moved the family into a more accessible house called Fairfield, away from the river at Richmond. He would have vividly remembered Rebecca’s death in a flood in 1819. He then let the Clarendon house to the auctioneer Laban White.24 It was inherited by George, but does not appear to have been lived in by him or the family ever again.
Fairfield at Richmond, William’s last house and where he died, since extended to be an hotel (Author’s photo)
Organizationally, Clarendon could be compared to other estates. Where it differed was in the unquantifiable human terms of the people who ran it. The estate in that form did not survive many years after William’s death and it must be questionable whether it could have done so without its original begetter, whereas the estates west of the mountains expanded under his sons. William’s great grand-daughters, thought to be the au
thors of his Memoirs of 1901, knew the house. They described it as:
A large cottage house, built of brick and plaster. It has large handsome rooms, and wooden wainscot runs around the ancient drawing room … But alas in our land woodwork endureth not. We have ‘white ants’, which eat the inside from solid timbers … as you walk across the once solid floor of native timber it gives way beneath the feet, and the gray dust rises that tells of rot, ruin and decay.
All that the Memoirs then say, of around the year 1900, is that ‘the levels are all askew … all is wild and uncared for … the trim paths are overgrown with weeds’.25
George Cox’s letters reveal that he had great difficulties with the estate after inheriting it. He had rented it out and wrote on 2 January 1848, when he was suffering greatly from the financial crash, that he called ‘at Clarendon to see the misery there, and made up my mind at once to lose the half of the rents for that place. The whole farm has not produced 150 bushels of wheat, no hay and not the slightest prospect of corn’. Two days later he set to work arranging ‘a division of the property … these money matters do indeed most dreadfully harass me’.26 He bequeathed what remained of Clarendon to his son Charles, who sold it to a man called Arthur Dight.
Owing to William’s lack of pretensions, Clarendon had never been a house for an aspiring gentleman and his sons had no need of it. William had greatly improved Hobartville at Richmond. In 1824 George had built Winbourne at Mulgoa, where Edward built the classical Fernhill, and Henry built Glenmore, while James created the most elegant and classical of all the sons’ houses, Clarendon in Tasmania.27 The rambling old Clarendon would not have suited their decidedly upper class sense of style. Eventually, Dight’s executors auctioned ‘Clarendon Park, containing 623 acres’ in 1909. It was bought for £7500 by a Captain Phillip Charley. On 12 December 1911 the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported: ‘Part of the old building being a ruin and the rest showed signs of decay, while the century old garden was a wilderness’.28 It finally fell into complete ruin around 1921. A newer house has been built close by, which has been misidentified on a website biography of William as being Clarendon. What are thought to be the remains of William’s detached kitchens still stand, just outside the perimeter fence of the RAAF airfield which now occupies much of the site of the farm.
There was a defined structure of oversight at Clarendon, particularly important during William’s absences at Bathurst, although it is clear from the Memoirs that Rebecca was emphatically the mistress of the house. The senior assistant to William on the estate was the former New South Wales Corps sergeant, James King, who was described as his secretary and had been with him since shortly after his arrival. Holt called him ‘the steward or clerk over the stores’ at Brush Farm in October 1800.29 King was both retainer and friend. The Memoirs called him ‘a good man and true’, which he clearly was. He never married, but was godfather to Edward Cox, to whom he left everything. William made sure he had a plot of land at Mulgoa and obtained him local preferment; for instance putting his name forward on 25 June 1812 as slaughterhouse inspector at Windsor.30 He must have played an important role in running Clarendon when William was away. He died at Mulgoa on 27 June 1829 and was buried in a grave close to Rebecca’s in the Windsor churchyard. The tomb’s inscription describes: ‘Mr James King … many years a respected friend and faithful assistant to William Cox, Esq. J.P.’ He was ‘Mr’ whereas William was ‘Esq’.31 His age is not given.
Beneath King came the overseers. The job of an overseer was described by the surveyor Oxley to Bigge: ‘On large estates the supply [of ordinary goods] to convicts’ is usually made by the overseer who is a sort of storekeeper to the proprietor; he sends to Sydney when anything is wanted for the farm & states to his principal what the articles are’.32 The overseer’s account at Camden shows that he was not only supposed to supervise most of the work on the estate, but that he was often sent to Sydney, mainly for the purchase of supplies and to meet new labouring families’.33 The structure at Clarendon would have been little different.
James King’s tomb at Windsor (Author’s photo)
Clarendon’s senior overseer was Richard Lewis, a free man, who had been the senior supervisor during the building of the mountain road and was later sent to Bathurst as the government’s superintendent. He had proper authority there, as when in July 1818 he certified the abstract of the government establishment at Bathurst.34 Oxen given to William as payment for road building were delivered through him.35 As might have been expected, although now a government employee, he continued to look after William’s personal interests, as accounts of the 1822 and 1824 troubles with Aborigines reveal.
At Clarendon there were several other overseers. When he was available, William took a personal hand in matters, as is evidenced by the survival of his farming smock, still in family hands (it may well be that when he told Bigge that they made ‘frocks’ these were in fact traditional smocks). After 1816, his absences made it vital to have a strong support team. Thanks to the distances and time involved in crossing the mountains, he had difficulty reconciling the demands of his various activities. Thus as early as August 1815, soon after the completion of the mountain road, the Colonial Secretary had to order Cartwright and Mileham to alternate as magistrates at Windsor ‘during the temporary absence of Mr Cox, who is on Government service elsewhere’.36 He was actually on another mountain mission with Macquarie and had also been supervising the improvement of the road from Parramatta to the Nepean. In February 1818 he was additionally appointed as magistrate at Bathurst. He was kept more busy than ever he had been.
This official dual capacity ended in August 1819, when Macquarie wrote to William personally informing him that, as Lawson had now been appointed as JP and magistrate at Bathurst, ‘there will be no occasion for your acting in a Magisterial capacity in that country in future’. William was asked to return the commission and warrant to Macquarie. It was signed simply with the initials L. M.37 Macquarie’s phrase ‘in that country’ indicates how distant the Governor felt it to be, as in terms of travel it was. Thereafter William was less frequently at Bathurst and from 1821 left the management of his expanding estates there to George, although sometimes he was physically unable to get away from Clarendon at all. On 15 February 1819 he apologized to Jamison for having to miss one of his many committee meetings in Sydney the next day, because ‘the waters are too much out to attempt it from Clarendon upwards’.38 It was in the following month that Rebecca’s body was recovered by boat.
All this meant that supervision was vital to the Clarendon enterprise. William’s overseers can be presumed to have been instructed to follow his liberal ideas. Certainly Lewis did. William aimed to keep relationships favourable through incentives, culminating with the issuance of tickets of leave, which landed him in such trouble with Bigge. In a personal letter to the Commissioner, previously quoted, William wrote about servants needing small comforts.39 Richard Waterhouse explains: ‘On most properties a task system operated, with servants free to earn extra food, alcohol and money in the time left over once they had completed their prescribed work for the day or week’.40 William believed in task work to provide an incentive and so get the work done effectively. But this was for a private employer. It was less effective when the men were working for the government.
By comparison with Cox, John Macarthur was relatively parsimonious and a great deal less understanding, which points up the favourable aspects of William’s attitudes and the difference between their styles of management, although Macarthur did give some incentives. When asked by Bigge about feeding his domestic servants, he replied: ‘They are fed plentifully … beef, mutton or pork, milk vegetables and fruit and they have Tea and Sugar twice a day’. He did not pay them the £10 a year. ‘I clothe them decently, allow them tobacco and occasionally give them a little money … altogether to the value of £15 or £20 per annum, according to their different degrees of usefulness’.
Rebecca’s tomb at Windsor (Author’s photo)<
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John Macarthur’s view of the men’s capabilities was also different to William’s. The idea that the convicts would one day be the making of the colony would have seemed inconceivable to him. When Bigge asked if comparisons with England were possible, he answered vehemently: ‘I will not admit of a comparison … those [men] brought up labourers have acquired such habits of idleness, that not one in ten can be induced to feel any pride in the performance of his duty’.41 Quite apart from his notorious arrogance, or perhaps because of it, he lacked William’s understanding of how to motivate men, upon which the management of Clarendon so depended. Atkinson records of the next generation that ‘The gulf between the Macarthurs and their own convicts … was carefully kept up by an array of supervisors and upper servants. James Macarthur explained “We find it more convenient not to give orders to the convicts ourselves”.’ Yet the Camden workers were motivated and there was also ‘nothing of the constant violence between masters and men which happened in some places’.42 But then James Macarthur was a thoughtful and considerate man, one of the few exclusives who developed a coherent vision of the colony’s future, albeit a strongly patrician one.
In one significant way Camden later came to differ from the Cox estates, although after William’s death. When the Molesworth Committee’s report of 1838 recommended the complete ending of assignment, the Macarthurs countered the labour problem by following the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, which had inspired Goderich’s reforms, and began obtaining labouring emigrants from Dorset under a government sponsored scheme. These families became small tenant farmers on the 24,000 acre estate, as did locals. The Coxes did not do this until the 1850s at Burrundulla (near Mudgee), when George Cox ‘set up a system of tenant farmers, but continued to work most of it himself’. He also sold some of the farms to tenants, presumably to alleviate problems.43