William Cox

by Richard Cox

  The great importance of assigned labour in developing and running estates in the earlier years is emphasized by the sheer size of William Cox’s labour force. In 1822 he maintained an unusually large number of assigned convicts, as well as six who were free by servitude and had chosen to remain with him. In addition to agricultural workers, he employed carders, weavers, stable boys, a carter, a horse shoesmith, a gamekeeper and watermen, as Alfred recounted. It is small wonder that these aroused envy from other landowners. Unusually, he also employed a wheelwright, named Kendall, who had been assigned to him on 25 October 1814 but who moved on.44 In 1820 one of the free men was Richard Kippas, reputedly the ‘best fencer and hurdlemaker at the Bathurst settlement, since pardoned’. He appeared on the 1820 Hawkesbury ‘Return of Tradesmen’ as a wheelwright working for William of his own will.45 This was the very same Richard Kippas who made complaints to Bigge against William, as will be seen in a later chapter. In his evidence given to Bigge on 29 November 1820, presumably at Windsor, Kippas explained that he had broken his leg and been in hospital at Windsor, after which ‘I came out and went to Mr Cox … and am still with him’.46 William must have been a good person to work for, since any man with Kippas’ skills was in demand.

  There does, however, appear to have been a deliberate attempt by William to confuse the Colonial Secretary as to the numbers he employed, even allowing for family collaboration. In 1820 he had told Bigge that he and his sons employed about 100 men and ‘we manufacture clothes for Prisoners & Frocks from our own wool & boots and shoes from hides tanned upon the estate … we keep a Taylor to make up the clothing’.47 On 30 March 1823 he wrote to Secretary Goulburn saying that ‘on an average of the last five years I have employed jointly with my sons George and Henry Cox of Mulgoa from seventy to one hundred convicts free of Expence to the Crown’. He listed them. Then on 30 April 1823 Edward wrote from Fernhill at Mulgoa, transmitting a list of ‘one hundred now in the employ of my Father, self and Brother Henry’ and speaking of ‘exertions both for my own good and the benefit of the colony’.

  The figures they had submitted had evidently been queried by the Colonial Secretary, because William wrote to his son George on 17 May of that year, asking if he was agreeable to providing a separate list ‘of convicts maintained by us during the period of six years’. The aim was ‘to shew that we have maintained a considerable number of them more than the Land Regulations require during the last six years as this appears to be what Major Goulburn requires’.48 Some complicated ‘back of the envelope’ mathematical calculations followed and the family papers in the Mitchell Library show how he arrived at these ‘averages’. There is no record of whether Goulburn was satisfied, but the history of the family collusion suggests that he had been justified in asking.

  The overall convict employment by William in 1823 was officially listed as 113.49 But the figure conflicts with the 1822 Muster, where a careful analysis of the names shows he had 128 assigned convicts. These included a waterman (Clarendon was by the river), shoemakers, shepherds, weavers and a woollen manufacturer.50 The number had increased rapidly after his second marriage in February 1821, before which they totalled 104.51 Subsequently William also benefited from a scheme introduced by Governor Brisbane (and abandoned by Darling), under which government convicts were hired in groups to clear and prepare land for settlers. At the November 1822 Muster he had 15 of these.52 The accusations made against William over using his position as a magistrate to obtain the best convicts appear never to have stopped him doing so.

  Governor Macquarie was concerned for the wellbeing of female convicts. A circular sent by Campbell to magistrates on 24 August 1811 told them that ‘a vessel being daily expected with female convicts … His Excellency proposes indenting these females … among settlers … as may require their assistance in the necessary business of a country life’.53 But William did not share the Governor’s view on females being paid. He wrote to Bigge in May 1820, saying that although they were entitled to a wage of £7 a year, he thought they should not be paid at all. ‘Their situation is totally different, they do not draw a ration, but live as the family do … get regular meals, have their tea or milk and are not in want of anything. They should be found in decent and proper apparel, but not any wages allowed them.’54

  The reason for this view, or prejudice, is not entirely clear, beyond that the women were living with the family and were therefore outside the system of incentives which William gave to the male convicts for defined jobs. In England living-in female staff were paid, as well as receiving board and lodging. As long before as 1658 a cook in Hertfordshire had received £2 10s a year and a chambermaid £3.55 In 1810 at the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle, admittedly a wealthy aristocrat’s establishment, housemaids were paid eight to nine guineas (£8 8s to £9 9s), while ‘Her Grace’s woman’ earned £20.56 Kay Daniels, making a comparison with male convicts, points out: ‘Domestic work was not like task work, measurable and discrete … it flowed into the whole day’.57 In terms of having female convict servants for herself and the house, Rebecca was undemanding, most of the time having only two, as in 1818.58 Bureaucracy being what it always will be, she was assigned another, Jane Williams, on 27 January 1820, ten months after she had been drowned.59 Anna had three assigned women, as well as, from her son Alfred’s account, the free women who were running the household and would have been paid.

  The women on Hawkesbury farms were few. In 1800 less than half the Hawkesbury farms had a woman living on them.60 Where free settlers were married, the wives were of huge importance in the organization of an estate, especially one relatively so distant from Sydney (Clarendon was three days by river, a day along the ‘roads’). The historian John Gascoigne writes that: ‘Women agricultural improvers such as Elizabeth Macarthur were valued for the results they achieved rather than criticized for stepping out of their traditional domain. And women were associated with the civilizing virtues … gender roles could work in favour of women.’61 But the conversation of lady-like women, and their ideas, were wholly overshadowed by those of their men and Elizabeth Macarthur must have been virtually alone in making her voice respected when she arrived in 1790.62

  Rebecca’s unsung farming efforts can be directly compared to the better known and much longer lasting ones of Elizabeth, during John Macarthur’s absences between 1801 and 1817, when she was also bringing up young children. It can be assumed that the two women knew each other. It also possible that the reason Rebecca does not seem to have been invited to Mrs King’s social occasions for ladies in her new drawing room of 1804 might have been William’s disgrace, as well as the distance involved, even though Governor King assisted William materially himself.

  Although both wives were propelled by their husbands’ circumstances into decision making roles, in Rebecca’s case her actions went almost entirely unrecorded. She is described in some family papers as having been ‘An early day society woman, whose name was always mentioned at social events. She took part in every good work.’63 However, this account was written a hundred years later and there is nothing to indicate that she was a society woman. Present day descendants emphasize that she was remembered as a very caring person. Holt thought in 1803 that ‘She was a complete gentlewoman’, despite her hardships.64 She had signed the Hawkesbury residents’ 1807 address of welcome to Bligh and in 1808 was a leading signatory of two petitions thanking the Governor for his help after floods.65 Atkinson suggests that it was unlikely that many ‘of the 244 signatories to the Hawkesbury address understood the fine line between acquiescence and obedience’.66 Whether that is correct or not, Rebecca displayed leadership in the community.

  According to Atkinson, ‘Women were conspicuous consumers’.67 But it can only have been many years after the 1803 bankruptcy that Rebecca might have become one, if ever (unlike Anna). Back in 1803 and 1804 she had been faced with replacing basic household equipment and her principal supply was of fortitude. During William’s absence, when he was receiving no pay due
to being suspended from office, she had to feed her family. With total family landholdings of about 800 acres, and convict labourers, she would have grown much of what they needed themselves, plus a surplus for sale. But they could not produce everything and basic prices were high, sometimes exorbitant. ‘Sugar two and six a pound,’ Mrs King, the wife of the Governor, wrote, ‘butter four shillings, soap six and tea £4. “The common necessaries of life are far, very far, beyond my reach”.’68

  These prices might be why Mrs King generously lent £300 to William, even though she and the Governor were in straitened circumstances themselves. Wheat had rarely cost more than 10 shillings a bushel, but by August 1806 it was fetching two guineas a bushel and maize £2. Three months later both maize and wheat were selling for £4, thanks to speculators driving up prices.69 Not that meals were often grandiose, even for the well- off. At Sir John Jamison’s, ‘they seem to have been fairly simple, rhubarb or pumpkin pie and wholemeal bread baked in dripping were considered luxuries and appeared on Sundays. Fruit certainly was plentiful.’70

  One of the most challenging aspects of describing William’s domestic life is that there is so little known about Rebecca’s contribution at Clarendon (slightly more has survived about Anna). With that notable exception of Elizabeth Macarthur and also the remarkable convict midwife on the Hawkesbury, Margaret Catchpole, the domestic lives of women in dairying, provisioning, cooking, washing, dances, courtship and children are completely absent from contemporary accounts. Despite the efforts of recent female historians to reconstruct their roles, there simply are very few contemporary records. The women’s activities seem not have been considered central to the lives of men, particularly pastoralists.71 There is a great contrast here with the wives of the next generation of Coxes, who entertained and wrote letters to friends, some of which correspondence is given in Chapter 13.

  That Rebecca was both instinctively practical and generous is shown by her taking the present of wine and rum to the Holts after William had crossed swords with Joseph Holt in 1800. Only one letter written by her is known to this author and sadly it is a transcript, so nothing can be deduced about her character from the handwriting.72 But the wording is still revealing. She wrote to Macquarie from ‘Clarendon Farm, Hawkesbury’ in January 1810, very soon after William’s return from England, pleading for confirmation of a land grant ‘given to my youngest son [Edward, then aged four] by Colonel Paterson’. This grant had been given during the Bligh interregnum. She enclosed the deeds, trusting that she might be ‘deemed worthy of a renewal of the said Grant for my little boy & more particularly for the present use of my stock, which is much in want of fresh pasture, the food on the common they now run being greatly exhausted’.73 This letter makes it clear that Rebecca actively ran Clarendon while William was awaiting trial in England and that she was reduced to grazing her cattle on common land. More significantly, it shows her displaying remarkable foresight in extending the family estate into a new and promising area.

  This grant for Edward was at Mulgoa, on the Nepean River, a good 28 miles (45 km) south-west of Windsor as the crow flies, and further by cart track. It extended the family enterprise into what amounted to a fresh start. Years later, when Edward had completed five years training in sheep farming in Yorkshire, both he and William continued enlarging this landholding.74 In the end Mulgoa became like a family estate, although the Blaxlands also had land there. William built a dairy and cheese factory, which eventually became the school, and in 1881 George Henry Cox donated land for a new one. Edward donated five acres for St Thomas church, where many generations of Coxes are buried, and established a racehorse stud, with 44 brood mares.75

  In 1810 Rebecca must still have been very conscious of her husband’s disgrace and unlikely to have been in any Sydney social circle. Nor, when he was restored to favour by Macquarie, does she seem to have been in Mrs Macquarie’s very active one. Later on, although William accompanied Macquarie on his surveying tours of what would become the five towns in 1816 and dined with him, the Governor did not stay with the Coxes, but camped or stayed in a government cottage.76 When he embarked on his tour to Bathurst in 1821 he stayed at Jamison’s Regentville.77

  Possibly during Rebecca’s time Windsor was simply too far out to make socializing easy, although that did nothing to stop Anna. Where Rebecca does match an overall analysis of settler motivations is that, like Elizabeth Macarthur, she clearly thought of her children as ‘future inhabitants of their native country’. When the Macarthur family first came to the colony it had not been ‘as a promotional step to somewhere else’.78 Nor did the Coxes see it that way. This predicated a considerable preoccupation with the children’s education, which was also to concern William after his second marriage.

  The education of the landed gentry’s children was crucial, not only to those children’s own futures, but to the future management of the family estate, which William and Rebecca had begun to build up from 1804 onwards. When the couple sailed from England in 1799 they had left their two eldest sons, William and James, at the grammar school in Salisbury, spending their holidays with friends in Somerset.79 William must therefore have hoped that their education would parallel his own at the Queen Elizabeth I Grammar School in Wimborne; and indeed it was to a standard which enabled William Jnr to be commissioned into the New South Wales Corps in 1808. The two eldest boys were only brought out to the colony in 1804, when they were respectively 15 and 14 years old, as was explained in William’s letter of 28 July 1804 to John Piper, quoted in Chapter 3. In that letter he said he had ‘got 250 acres of ground for them with four men … as other settlers have’.80 So their careers as landowners had begun. But for the younger children education was less easy.

  A school was run by the Reverend Richard Cartwright, the chaplain on the Hawkesbury. He testified that parents were ‘eager to have their children educated … They came to school for unpredictable periods between about four and twelve years old.’ This has the sound of emancipist small farmers’ offspring, although Bigge found those children ‘manageable when treated with kindness’.81 In any case, by 1811 only Rebecca’s last two children, Maria and Edward, were as young as that. Probably Rebecca taught them herself when they were very young.

  For the boys of William’s second marriage the solution may have lain in a school established later at Castlereagh by the Reverend Henry Fulton, who had travelled out on the Minerva with them in January 1800. In June 1814, after involvement in the rebellion against Bligh, who Fulton supported, he became resident chaplain in charge of Castlereagh and Richmond. He is thought to have been helped to this by William and rapidly established a seminary for ‘young gentlemen’ at his parsonage.82 W. C. Wentworth described it as it was around 1818. There were: ‘Several good private seminaries for the board and education of opulent parents. The best is in the district of Castlereagh and is kept by the clergyman of that district, the Rev. Henry Fulton, a gentleman peculiarly qualified both from his character and acquirements for conducting so important and responsible an undertaking. The boys in this seminary receive a regular classical education.’83 Time there would have been followed by terms at the King’s School at Parramatta, which Alfred says he attended.

  William subsequently built a new Castlereagh schoolhouse for the government. In April 1820, after Rebecca’s death, he reported its completion to Macquarie in something of a self-congratulatory tone: ‘This new building in the Township is made strong, neat and useful, but expensive … Knowing it was Your Excellency’s wish to have this useful building completed without delay I feel much pleasure in thus reporting it’. It would also be used for Divine Service. ‘The person Your Excellency sent us as a clerk & schoolmaster will, according to Mr Fulton’s opinion, be properly able to perform his duties.’84 It sounds as though Fulton handed over some of his teaching to the clerk. Nonetheless, William had problems educating his second family, although dynastically they would prove to have little importance, since only one of the men remained in New South Wales.85<
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  Asking for assignment favours, as ever, William wrote to McLeay on 14 September 1826 from Clarendon:

  In the Gazette I have received have observed an English ship is arrived with prisoners, will you have the goodness to cause an application to be made [to His Excellency] for a man fit to teach two of my young children aged three and five years their reading and writing, they are too young to send to a boarding school and we have not a day school near us.

  This assignment was ordered on 22 September.86 Apparently it did not last, because early in 1827 a young immigrant called Alexander Harris, who had been arrested for travelling with no visible means of support, was offered work. Cox intervened, saying, ‘I have two children who need a tutor. Would you like the job?’This seems to have been the same Alexander Harris who, 20 years later, in 1847, published Settlers and Convicts; or recollections of Sixteen Years Labour in the Australian Backwoods. He had arrived in 1825 and, although an educated young man, was living as a vagrant. William must have seen something worthwhile in Harris, a capacity in keeping with his liberal views. 87

  Alfred makes no mention of Harris, only saying that when he was older: ‘The first school that my brother Tom and I were sent to was some 10 or 12 miles from home kept by the Rev. W Wilkinson. He had the reputation of being a fair classical scholar … but when in a passion used to knock about in fine style.’ In terms of location this might have been Fulton’s school, which was famous. Of Wilkinson’s establishment Alfred said, ‘we were somewhat proud of him and ready enough to proclaim to the world that he had been our schoolmaster’. He also recorded: ‘My brothers and myself were packed off to a public school at a somewhat early age. We had of course no opportunity of riding there, but when our holidays came round, were again quickly in the saddle, to the pride of our father, and somewhat to the concern of our mother.’88 The two boys were next sent to the King’s School at Parramatta, where there was ‘a pretty strong contingent of boys not attending the King’s School … ever ready to try conclusions with us … we had in our little way “Town and Gown” encounters’. The charges for Board and Tuition were £28 a year. Their minds were ‘saturated with Greek’ by one of several masters.89 Alfred made no mention of how his sisters were educated.