William Cox

by Richard Cox

  George Cox’s letters reveal that they took up the extraordinarily large area of 60,000 acres at Nombie on the Liverpool Plains in 1838,1 while the State Records show land purchases by the sons both before and after their father’s death. William Jnr completed the purchase of 4000 acres on the Upper Hunter on 12 June 1837 ‘permitted by Govr Brisbane’s warrant dated 23 June 1825’(apparently the same warrant upon which his father had once relied) on 19 September 1831 and George purchased 958 acres at Mudgee for £239 17s on 10 December 1833,2 while Edward applied for a further 1100 acres bounded by Thrall’s Creek at Mulgoa on 31 August 1836, having paid £21 15s for 814 acres there on 30 May 1834. These were near to the grant that his mother had obtained for him in 1804, on which William Snr built The Cottage in 1811 for his sons’ future use until they married.3 Having been restored by the architectural historian James Broadbent, it is now the oldest inhabited house in Australia.

  The sons displayed their social ambitions – far greater ones than their father ever had – through the houses they built for themselves. James Broadbent remarks: ‘second generation landowners, such as William Cox junior … began to build or rebuild, confidently encouraged by the prosperous economy and uninhibited by their environment’.4 William Jnr rebuilt Hobartville in Richmond in 1827. At Mulgoa, Henry built Glenmore in 1825. George added a second storey to his 1824 mansion Winbourne in 1842, the year before the Bank of Australia crashed. Edward was delayed by the 1840s depression and forced to compromise on a second storey at Fernhill, which he only completed in 1845. James began Clarendon in Tasmania in 1834.

  The sons were thus somewhat different to the father, though not by a wide margin. If one believes in the effect of inherited genes, then the great fortitude of Rebecca, coupled with William’s own determination, accounts for the sons of the first marriage turning out to be rather more enterprising than those of the second to Anna Blachford. Her son Alfred described her as ‘remarkable for her commonsense, and her promptness in acting when … called up to settle differences [in William’s absence] among the men and women composing the little community in which she lived’.5 Notwithstanding her household abilities, there is less to be said of her sons than might have been expected, although they were close to their half brothers. Edgar and Alfred both eventually went with their mother to New Zealand. Alfred moved in 1858, 20 years after Anna had married Dr Alexander Gamack, the surgeon at the Windsor Hospital, which she did in December 1837, the year that William died. They will be looked at first.

  Edgar had inherited a considerable amount of land: the 1823 acre Hereford farm at Bathurst, where he bred racehorses, another 2000 acres, also in the County of Roxburgh, 2560 acres in the County of Wellington, 640 acres at Burrendong, another 640 which William originally bought from Bell and 100 acres also at Bathurst (presumably in the settlement). If Edgar died then these six properties were to go to Alfred, who inherited 1000 acres in Roxburgh directly.6 Edgar married the old family friend, John Piper’s daughter, Andrewina. Why he later abandoned this substantial pastoralist holding and followed his mother to New Zealand is not clear. But something went badly wrong with the family subsequently, because their eldest son, Edgar William Piper Cox, died intestate at a great age in 1918, being described as an estate manager of Tomago, Hexham, New South Wales.7

  Alfred too lived for a considerable time in the colony and in 1848 was involved with George Cox, the lawyer Beddek and with Gamack, in settling William’s estate.8 But in 1855, having been there several times, he decided to move to New Zealand, sold his New South Wales properties and obtained two grazing runs at Raukapuka, where he built a homestead in 1860 and was a magistrate. He died in 1911 at the age of 85. His ‘Reminiscences’, covering the years 1825, when he was a small boy at Clarendon, and up to 1911, give verbal portraits of his brothers and half-brothers, which no one else did. Overall, the second marriage produced no dynastic or leading pastoralist outcome, since Thomas also emigrated.

  Thomas went to Cambridge, with money left for the purpose by his father, and after a short European tour to Germany and Switzerland did return to the colony in 1848, asking in advance for a horse to be bought for him. He and Alfred stayed briefly with George at Winbourne in June 1848.9 Alfred commented of Tom: ‘It seemed at one time there was a prospect of his remaining in the Colony and engaging in squatting pursuits, but the fancy was short-lived, he returned to England in less than a year with the view of reading for the Church’. He eventually became a country rector in Somerset. He had inherited a valuable house on O’Connell Street in Sydney, at the heart of what is now the Central Business District, and was no doubt helped financially by the house being rented to the government.10 This property had been the subject of a brief official exchange, after it was built, when William got the better of Governor Brisbane over the latter hesitating to approve renting it for the new head of the Commissariat Department, called Boyes, before he arrived. William told the Governor that he now had ‘an opportunity of letting the premises on a lease to a tenant I approve of. I am unwilling to let it stand over.’ Brisbane capitulated and took the house.11

  The sons of William’s first marriage were more distinguished (Charles was killed by natives in Fiji on a voyage to China in 1813 at the age of 21) and truer to their father’s ideas. One might have expected William Jnr to have continued the Cox tradition in public life. In fact he simply became a country gentleman at Richmond, largely declining major social responsibilities. He had been born on 13 November 1789 and had been left at the City Grammar School in Salisbury, together with James, when the rest of the family sailed for New South Wales.12 As recorded earlier, the boys both came out to the colony in July 1804, when William was 14, and were given grants of land by Governor King jointly with their father.13 He was described by his half-brother Alfred as being ‘not strikingly like his father, either in appearance or character. He was of medium height, somewhat inclined to fleshiness … more than any of his brothers he had the look of a well-conditioned Englishman, he was a well-set up man, having obviously been drilled in his youth’. No doubt he had been during his army service. At his death those living in the neighbourhood said ‘they knew no-one … coming nearer … to their ideal of an English Country Gentleman’.14

  William Jnr was commissioned into the New South Wales Corps on 10 March 1808 as an ensign and returned with it (as the 102nd Regiment) to England. He was said to have later transferred to the 46th Regiment, which had been posted to the colony, but that unit did not take part in the Peninsular War, where he served on the Staff Commissariat as a lieutenant. He took part in the memorably bloody siege Badajoz in 1812, under Wellington, when the British lost 4800 dead and wounded and Wellington wept when he fully realized the extent of the carnage. It is said of Badajoz that it made friendships of a kind that could not have been forged in any other way, although this has surely been true of most such bitter battles, from Agincourt to Arnhem.

  One happy result was that William married the sister of an engineer officer, Captain Robert Sloper Piper, whom he had served alongside (and who ended up as a colonel). Confusingly, in Cox family terms, William’s bride was called Elizabeth, but was unconnected to the family’s close friend Major John Piper.15 Their children carried the middle name Sloper. William’s rank of lieutenant in the army dated from December 1812 and he transferred to the 46th Regiment in 1813. He went on to the Irish half-pay list on 11 June 1818, as belonging to the 12th Regiment of Foot, but only sold his commission as an unattached lieutenant on 5 June 1835.16 These dates tie in with his return to the colony in 1814 to live as a gentleman of somewhat aristocratic pretensions.

  Curiously, in spite of having been granted that land back in 1804, when his father had portrayed him as a newly arrived free settler, he was listed in April 1818 among ‘persons permitted to become free settlers and who are to receive government cattle’.17 As long after this as April 1835 he was ‘allowed the commutation allowance on the purchase of land’, as a half-pay lieutenant of the 12th Regiment of Foot from June
1818.18 This was the same commutation of pay that ex-officer squatters benefited from, although William can hardly have needed the money. It was exactly the sort of thing that his father would have done.

  Meanwhile in 1816 he had bought the estate of Hobartville at Richmond, with its ‘neat and commodious house’, which he rebuilt in the 1820s to be a much more architecturally ambitious country house in a basic Palladian design with a Doric columned porch. The design by Francis Greenway is described by Broadbent as uninspired, but refined in design and detail.19 The French windows of the drawing room look out over lawns to a lagoon, with the mountains beyond. The whole concept is of a true country gentleman’s residence. Appropriately, today it is the home of a racing stud owner. Hobartville became known for the couples’ parties and balls. A well-known watercolour of the reception hall in later years depicts a surge of young ladies ascending the grand staircase at a ball, although they are shown smaller than life size compared to the staircase to make it seem more impressive.

  Hobartville, William Jnr’s house at Richmond (Author’s photo)

  Alfred wrote of Elizabeth that the ‘real secret of this remarkable [social] success was mainly due to the clever management and social instincts of his [William’s] wife … who had few equals as a hostess in the Colony’. Her letters are indeed strikingly illustrative of the very different life that she led to that of her deceased mother-in-law, Rebecca, which was equally true of Edward’s wife, Jane Maria, at their Mulgoa mansion, Fernhill. The first generation’s wives left little correspondence and in instances when they did – most notably the letters of Elizabeth Macarthur – they reflected the practicalities of settlers’ lives, not their frivolities. By contrast, on 26 September 1832 Elizabeth wrote to Mrs Piper saying, ‘Captain Chetwode … gets plenty of his brother officers up from Parramatta to our Balls, which makes us look dashing’. Chetwode had been in the same regiment as her brother.

  On 3 May 1835, she wrote to a relation: ‘My dear Cousin, I hear you … are coming to the Ball and I need not say for as long as you like to make your stay at Hobartville’. She added that she had wanted to take her two girls to their grandfather (William Snr) ‘but the measles being in the house, we may be prevented’.20 William Jnr did not escape being hit by the financial disasters of the 1840s. George Cox commented in August 1846 that ‘The Hobartville party was not near so large as last year … there were not forty altogether … did not break up until near two o’clock’. It sounds as though, financial depression or no depression, there was a major ball each year, not to mention other parties which Alfred mentioned and Anna would have enjoyed, since she was something of a party-giver herself.21

  Later, on 3 October of 1835, Elizabeth wrote to tell John Piper, then at Alloway Bank near Bathurst: ‘We had His Excellency, Sir John [Jamison] and Capt Wentworth here two days this week that I really began to think our house would never be empty. Mrs Blachford is still with us, but we look upon her as one of ourselves.’ (This was Anna’s mother who, after her other daughter married the solicitor Francis Beddek in Windsor, had evidently come to live there herself.)22 These brief excerpts convey the flavour of a wealthy second generation enjoying itself, at the same time as the husbands acquired more land and fulfilled a modicum of community duties.

  William’s aristocratic inclinations were displayed in 1828, when Anna Cox (Blachford)’s sister was married at Windsor. He arrived with his wife in a carriage drawn by six plumed horses, adorned with his coat of arms, and which bore white favours as part of the ‘gay turnout’, as one lady witness described it to Mrs John Piper. It was an elegant wedding. ‘Miss Blachford wore a clear muslin dress, beautifully worked at the bottom and lace let in, over a sarsenet slip, the hem of the skirt was satin and the body trimmed with pipings of white satin and lace and a lace pelerine, silk handkerchief, and watered ribbon band, a leghorn bonnet trimmed with satin ribbon and a handsome white veil.’ 23 This description has been confused with Anna’s wedding to William Snr, of 1821, but the original letter in the Mitchell Library makes it clear that it was not.

  William did display his father’s regard for helping assigned convicts if they deserved it. Agnes Wicks had come out on the Princess Royal in 1828 and been assigned to him in 1829 as a house servant. She stayed with him three years, being described by him as ‘honest, sober and industrious’, and fell in love with a carpenter he also employed, as described earlier. William helped the pair by promising to keep them in his employ until they got their tickets of leave.24 The application to publish their marriage banns was made at Richmond on 16 May 1831.25 William was less lucky in the same year with Ann Huldie, off the same ship, who stole things, tried to blame the theft on the nanny and wound up in gaol.26 It is evident that William maintained a fair-sized establishment at Hobartville, in purely domestic terms greater than his father’s at Clarendon. The basements in which the servants lived are quite extensive.27

  Thus William Jnr basically followed the career of a landed gentleman, employing convict ‘mechanics’ and obtaining land grants. His half-brother Alfred considered that he had ‘less energy and enterprise than the father’.28 He did behave like a traditional squire in espousing some local benevolent causes, becoming treasurer of the Windsor Benevolent Society in 1828. He and his brother George were named among a long list of those proposed for the Legislative Council in December 1835, any 12 of whom were to be selected by Governor Bourke. The others included Sir John Jamison, W. C. Wentworth, John Blaxland, Hannibal Macarthur, James Macarthur and William Lawson, in an eclectic mix of two generations, with the exclusives prominent.29 William was not chosen. In 1839, when Sir George Gipps was in near-desperation to find members, he was invited to stand, but by then had changed his mind and ‘Declined on the ground that his domestic habits rendered him unfit for the duties of public life’. Gipps had described him as ‘amongst our most respectable and wealthy Settlers’.30

  However, in 1842 William did consent to be appointed as a magistrate of the territory, along with James Macarthur and three of the Blaxland sons.31 In other words, he pursued much the same sort of life as a wealthy squire would have followed in England, though hardly that of an English aristocrat. In England the gulf between the squirearchy and the aristocracy was vast. Had he been an eldest son in England the family estates would have devolved upon him and been protected by entail. Here it had been unnecessary, emphasizing the way in which the Australian landed gentry model evolved differently to its spiritual parent. William died in 1850, only 13 years after his father.

  William and Rebecca’s second son, James, was much more in the adventurous mould of his father and has been described as a man of outstanding ability and a true pioneer.32 Alfred considered he was strikingly like their father in face and figure and ‘had his father’s energy, the same clear head, and as strong a determination when he took a matter in hand to go through with it’. He moved to Van Diemen’s Land in 1814, with his wife Mary Connell, where he created a career and an estate in ways of which his father would have fully approved. He told Alfred years later, in 1847, presumably when Alfred was working in Tasmania, that the move was because, when William was away in England (from 1806 to 1809) he had been ‘his father’s representative and sole manager’. He felt, on his father’s return, that ‘it would be well to think out a course for himself’. He certainly had been running the farm with Rebecca and been a leading signatory of the Hawkesbury residents’ addresses to Bligh.

  Soon after his arrival James acquired land at Port Dalrymple and in 1817 he had become a wholesale merchant, with a government contract to supply meat to the garrison, and was appointed a magistrate. In 1819, around the time of Commissioner Bigge’s visit, James was granted a total of 6700 acres on the South Esk River at Morven (renamed Evandale in 1836) which he named Clarendon after his father’s estate, but for fear of bushrangers and Aborigines moved into Launceston to live.

  In April 1820 he wrote an account of the Port Dalrymple and Launceston area for Bigge, noting that he paid his convict l
abourers £25 a year in clothing, necessaries and food, which was comparable to the more generous masters in mainland New South Wales.33 Bigge recorded in his Report on Agriculture and Trade: ‘At Port Dalrymple there are four individuals who possess considerable quantities of stock, and of these Mr Cox Jnr is making some attempt to improve both his land and the quality of his wool’.34 Bigge had made extensive enquiries about agricultural improvements on the mainland and would have seen greater attempts there, hence his disparaging tone. In his letter James also bemoaned the large number of unprincipled ex-convicts in the area. Bigge bemoaned that ‘Three magistrates at Launceston, Mr Archer, Cox and Captain Beverly, were occupied largely in agriculture or trade with the exception of Mr Archer [one of them] did not command the respect of the inhabitants’.35

  That must have changed, if it was ever correct, since James came to prosper greatly as a pastoralist, bringing merino sheep from the Macarthur flock at Camden, and establishing a stud breeding from an Arab stallion, Hadji Baba. Between 1834 and 1838 he built one of the greatest mansions of Australia at Clarendon, also creating a deer park with imported fallow deer. The house is described as having ‘simplicity, taste and imagination … grand without being overpowering’.36