Introduction

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Homes of the Cox Family in New South Wales and Tasmania:

a Generational Shift 

Clarendon, Tasmania, 22 May 2010 

Ian Jack 

I am very grateful to Donald Ellsmore, Linda Clark and the other organizers of this symposium.  Although I have over the last four decades taken an interest in the colonial houses built or occupied by members of the extensive Cox clan and although the name Clarendon has resonated with me, I have not until now had an incentive to take stock.  This grand house called Clarendon, where we are meeting, is a second-generation Cox creation.  How does it fit in with the first-generation’s Clarendon, with other Australian houses occupied or owned by the first William Cox and with the homes built by James’s brothers and nephews on the Hawkesbury/Nepean and in the Central West of New South Wales?  The contrasts and comparisons reflect the dynamics of an uncommonly close-knit family.  There was a quite exceptional communality of interest in both the first and the second generation, which initially paid little attention to the niceties of title to the lands the men and boys essentially shared.  The styles in which the family members chose to live, as they established more independence, are, of course, influenced by social aspirations, by available income, by the example of neighbours and peers and, not least, by the often neglected input of the Cox womenfolk, particularly the wives. 

A factor lying behind all this is the physical environment in which these people grew up.  William Cox, senior, who came to the colony as a soldier in 1799, was already a man of 34, who had grown up in a Dorset town.  He had moved to Wiltshire, and was married to Rebecca Upjohn, the daughter of a Bristol merchant.  Before the couple left Britain in 1799, they already had six children, all boys.  The eldest son, William junior, and the second son, James, who built this Tasmanian Clarendon, both born just at the time of the French Revolution, were educated in England and remained at school there when their parents and four younger brothers sailed for Australia in 1799.  William and James came out to join their family only in 1804 and, although James stayed here, William junior left again for England in 1807 along with his father, who was in financial trouble and potential disgrace.  William senior did not return to New South Wales until 1810, so his wife Rebecca and the teenaged James looked after the family interests during these three years.  William junior stayed in Europe longer than his father, served in the Peninsular War and did not return to stay permanently in Australia until 1814.  William junior was by then a man of 24, already married to a English cousin of Captain Piper, who gave his name to Point Piper in Sydney.

The other four sons born in England were significantly younger: there had been a three-year gap in the production line after James was born in 1790.  The third son, Charles, died unmarried on missionary work in Fiji when he was only eighteen, so does not feature in the family history.  And the sixth son, Frederick, seems to have died young.  That leaves the really important siblings, George and Henry, who were only about three or four when they left England in 1799, and their Australian-born brother Edward, born on the Hawkesbury in 1805.

These are the five brothers who constitute the second generation: in order of age, William junior, James, George, Henry and Edward.  There was also a daughter from William Cox’s marriage to Rebecca Upjohn but she does not seem to have survived.  Two years after Rebecca died in 1819, William senior married again, to Anna Blachford, who had only just come to the colony with her uncle, a military officer.  This union produced three more sons between 1822 and 1825, Edgar, Thomas and Alfred, and one daughter.  Relations among Rebecca’s sons, their stepmother and half-brothers seem to have been unusually cordial: when Alfred published his Recollections in 1884, he went out of his way to emphasis that the children of the second marriage: were quite as much at home in [George’s] house and amongst his family, as in our own home. 1 It all sounds too much Happy Families to be true, but there is no strong evidence to contradict it and much to reinforce it.

Five sons of William and Rebecca built distinguished houses of their own in Australia.  William junior at Hobartville; James here at Clarendon in Tasmania; George at Winbourne in Mulgoa and later Burrundulla near Mudgee; Henry at Glenmore in Mulgoa; Edward at Fernhill also at Mulgoa.  The three sons of William and Anna Blachford did not build famously in Australia.   Edgar was not much of a success, although he did marry a daughter of Captain Piper; Thomas went to England and became an Anglican clergyman; while Alfred finished up in New Zealand in the 1850s.

All five of the Cox sons who built Australian homesteads married and had lots of children.  William junior had ten, James nineteen, George twelve, Henry seven and Edward eight.  So there were 56 in the third generation, only 22 of whom were male, and not all of these grew to manhood.  The knack which old William had had in fathering sons was not passed on to them.  I am not pursuing the third generation, though through Victoria’s reign they continued to build new Cox homes in the central west of New South Wales.

William senior, William junior and James had all come to Australia with eighteenth-century English baggage.  I do not think that the memory of the seventeenth-century half-timbered house in Wimborne in Dorset where William grew up in the 1760s is very relevant

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1. William Cox’s birthplace, 5 King Street, Wimborne, Dorset Photograph 1970

But the name Clarendon is relevant, not just to William senior and James, who both lived in houses called Clarendon, but also to William’s last daughter, christened Anna Clarendon Cox, and to George’s fourth son, Charles Clarendon Cox.  When William senior and Rebecca were newly weds in the 1790s, they had lived close to Clarendon Park in Wiltshire, a famous royal hunting-preserve where 7,000 deer used to rove.

There is no evidence that William senior used the name Clarendon Park before 1814: he soon adjusted the name to simply Clarendon.  Cox had been renting Argyle Farm on the Hawkesbury as early as 1802 and knew the area, although he did not reside there at that time. 2   The prime 200 acres where Clarendon house was built, largely on the Hawkesbury flood-plain, came to the family in 1804, in the form of a grant to the newly arrived teenagers, William junior and James

2. Land grants of 1804 to two sons of William Cox and to George William
Evans in trust for two daughters State Records NSW Map 226

This became a great convenience to their father, who had, like other Paymasters, used the funds of the Rum Corps to finance his personal purchases of Brush Farm and Canterbury Farm, but omitted to retain enough ready cash to pay the troops. As a result  William senior was obliged to sell nearly all his purchased land in 1807 and then to go to England to face a potential court-martial.  But no one could touch the Clarendon land, since it was granted to his sons.  Already by 1805 William had built a cottage there.  This was the core of Clarendon house.

Although it is usually said that Clarendon house was built about 1810, when William senior returned from his three-year visit to England, it is clear that there was a house there before William went off.  His son Edward was born ‘in the Hawkesbury’ in 1805.  In March 1806 William assisted in the rescue of his neighbour, George William Evans and his wife, whose house on the lowland was immersed by floodwaters and brought them up by boat to his house snugly located on the high land beside the common at the south end of his 200 acres

3. Location of Cox’s house (C) and Evans’ second house (E)

It is at this house that Rebecca with all her children except William junior spent the three years while her husband was in England.  For this is the only family property which William managed to rescue from the financial mess in 1806-1807.

On his return in 1810, cleared of blame, William entered on a period of great and increasing prosperity and developed Clarendon house in the 1810s and perhaps the 1820s in ways which can be recreated only in general terms.

 This photograph

4. Clarendon near Richmond, 1805-1820s, from south-eastPhotograph c. 1890

taken about 1890, shows the south-east side of the single-storey house, which then overlooked the common but would now overlook the air-force base.  When fully developed the house had some twelve rooms, all but two constructed in brick: this is my sketch plan based on Hardy Wilson’s manuscript of ninety years ago

5. Plan of Clarendon house, NSW,after Hardy Wilson3  

 
Clarendon had a stone-flagged entry on the north-west, distinguished by tall niches for vases or statues, and developed along the continuing hallways which form a central cross shape.  Part at least of the early house was in Flemish bond, alternating headers and stretchers in every row.  This was fortuitously recorded in a highly coloured sketch by Hardy Wilson, in the last years of the house’s existence

6. Clarendon house, brick coursesDrawn by Hardy Wilson, c.19134

The final addition, in stone instead of brick, was the north-east wing containing a long dining-room and an elegant sitting-room.  The transition to stone is visible on Frank Walker’s drawing of the house in terminal decay in 1898

7. Clarendon near Richmond, 1805-1820s, from south-eastDrawing by Frank Walker, c.1898

The east end of the sitting room is the part on the right.  Round the corner was the north-east verandah which gave a fine view across the Cox land down to the river with the Blue Mountains beyond

 
The north-eastern face of Clarendon, with its verandah supported by substantial columns, is shown in a photograph of the 1870s, which is unfortunately available only in a poor newspaper reproduction of the 1930s

9. Clarendon house, 1805-1820s, western verandah, from north-east Photograph 1870s

The people in the picture are Dights, not Coxes. The sitting-room is on the left of this image, the dining room on the right.  Hardy Wilson was much taken with these two rooms when he visited Clarendon about 1913 and replicated some features at his own house called Purulia in 1916.  In his own living-room Wilson duplicated the double cube dimensions of Cox’s dining-room, while the wainscotting in the Cox sitting-room was copied in Purulia’s sun-room

10. Hardy Wilson’s Purulia, 1916, with Clarendon-inspired wainscotting
Zeny Edwards, William Hardy Wilson, 2001, 171.


11. Panelling from Clarendon, NSW, in National Gallery of Victoria in 1920s5

In the dining-room and the sitting-room of Clarendon, the cedar woodwork had been painted white and gold, though which occupant did this is uncertain. 6    William Cox’s original Clarendon was a house of character.  This is the north-east  elevation of his dining-room, with the door leading to the verandah

12. Clarendon house, dining room elevation Hardy Wilson

There is another Wilson drawing, showing the wall between the dining-room and the sitting-room

13. Clarendon house, dining-room elevation, entry to sitting-room (right, cupboard; centre,
back of sitting-room fireplace; left, interconnecting door)Hardy Wilson

The doorway between the rooms is the one on the left.  The matching door on the right opened into a cupboard, while the arch in the middle was the back of the sitting-room fireplace.  In 1914, before the house partly fell down and was partly pushed over, Hardy Wilson persuaded the current owner, Philip Charley, to give some of the finer intact fittings to the National Gallery of Victoria.  There the ‘wainscotting, fireplace, window, door, cornice and brickwork’ were incorporated into the Clarendon Room, designed with the help of Hardy Wilson

14. Clarendon Room, National Gallery of Victoria, 1920s 7  

Though the Clarendon has long been dismantled, the fittings are still in store at the National Gallery of Victoria.

So, although Clarendon house disappeared more than ninety years ago, it is more recoverable than I thought when I began to plan this talk.  It was not a grand house, not an ostentatious house, but it reflected the solid achievement of a prosperous farmer, magistrate and entrepreneur: James Broadbent saw it as an important early bungalow. 8 As Ian Stephenson commented in a throwaway line, there is a ready comparison with the Macarthurs’ Elizabeth Farm at Parramatta, not least in the entrance hall. 9

There is an interesting contrast with the next-door house.  George William Evans had been sacked from his job as a government surveyor in February 1805 and had retreated to the large farm on the Hawkesbury which he had been granted in trust for his two infant daughters in 1804, on the same day as the Cox grant next door

15. Cox and Evans, land and houses at ClarendonCox red hatched; Evans edged in black

Evans built his first house imprudently down on the flood-prone lowland - the exact site is not known - but he rebuilt on the high land immediately adjacent to Cox’s Clarendon in 1806.  Because of the hysterical but understandable hydrophobia of his wife after she had been rescued from the roof-ridge of their first house during the major flood of March 1806, Evans built a two-storey house, completed over three stages between 1806 and 1810

This is the plan of both storeys as drawn by Graham Edds in 2005

17. G.W. Evans’ house, 1806-1810,plans by Graham Edds, 2005

The indented middle section, coloured green, came first, then the larger section on the left, coloured blue, and finally, no later than 1810, the large suite of rooms on the right with a cellar below

18. Evans’ house, north end, c.1810Photograph 1978

This is the rear view in 1978, before substantial changes were made to the skillions

19. Evans’ house, 1806-1810, rear view Photograph 1978

The house was well-sited, like its neighbour: this is the view of it which William Cox would have had on his return from England in 1810

20. Evans’ house, 1806-1810, rear view Photograph 2010

There is a lot to be discussed about Evans’ house, for it is, I think, the earliest surviving double-storey private house in Australia.  Internally all the rooms are meanly appointed and meanly sized compared to those in Clarendon, but historically Evans’ house is no less important and it has managed to survive remarkably intact.

The grant to Evans was originally only in trust for two of his children.  But this was adjusted in 1809 when the trusteeship was removed from the grant.  By contrast William Cox senior never obtained official title to Clarendon, but he always treated the property as his own and in his will in the 1830s he actually bequeathed it to George and this was not disputed by the real owners William junior and James, who were George’s brothers.  It is a shining example of how homogeneous the Cox family was.

This family spirit is also evident in the fate of Evans’ land.  Evans, after being away from the Hawkesbury for two decades, sold the whole of his grant to William Cox senior in 1835.  When old William died in 1837, both Clarendon and the eastern portion of Evans’ land were inherited by George Cox, but Evans’ remaining 263 acres to the west was bequeathed to James, who was just at that time building a new Clarendon here in Tasmania.  And James at once named his Hawkesbury estate Little Clarendon

21. Clarendon and Little Clarendon, 1837 to 1855

So in 1838 when the Tasmanian Clarendon was completed, it was mirrored by James’ own Little Clarendon on the Hawkesbury.  He does not seem to have built any homestead on the Hawkesbury, but retained the property until 1865, when he transferred it to a nephew, James Dalrymple Cox, who was an independent grazier in Mudgee. 10

The extensive holdings which the Coxes built up at Mulgoa on the Nepean are also evidence of this family solidarity.  William senior built a cottage in the Mulgoa Valley soon after he returned to New South Wales in 1810.  This is known simply as The Cottage, though the Coxes initially called it Fern Hill or Fern Hills and it developed by 1820 into a spacious bungalow

22. The Cottage, Mulgoa, 1810-1811,Photograph 1986

Introduction

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