James Cox (11 October 1846, in Snodshill in

Chiseldon Chiseldon is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Swindon, Wiltshire, England. It takes its name from the Old English cisel dene, or gravel valley, being noted in the Domesday Book as ''Chiseldene''. The village lies on the edge of the ...

Wiltshire Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershire ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

– 19 July 1925, in

Greytown, New Zealand Greytown ( mi, Te Hūpēnui), population 2,202 (at the 2013 Census), is a rural town in the centre of the Wairarapa region of New Zealand, in the lower North Island. It is 80 km north-east of Wellington and 25 kilometres southwest of Mas ...

) was an English office worker and later a New Zealand

flax Flax, also known as common flax or linseed, is a flowering plant, ''Linum usitatissimum'', in the family Linaceae. It is cultivated as a food and fiber crop in regions of the world with temperate climates. Textiles made from flax are known in ...

worker,

swagman A swagman (also called a swaggie, sundowner or tussocker) was a transient labourer who travelled by foot from farm to farm carrying his belongings in a swag. The term originated in Australia in the 19th century and was later used in New Zeala ...

(itinerant labourer), and agricultural worker. He is remembered because of his extensive diary. Cox was the son of a prosperous small farmer. He became a clerical assistant for the

Great Western Railway Company The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a British railway company that linked London with the southwest, west and West Midlands of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament on 31 August 1835 and ran ...

. When in 1880 his mother sold the family farm (Cox was then 34, single, and living with his mother), he emigrated from England to New Zealand, living in

Christchurch Christchurch ( ; mi, Ōtautahi) is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand and the seat of the Canterbury Region. Christchurch lies on the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula on Pegasus Bay. The Avon River / ...

, New Zealand until 1888 and thereafter in the

North Island The North Island, also officially named Te Ika-a-Māui, is one of the two main islands of New Zealand, separated from the larger but much less populous South Island by the Cook Strait. The island's area is , making it the world's 14th-largest ...

, where he worked in a flax mill. The mill closed in 1890 and thereafter Cox lived a hand-to-mouth existence, a hard life of vagrancy, intermittent and arduous labour, and poverty. He was buried in an unmarked grave, but a headstone was placed for him at Greytown Cemetery in 2013. After 1888, he kept a very detailed diary, the surviving portion being about 800,000 words. The diary offers a unique and valuable account of New Zealand working class life of the period. Miles Fairburn wrote a 1995 book, ''Nearly Out of Heart and Hope'', based on Cox's diaries. Cox's dairies were featured in the 2013 exhibition "Logs to blogs" at the

Alexander Turnbull Library The National Library of New Zealand ( mi, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) is New Zealand's legal deposit library charged with the obligation to "enrich the cultural and economic life of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations" (''Nat ...

in Wellington. Cox was the cousin of nature writer

Richard Jefferies John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influ ...

; as teens, Cox and Jefferies set off on an unsuccessful adventure, first planning to walk to Moscow and, this having failed, to sail to America, which also proved impossible.

References

External links

Cox's Twitter feed

References

External links

Further reading