Extract from A Wrack Behind: Myself, when young

Extract

I was born on 6 June 1902, in Handsworth, a borough in Staffordshire, which in 1911 became part of Greater Birmingham. Handsworth, in those Edwardian days, could be described as a dormitory suburb of Birmingham. Its character is now vastly changed and today it houses large numbers of our immigrant population.

My father, William John Roxbee Cox, is described on his marriage certificate as a master jeweller and indeed was, at the time of his wedding, working with his father, Samuel James Cox, a reasonably prosperous manufacturing jeweller in Birmingham. Samuel had married an American lady, Emily Power Jones, who was, I believe, distantly related to him, and my father was their only child.

My mother was Amelia Stern, the third child of Henry Stern, a Pole who became a naturalised Englishman. My memory of him is vague but pleasant. I think he must have been a nice man. He was an engraver on glass. He died of pneumonia in 1904 at the age of 54. His brother Louis became a Church of England parson, but did not achieve major preferment.