Life
George Witherage Cotton was born on 4 February 1821 at Staplehurst in Kent, England to Samuel and Lydia Cotton. He was apprenticed to a carpenter and studied at Wesley College, Sheffield. After working in London he migrated with his parents to South Australia in 1848. His wife and son died soon after their arrival and in 1848 he married Elizabeth Mitchell with whom he had nine children.
Cotton worked as a carpenter at Willunga and store-keeper on Hindmarsh Island before becoming a successful land agent in Adelaide. In 1865 he called a meeting of laymen of the Wesleyan Church to consider the purchase of a site for a Wesleyan college. This was to become Prince Alfred College and Cotton the founding Secretary.
In 1879 Cotton retired from business, and was elected to office in the Legislative Council (Upper House) elections of 1882 (at the age of 61). In the depression years following he took an interest in the unemployed and in land reform. Cotton developed a working men's blocks scheme in which the government would offer blocks of up to 20 acres (81,000 m2) of crown land at low rents. Income from such blocks would eventually be adequate to support a family, forming the basis of a new society of independent producers and co-operative associations.
In 1885 the South Australian government began to implement Cotton's plan. Blocks were surveyed and occupied in many parts of the colony, from Adelaide suburbs and country town fringes to the open country. In 1896 about 12,900 people, or nearly 4 per cent of the population, lived on them.
Cotton also championed the state bank, technical education, a strong government department of labour and boards of conciliation and arbitration. He was short-tempered and not an effective speaker despite being widely read. In the 1880s he left the Wesleyans, whose indifference to reform enraged him, and declared a new faith: 'I worship a living Christ in the person of every child, however it may have been born into the world'.
He died at Adelaide on 15 December 1892.
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