Ernest Cox - Later Life

Later Life

Cox spent the remainder of his days supporting charities, organising and giving lectures on deepwater salvage, including the High Seas Fleet.

In failing health, Ernest Cox died in 1959 at the age of seventy-six. Though his salvage business never quite broke even during the course of the salvage of the German fleet (he was ten thousand pounds out of pocket at the sale of his interests), his scrap metal business offset the loss by turning considerable profit; whilst Cox was frequently assumed to be a poor businessman who did not understand business efficiency, it is also true that he suffered from an astonishing amount of bad luck in the varying degrees of difficulty of ship salvage that ensures that no two lifts are ever the same. The rise and fall of the price of scrap frequently ate up the best of his profits during the long salvage operation. Accidents that were as much the fault of the elements as of human error plagued the salvage. Despite all this, his yard at Lyness on the Orkney Island of Hoy employed 200 workers at the peak of his business, and he was noted for granting holidays with pay during times of financial hardship.