John Cox Bray - Early Life

Early Life

Born in East Adelaide, South Australia, Bray was the second of four sons (with two daughters) of early immigrants to the new colony. His father, Tom Cox Bray (1815–1881), was a native of Portsmouth, Hampshire, and his mother, Sarah Pink (1813–1877), was from the same county (her father, William Pink (died 1853), also settled in Adelaide, and was employed as a labourer in the Survey of South Australia). The couple were married at St Mary's parish church, Portsea, Hampshire, on 22 July 1838, just prior to their embarkation for Australia in the Prince George.

In the early years in Adelaide, T.C. Bray worked as a shoemaker, following in the footsteps of his own father, William Bray, who, rather than being a captain in the Royal Navy as is traditionally claimed, in fact, worked as a cordwainer and cabinet maker prior to his early death in 1816, aged about 26 years.

The Bray family appears to have moved to the Portsmouth area from the Isle of Wight, in contradiction to the very garbled accounts of their origins to be found in Burke's Colonial Gentry (1891–1895), volume 2, under "Bray of Adelaide", and in the American Supplement (1939) to Burke's Landed Gentry (1937 edition), now renamed Burke's American Family Records with British Ancestry, and found under "Bray" (covering the career and descent of Professor William Crowell Bray (1879–1946), head of the Chemistry department at the University of California, Berkeley, who belonged to the Canadian branch of the Bray family which had been established in Upper Canada in 1839 by William Bray, J.P., R.N. (1814–1882), a gunnery officer in the Royal Navy, and the elder brother of T.C. Bray).

Educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide and in England, Bray read law in South Australia, and was called to the South Australian Bar in November 1870. Meanwhile, his parents, elder brother and sisters returned to England, due to an improvement in their circumstances said to be the result of T.C. Bray's having inherited shipping interests from his paternal grandfather, possibly George Bray (elsewhere called Charles Bray), who had disapproved of his son's marriage to Ann Cox (1789–1840), later Winship, daughter of a farmer from Southsea, Hampshire.

Once in England, the family lived in comfort first at Blackheath in Kent, and later at Harrogate, the Yorkshire spa town in which Mrs Bray died. The elder son, Thomas William Bray (1840–1887), was sent to Clare College, Cambridge, and later became an Anglican clergyman. He was father of Sir Denys Bray (1875–1951), K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E., C.B.E., sometime Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, and Indian delegate to the League of Nations during the British colonial period.

T.C. Bray lived the rest of his life as a gentleman, moving to Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire in Scotland, where he had descendants in the mid 1980s. He died in Scotland and his will was proved in Scotland and South Australia. Descendants include Sir John Henry Kerr, colonial governor in India, David Russell, classical guitarist, and Piers Sellers, astronaut.