Ten siblings, their letters, and a great-grandchild's notes.
Through the Machell Cox siblings' own circulating letters, the show follows one English family from a big Wolverhampton house in 1912, to a mission in what was then Nyasaland, to the celebrations of 1945. A great-grandchild of one sibling reads the letters and adds notes on places, people and questions still unanswered.
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100 Years of Cox tells a family's history mostly in the family's own words. Those words come from the letters the ten Machell Cox siblings sent one another, which they called the 'budget' and which were still going round the globe in 1945. A great-grandchild of Edmund, one of the older brothers, chooses the letters, reads them out and adds dates, places and plain-spoken notes. Enid was the eldest. After Edmund came Arthur, Neville and Wilfred, then a younger set that included Bernard and Aldwyn. Aldwyn's letters come from furthest away. He was an Anglican clergyman with the UMCA, a mission run jointly by Cambridge and Oxford universities. He worked on its steamships in what was then Nyasaland and later became sub-dean of St Peter's Cathedral on an island in the middle of the lake. A two-part story, which the storyteller sums up as a crocodile and a murder, follows the death of his friend and colleague Padre Arthur Douglas in 1911. It goes on through the trial that held up Aldwyn's leave and his steamer voyage home by way of Zanzibar and Naples. The storyteller admits to not knowing where that trial was held or what happened to the Portuguese official involved, and asks anyone who finds out to get in touch. The small moments matter as much. Boys at the island mission pick out family members from photographs pinned to a cloth-covered board and admire Neville's and Bernard's moustaches. An episode set in 1912 visits the big old house in Wolverhampton where Enid lived with her husband Cyril, a schools inspector. The house is gone, and the storyteller shows where it stood by the streets that now cover the site. In a letter from Sydenham that October, Bernard describes Avis and Vera plunging into a little wood after blackberries and coming back with purple-stained lips. An episode on 1945, prompted by the eightieth anniversary of VE Day and VJ Day, gathers VE Day celebrations in Stamford, the siblings' reactions to the atomic bombs and their comments on the July general election. It also includes a letter about the Treasury questioning two repair bills for coal scuttles at a large hostel, until the writer proposes sending both scuttles to London. Another episode follows transport through the family's papers. It starts with Matilda, a third great-grandmother, travelling by carriage with a chaperone in the 1820s, and moves on through dog carts, governess carts and bicycles to motor cars. Along the way it finds room for a 1911 dinner with a new headmaster, the father of a future novelist, which Bernard thought not a very lively occasion. Vera, the storyteller's great-grand-aunt, writes in wartime of missing her family and of how welcome the budget letters are. Present-day asides are kept short: research at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a talk on Vera at Great Comp in Kent, and a stop in Hobart, Tasmania, once a departure point for Antarctic expeditions. The appeal is the detail of ordinary life: ice in a flower vase despite a gas fire, Arthur's oldest holiday clothes falling apart, and a favourite sibling cheerfully admitted to.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes history told through ordinary letters, with the small domestic comedy left in, and who is happy to follow one relative's story across consecutive episodes. It also fits anyone curious about English family life and mission work abroad in the early twentieth century.
What sets it apart: Rather than a historian's overview, it is one family's own letters read by a descendant, who adds notes on places, archive research and honest admissions about what is still unknown. History comes through coal scuttles, moustaches and blackberries as much as through wars and elections.
I am telling the story of ten siblings from the Machell Cox family, through the letters they wrote to each other. They were born in England between 1868 and 1884; seven of them lived in England and three lived abroad, in the Colonies. One of the siblings was my great grandfather.
The Treasury demands proof of two coal scuttles; you get history with its petty paperwork intact.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Oxford observations and Vera's letters make a quiet, detailed record of hockey, war, and everyday family history.
Oxford gives the episode its shape, as the narrator returns to the Bodleian Library after 16 years of reading there on and off, then moves by the river, through Christchurch Meadow, into Evensong, and past the small dislocation of Oxford time.
Wartime victory is seen through family letters, returning prisoners, early flowers, and a coal-scuttle dispute with the Treasury.
An 80th-anniversary instalment of 100 Years of Cox looks at the end of World War II through the scattered lives of the Matril Cox siblings. VE Day is set against the war still continuing with Japan, while family letters place the circle across Malawi, Derbyshire, Surrey,…
Aldwyn's coffin-like sofa bunk anchors a delayed journey full of letters, travel, family alarm, and discomfort.
Aldwyn's delayed return to England gives the episode a firm center. After the death of his friend and colleague Padre Arthur Douglas, he stays at La Coma while the bishop and Padre Glossop go to the trial.
Aldwyn's island letter moves from mission routine and family photographs to sleeping sickness and a troubling report about Reverend Arthur Douglas.
Aldwyn's life on an island in Lake Nyassa is shaped here through a letter that begins in mission routine and gradually gives way to the threat of sleeping sickness, then to a troubling report involving Reverend Arthur Douglas.
Virginia history by lineage, law, and memory.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
This episode of 100 Years of Cox moves between Oxford, Great Comp in Kent, and Vera's wartime letters, with Duke Humphreys Library, the Bodleian, and the Bridge of Sighs all named in the research sections.
Cuthbert Cox, 64, prepares to retire from Berkhamsted School at Christmas 1945 after more than 140 applications for his post, and he later welcomes his successor, Captain Evers.
Bernard calls Roger’s wartime work “the best kept secrets of the war.”
100 Years of Cox follows Aldwyn’s 1912 letters from La Coma, Tanga, the Red Sea, and Sydenham, with the family tracking his steamship delays and his return to England.
SHOW: 100 Years of Cox, episode S4E10, follows Aldwyn Cox’s letters from Nyasaland in 1911 and 1912, when he is moving from Kota Kota to Lacoma Island and reporting mission life.
Letters from 1912 document Enid and Cyril's End Hall, where tennis parties, 100 French rosebushes, pears, and toffee shaped family visits.
The family's 1907 budget letters repeatedly joke about Bernard, Avis and Aldwyn diving into a hedge when they first met a motorcar on the Isle of Wight in the late 1890s.
Frances Thompson narrates the story of the Machell Cox siblings through their letters, starting with their father's genealogical research.
Frances Thompson reads and discusses letters from the Machell Cox family budget written in June 1908.
A podcast narrating the story of ten siblings from the Machell Cox family through their decades-long correspondence.
This episode reads and discusses letters from the Machell Cox family's circular letter 'The Family Budget' from February and March 1908.