Francis Fox of St Germans

Francis Fox of St Germans was the progenitor of a vast clan of people called "Fox", notable in many fields of enterprise, science and the arts. He was an early convert to the Quaker faith, to which many of later generations were also true.
Origins
Burke, in his History of the commoners, states "that the numerous families of Fox at present residing in the West of England sprang from one common ancestor, a Francis Fox, who married 1646, Dorothy Kekewich." Tradition represents him to have come from Wiltshire (it is said from the parish of Farley or that of Pitton), somewhere in 1645, during the commotions of the civil war. He is stated to have been descended from the same family as the celebrated Sir Stephen Fox, ancestor of the Earls of Ilchester and the Lords Holland. It is likewise handed down that he was one of seven or eight sons, and that others of the same family also came into Devonshire and Cornwall, settling at Plymouth and Looe, but left no sons who survived.
Settling down
After marrying in 1646 he lived at Catchfrench, a 16th-century manor house belonging to the Kekewiches. Catchfrench is about three miles (5 km) from St Germans, where Francis was a clothier. It is about the same distance from Menheniot, where George Fox held his first Cornish meetings. George Fox brought the Quaker message to Cornwall in 1655 and it was then or a little later that Francis and his family joined the Society of Friends. His son, also Francis, married Tabitha Croker in 1686. They had three sons and four daughters.
Their progeny settled and were successful in business and the professions in Wadebridge, Wellington and Brislington in Somerset, Exeter, Plymouth and Kingsbridge in Devon.
Children of first marriage of George Fox of Par to Mary Bealing
*Edward Fox (born 1719) of Wadebridge, married Anna Were (1719-1788). They had nine children, including
**George Fox (11 July 1746 - 22 June 1816) of Perranarworthal near Falmouth, Cornwall, merchant
The House and the Mill
The Wellington Foxes built a large textile mill and a grand house at Tone Dale House, Wellington, Somerset (which is now part of the Big House Co).
The mill is currently being converted into residential apartments. The brochure says:
"The 12.6 acre former woollen textile mill complex is a brownfield site featuring a range of Grade II and Grade II* listed buildings. Established in 1790 by the Fox family, Tonedale Mill was the largest integrated mill in the South West, producing woollen and worsted fabrics.
It became a site of national importance during the Boer War when the Tonedale dyers developed the ‘khaki’ dye - given the royal seal of approval by the then Prince of Wales in 1900 - which led to the end of British soldiers’ ‘redcoats’.
At its peak, Tonedale Mill employed some 4,500 people and exported fabrics around the world. It also provided livelihoods for other related trades on the site, including bookbinders, basket weavers, stonemasons and metalworkers. From the 1950s, manufacturing at Britain’s mills went into decline. The deafening noise of the powerlooms housed in Tonedale’s weaving sheds was heard no more once production on the site ceased by the end of the 1990s, although the firm of Fox Brothers and Company Ltd still exists and operates in a nearby location to this day. The history of the family was documented by Charles Henry Fox in Chronicles Of Tonedale: Two Centuries Of Family History (1879).
Part of the mill complex is still open today - the Coldharbour Mill museum in Uffculme, which supplier worsted yarn for the weaving looms of Wellington.
List of notable descendants
*Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet
*Jonathan Backhouse
*Roger Backhouse
*Timothy Beaumont, Baron Beaumont of Whitley
*
*Andrew Ellicott
*
*Joseph Ellicott
*
*Harriet Findlay
*Sir Edmund Findlay, 2nd Baronet
*Fox family of Falmouth
*Alfred Fox
*Anna Maria Fox
*Barclay Fox
*Ben Fox
*Caroline Fox
*
*Dr Charles James Fox
*Charles Masson Fox
*Edward Long Fox
*Gerald Fox
*Howard Fox
*Joseph Fox the elder
*Joseph Fox the younger
*Josiah Fox
*Robert Barclay Fox
*Robert Were Fox the Elder
*Robert Were Fox the Younger
*Thomas Fox
*Victoria Fox
*Dr Wilson Fox
*John Eliot Gardiner
*Michael Gresford Jones
*Howard Hodgkin
*Sir Alfred Pease, 2nd Baronet
*Jack Pease, 1st Baron Gainford
*Joseph Pease, 2nd Baron Gainford
*Joseph Pease, 3rd Baron Gainford
*Francis Fox Tuckett
Further reading
* Pamela Rosemary Richardson - The West Country Fox family : a study of provincial English Quakerism 1840-1920, 2007. - 2 v. : ill., map, ports. ; 30 cm., Thesis (PhD) - University of Exeter, 2007 - Locations: Library of the University of Exeter, The library at Friends House, London, the Courtney Library at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, Cornwall.

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