Ernest Cox

Ernest Frank Guelph Cox (1883–1959) was an English engineer, with knowledge in electrical and mechanical engineering, which he notably deployed in marine salvage. Between 1924 and 1931 his Cox & Danks Shipbreaking Co. successfully raised 35 ships of the German Imperial Navy High Seas Fleet that had been scuttled at Gutter Sound, Scapa Flow, in 1919. A tough but caring employer, after a series of fatalities and accidents to his employees, Cox sold his marine salvaging business to the Alloa Shipbreaking Company in 1932. He remained a consultant to the British Admiralty throughout his remaining career, and retired in the early 1950s after selling his profitable scrap metal business to Metal Industries Group.

Born in 1883, the eleventh son of a Wolverhampton draper, Cox left school at thirteen but chose to study electrical engineering in his spare time, and through a succession of jobs, earned himself the post of Engineer at a Wolverhampton power station by the age of eighteen. Deciding that anyone who could put electricity into peoples homes would become rich, Cox was determined to be just that, and moved to the post of Assistant Engineer at Leamington, and from there to Ryde Corporation on the Isle of Wight. In doing so he learned the art of salesmanship, selling electrical power installation to the inhabitants of Ryde.

From Ryde he moved to Hamilton, Scotland at the age of twenty-three, a change of position that taught him the rudiments of management. Moving yet again, this time to Wishaw in Lanarkshire, he took what was to be his last salaried job, laying down plant and network as Chief Engineer, aged just twenty-four. It was here in 1907 that Cox married the daughter of Wishaw Councillor Miller, the owner of Overton Forge, a Lanarkshire steelworks, and joined the firm as a partner. Unable to leave his post at the power station, he carried out both jobs simultaneously.

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