John Cox Bray
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Sir John Bray KCMG |
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|---|---|
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| 2nd Leader of the Opposition (SA) | |
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In office 1884–1884 |
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| Preceded by | John Colton |
| Succeeded by | John Downer |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
John Cox Bray 31 May 1842 |
| Died | 13 June 1894 (aged 52) |
| Education | St Peter's College, Adelaide |
Sir John Cox Bray KCMG JP (31 May 1842 – 13 June 1894) was a prominent South Australian politician and the first native-born Premier of South Australia (1881–1884).
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 Families with British Ancestry: The Lineages of 1,600 Families of British Origin Now Resident in the United States of America, 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).
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