Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

66 No-ball! I referred earlier to various censuses in which Coxon appears, and there is one remaining surprise disclosed in the 1901 census. As already mentioned, most censuses referred in one way or another to his profession as a banker. But in 1901 his occupation is given as ‘artist, sculptor’, and suddenly a whole new string to his bow is revealed; sadly, one about which to date I have been able to discover very little. He does not earn a mention in the major dictionaries of artists, 43 but he was good enough to have exhibited a picture entitled Premiere Communiante at the Royal Academy in 1898. The internet, usually a good source on such matters, tells us nothing more of his life as an artist - though it is not difficult to find online a reproduction of his oil painting Seated woman in a hat , which sold for $1500 (against an estimate of $500-$1000) at an auction in the United States in May 2011. And there that line of enquiry ends. In 1911 Coxon was living the no-doubt-contented life of a retired gentleman in Kensington, but it would seem that this was not his final residence. Maybe it was the influence of his Catholic upbringing (already seen in the title of that 1898 painting), or of his Belgian wife, or of his third forename - or maybe it was a wish to live near other artists; but by 1921 he had moved abroad for one final time, to a property in France - at Neuilly-sur- Seine, towards the western edge of the conurbation of Paris. The area is described on Wikipedia today as being composed of mostly wealthy, select residential neighbourhoods, and we may safely assume that that was also the case a century ago, and draw our own inferences about the lifestyles of those who lived there. And it was here, at his home at 34 Avenue de Neuilly, that Ernest James Coxon died at 7.30am on 8 April 1921, at the age of only 63. His French death certificate gives no cause of death. Probate was granted to his younger brother Stanley, at the time a lieutenant-commander in the RNVR, whose name had appeared very occasionally in Cricket ’s scorecards of club matches in London in the later 1890s. His estate was valued at around £6,200, the equivalent of around £340,000 today. So he was comfortably off, but not an outstandingly rich man at his death; but one who had lived a highly varied life in many parts of the world, one who had apparently cheated death 32 years earlier - and if truth be told, one who was probably little if at all affected by that call of ‘no-ball’ on a May evening in Oxford back in 1890. But he still holds the distinction, if that is the right term, of being the only Briton to be no- balled out of top-class cricket in his very first match. … an Australian … Ernest Coxon’s Australian counterpart is Frank (Franklyn) Pitcher - an unfortunate surname if ever there was one. But if Coxon’s case passed largely unnoticed, the same cannot be said of Pitcher’s, which gave rise to ructions that lasted for some while after the event. 43 He is not, for example, listed among the 170,000 artists in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists , nor in Johnson & Greutzner’s Dictionary of British Artists 1880-1940. Neither is Robert Gregory, the artist who featured in the first volume of Brief Candles , included in either of these sources.