Josephine Cox, who has died aged 82, could have stepped out of the pages of a novel by Catherine Cookson or Barbara Taylor Bradford. Brought up in poverty with a father who drank his wages, she earned pennies from storytelling and went on to write more than 60 novels that sold more than 20m copies, beginning in her late 40s with Her Father’s Sins. Her most recent, Two Sisters, was published in February, though it is likely there will be posthumous publications.
Cox was one of the most borrowed authors and therefore one of the biggest earners of the Public Lending Right scheme, and her childhood experience of poverty ensured she was a champion of the library service. Invited to a reception at No 10, she gave the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, a piece of her mind, jabbing his chest and reminding him that poor people could not afford to buy books. As austerity devastated the service, she wrote to MPs, telling them that libraries weren’t “just somewhere to borrow a book; they are cultural and very necessary”. A plaque outside Blackburn Central Library records her work as a patron of Darwen borough library services.
“She thought working-class women were being disenfranchised,” said Luigi Bonomi, her literary agent, who witnessed the Downing Street haranguing. “In another life she’ would have been a Labour politician fighting for women.” She thought Barbara Castle, the MP for Blackburn for 34 years and later Lady Castle of Blackburn, was “terrific”.
Cox never forgot her roots, nor did success make her grand. She remained a cheap date for publishers – happiest with a pub lunch of Diet Coke and a bowl of chips – and had no interest in fancy launch parties, preferring community events that were free to attend, with everyone served tea and cakes. Buying a book was not obligatory, but most did. Such dos always ended with an old-time sing-song; as did her publishers’ Christmas lunches, to the embarrassment of the top brass.
Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, Josephine was the daughter of Bernard Brindle and his wife, Mary (nee Harrison), one of 10 children crammed into a mill house. Her father worked for Blackburn corporation, and Jo was proud that he looked after the Blackburn Rovers ground. But he drank, and she was often dispatched to the pub to drag him home, which she did, after singing a song or two from atop the bar, collecting a few coins in a flat cap, which she would take home to her mother.
Bernard could be an unpleasant drunk: as she told me in an interview in 1994, “He would come home in the early hours and get violent. I’d go down to the constabulary to fetch a policeman. It happened so often they knew me!” Eventually, Mary did a midnight flit, taking the girls south to Dunstable, Bedfordshire, to stay with relatives and leaving the boys with their father.
Between births, her mother worked in the mills and Jo was “little mother hen”, feeling a duty to contribute to the family exchequer. “Every Friday, the children would come along and we’d sit in the rubble at the bottom of Derwent Street … If they hadn’t brought a penny they couldn’t stay.” The audiences for her tales provided enough money for a loaf and a couple of days’ gas.
Cox always remembered the encouragement she received from her English teacher, who, awarding her an essay prize, told the school that “one day the world will read your stories”. Putting aside her own ambitions to teach, Jo left school aged 14 to work in “a rat-infested factory”. At a fireworks party, she met Ken Cox, and they married when she was 16.
Settled, with two sons, Cox attended night school and then teacher-training college, teaching for 14 years at Bletchley College (now part of Milton Keynes College, in Buckinghamshire). When Ken found himself out of a job, she became the family breadwinner. The stress made her ill, and during a lengthy stay in hospital she began working on the novel she had always promised herself she would write. It was Ken who insisted she find a publisher.
In 1987 her luck changed. Cox was named Superwoman of Great Britain, an award acknowledging achievement in the face of adversity, for which the family had secretly entered her. And Headline, a brand new publisher aimed squarely at the mass-market, bought her novel. The advance paid for a new suite of furniture, and by the mid-90s, with a dozen novels published at the rate of two a year, the money was “pouring in”. She and Ken rebuilt the cottage in Woburn, Bedfordshire, that the council had assigned them as “a tumbledown wreck”, and she made her only luxury purchase: a speedboat for Ken.
“He’d always wanted one and I felt I’d treated myself by treating him.” Every novel was “For Ken”.
“Write what you know, write from the heart,” Cox would tell students. And that’s what she did, beginning with the characters, usually flawed, and always based on someone she had known. Bonomi said Cox was “one of the few authors I’ve met who had an instinctive rapport with her author base. Violence, infidelities, betrayal, murder – and hope: her books were about how people lived, a world of intense communities with dramas and secrets. It was EastEnders for northern England.”
At the outset, booksellers were snobbish. The game changer for Cox, and others like her, was the 1994 breaching of the net book agreement, which enabled the price-promotion of books. Supermarkets piled in, Cox a beneficiary of the sales boom. In 2003, after 30 novels (six as Jane Brindle, drawing on her mother’s middle name), she moved to HarperCollins with The Beachcomber, writing one book a year and publishing in hardback, not as a paperback original. Nobody could afford to ignore her. She was that rare thing– “a brand”.
Despite this level of success, Cox personally answered every one of the “sackful” of letters, perhaps despatching a bouquet to someone who was bereaved, or – frequently – enclosing a cheque for a thousand or two that enabled a school to buy books. “She’d say that if people took the time to write to me I should find the time to write back. She barely slept, and she’d spend two hours every day writing letters,” Bonomi said. “She had sympathy for working-class women and their lives, for up-against-it single mothers trying to feed their kids when their husbands had left them. She wanted them to stand up and be proud.”
Ken died in 2002. She is survived by her sons, Wayne and Spencer.
Josephine Cox, author, born 15 July 1938; died 17 July 2020
