IN 1861 Reuben Glanville Cock was living in the Middlehill area of Pensilva, he was aged 16 and working as a lead miner alongside his father and an elder brother.

At only 10 years old his sister Maria was working as a Copper Ore Dresser. Reuben spent several months of 1864 incarcerated in Bodmin Gaol where he was sent to work in the Gaol’s Corn Mill. His offence was ‘trespassing on Darley Farm in Linkinhorne in pursuit of game’. He was described as a ‘dissenter and pockmarked’.

The year after his discharge, Reuben married Elizabeth Jane Richards in Liskeard and a few weeks later, on April 8, 1865, the newly-weds boarded the ‘Peeress’ at Plymouth heading for Port Adelaide, South Australia, on an Emigrants’ Free Passage. The voyage lasted three months and one day, during which three of the 331 ‘souls’ on board died, and three babies were born, delivered by the ship’s surgeon.

Reuben found work in the copper mining district of Moonta, but soon settled in the farming area of Kadina, where Elizabeth gave birth to a son eight months after leaving Plymouth. Another son arrived two years later, but sadly Elizabeth died in childbirth. From the records of the Registrar of the Land Office, on September 2, 1869, Reuben was granted a ‘commonage licence’ which allowed him to graze one ‘Great Cattle’ and four ‘Small Cattle’ on his plot of land. In the same month Reuben re-married, to Mary Jane Glanville; they went on to produce three sons and seven daughters.

Reuben wasn’t great at completing his paperwork; in September 1876 his land ‘had become liable to forfeiture due to having failed to complete the statutory returns of improvements’. He mended his ways and was able to keep his land, eventually retiring to Woodville, a suburb of Adelaide, where he died in 1904 aged 60.