Fox, C. E. (Charles Elliot), 1878-1974

The Rev. Dr. C. E. Fox was born in Dorset, England in 1878, and was educated in New Zealand. He joined the Melanesian Mission from New Zealand and was posted to the Mission's school on Norfolk Island in 1902. After being ordained in 1903, he spent some time in the Banks Group of the New Hebrides before going to San Cristobal, Solomon Islands in 1908 where he began a school and started learning the local languages. He remained in the Solomons throughout the Pacific war, living behind Japanese lines. After the war, he continued as a teacher and remained in the Solomons until well into his eighties.

Biography

Charles Elliot Fox, British missionary in Melanesia, was born in Stalbridge, Dorset, England in 1878. He was educated in New Zealand and graduated from the University of New Zealand in 1901. In 1902 he received a degree in theology from St. John's College in Aukland. He joined the staff of the Anglican Melanesian Mission in 1903 and was ordained the same year. During his more than seventy years of service as a missionary and teacher, Fox lived and worked in most of the islands of the Solomon chain, on the Banks, and in the New Hebrides.

Fox's activities embraced a much wider field than the customary missionary tasks of teaching and baptizing. During his first assignment of duty, as housemaster at St. Barnabas School on Norfolk Island, from 1903 to 1911, he was introduced to the new science of anthropology by the British Anthropologist R.H. Rivers. Fox's association with Rivers, which lasted until Rivers' death in 1922, contributed to Fox's interest in the scientific study of Melanesian culture.

Fox did much of his work on the island of St. Cristobal, in the Solomon chain, where he lived from 1911 to 1924. There and elsewhere in Melanesia he acquired a thorough knowledge of many Austronesian languages. He wrote dictionaries of the languages of Arosi, Mota, Lau, and Gela, and grammars for Arosi and Gela. Fox also published many scientific papers on the comparative linguistics of the Austronesian languages.

In 1932 Fox declined an offer of the post of Bishop of the Melanesian Missionary Church. In the same year he was admitted as the only white member to the Melanesian Brotherhood, an Anglican monastic order founded by indigenous Melanesians and dedicated to the principles of the church. In 1962 Fox's autobiography, Kakamora, was published in London. The title came from the name of a major spiritual being of the Arosi culture. Fox's last major work, THE STORY OF THE SOLOMONS (1967), was intended to describe Melanesian culture and history to native schoolchildren. He died in 1974.

Through his anthropological research and his linguistic studies, Charles Fox gained empathy and respect for the culture of the Melanesians. He took the position that superimposition of English civilization could not effect a permanent conversion of the Melanesian mind to Christian thinking. Transformation of the Melaniesians, he thought, must begin with the recognition of the environmental and historical influences that had conditioned their minds.