Shadrach was probably the son of Captain Thomas Fox, who appears in the accounts of Philip Foley in 1669 as buying tough pig iron,[1] In the 1690s, Shadrach was renting the Coalbrookdale ironworks and supplying shot (for cannon) to the Board of Ordnance.
His brother Thomas Fox had worked that company as founder near London, casting grenado shells and shot for the Board in 1693, after which Thomas became warden of the Fleet Prison, in which he stored 'bombs and grenado shells', probably ones empty of gunpowder.
In 1701 he placed his brother in charge of another blast furnace, at Wombridge to which Isaac Hawkins supplied a large quantity of coal and ironstone, which suggests that they smelted iron with coke.
[2] After leaving Coalbrookdale, Shadrach had an interest in a corn mill near London and worked as a founder casting shells for contractors, probably supplying the East India Company.
He travelled by way of Archangel, but died in the course of his first winter in Russia, leaving a destitute widow in England and several children, of whom his son Mesech served as a soldier and later sought to recover his father's property (but there was none).