Cox, 60, has overcome incredible hardship to get to where she is today. One of 10 children, she was born in Blackburn, Lancashire. Her parents split up when she was 14, and Cox moved south to Dunstable in Bedfordshire with her mother and seven of her siblings.
She married when she was 16. For years, she and her husband, Ken, struggled to make ends meet. Ken’s haulage company went bust in the recession of the early 1970s, and the couple, who by that time had two young sons, lost their house.
Cox worked in a plastics factory, but decided that she wanted to catch up on the education she had missed out on as a teenager — she had left school at the age of