After his father's death in 1880, James Peter FitzPatrick (later self-selected Percy) left college to support his mother and her family. After working for some time as a clerk in Cape Town's Standard Bank, he travelled to the Eastern Transvaal goldfields in 1884, where he worked as a storeman, prospector's assistant and journalist as well as an ox-wagon transport-rider from the former Lourenço Marques to Lydenburg and Barberton. He later became editor of the "Gold Fields News" in Barberton. An account of FitzPatrick's adventures during this time, "Jock of the Bushveld", was published in 1907.