Life
He was born at Plymouth, the eldest son of George Clarisse Dobson, a civil engineer, of French descent. When he was about eight, the family moved to Holyhead, and his first school was at Beaumaris in Anglesey. He was later educated at Coventry, and the Gymnase, Strasbourg. He returned at the age of sixteen with the intention of becoming a civil engineer. (His younger brother James would in fact become a noted engineer, helping complete the Buenos Aires harbour works in the 1880s and 1890s.) At the beginning of his career, he continued to study at the South Kensington School of Art, in his spare time, but without definite ambition. In December 1856 he entered the Board of Trade, gradually rising to the rank of principal in the harbour department, from which he retired in the autumn of 1901. In 1868, he had married Frances Mary, daughter of the distinguished civil engineer Nathaniel Beardmore (1816–1872) of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and settled at Ealing. He died in 1921 and is buried in the Westminster Cemetery, Uxbridge Rd, Hanwell, Middlesex.
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“His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.”
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