Author: Cobbold, Robert Henry
Biography:
COBBOLD, Robert Henry (1820?-1893: ancestry.co.uk)
Poetic Description of the Festivities at Oakley Park (1832) has been attributed to Robert Knipe Cobbold (c. 1792-1859), a son of Elizabeth Cobbold and brother to Edward and Richard Cobbold (qq.v.). A manuscript note in the BL copy states that the poem is in fact by his eldest son, Robert Henry Cobbold, and he is now usually recorded as the poem’s author. Some sources give his birth year as 1816, making him sixteen when the poem was published. However, no record of his birth has been located and he was baptised at Eye, Suffolk, only on 14 Jan. 1820; if he was born in 1819 or 1820, it is just barely plausible that he wrote the poem when he was twelve or thirteen. His mother was Emily Mary Smith who married Robert Knipe Cobbold at St. Helen’s, Ipswich, on 26 Nov. 1814. He was educated at Shrewsbury school and matriculated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, on 28 June 1839 (BA 1843, MA 1846). He was ordained a deacon in 1844 and priest in 1845. He served as curate at Southwold, Suffolk; and Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, and published A Few Last Words to the Congregation of Melton-Mowbray Church in 1847 before leaving to be a missionary in Ningpo, China. He married Caroline Anne Brown in Bosmere, Suffolk, in 1852; they had eight children. Cobbold served as archdeacon in Ningpo 1856-58 and, on his return to England, was successively vicar of Field Dalling in Norfolk, rector of Broseley with Linley in Shropshire, and rector and vicar of Ross in Herefordshire. In 1885 he became a prebendary in Hereford. Cobbold died on 16 Sept. 1893 at Ross. His other publications include Pictures of the Chinese, Drawn by Themselves (1860). (ancestry.co.uk 17 Jan. 2024; CCEd 17 Jan. 1824; ACAD; Cobbold Family History Trust at cobboldfht.com 17 Jan. 2024) SR
Other Names:
- R. H. Cobbold