Chester Francis Cobb

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Chester Francis Cobb (8 June 1899 – 17 February 1943) was an Australian-born English novelist and journalist. He was born in Waverley, Sydney, to Joseph Septimus Cobb, a chemist who had emigrated from England, and Rosalie Thomasina Kate Cockburn. He attended Sydney Grammar School but left early to work as a reporter for The Daily Telegraph. In 1921, after a small inheritance from his mother, he moved to Oxfordshire, England, and took up poultry farming. He married Barbara Anne Convy in 1924 and never returned to live in Australia.

Cobb published two novels: Mr. Moffatt (1925) and Days of Disillusion (1926). He began a third novel that was never published. His writing drew on his Australian experiences and he is noted as the first Australia-born novelist to use stream of consciousness in his work, a technique connected to his interest in religion and spiritual questioning that leaned toward theosophy while he was in England.

Besides writing, Cobb’s main income came from poultry farming, though he later worked as a sub-editor on The Countryman. He died on 17 February 1943 in Oxford after a gallbladder operation at Radcliffe Infirmary, aged 43. His novels, though short, explored personal and spiritual journeys and reflected his life between Australia and England.