Letters to Alban Taylor Austin Dobson

Robert Dobson, following a multifaceted career as a soldier-poet, employee of the Ministry of Information in New York, Professor of English at Tokyo Imperial University and literary adviser to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in Hollywood, moved to Winchilsea, Sussex, in 1927, where he founded the Winchilsea and Icklesham Ratepayers' Association. On their behalf he conducted an extraordinary correspondence with a civil servant at the Ministry of Agriculture, Alban Dobson, son of the poet Austin Dobson, focussed on a politically polarised campaign about action to improve Winchilsea's sea defences. The letters are amusingly revealing in their portraits of local worthies, but their main value is the light they shed on the experience of a socialist campaigner in rural Sussex during the Labour administration of 1929-31.