Robert K. Dawson (surveyor)

For the U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works), see Robert K. Dawson (public official).

Colonel Robert Kearsley Dawson CB (1798 – 1861) was an English surveyor and cartographer of the Corps of Royal Engineers.^[1]

Robert Kearsley Dawson CB
Born	1798 Dover, England
Died	28 March 1861(1861-03-28) (aged 62–63) Lee Grove, Blackheath, London[1]
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Branch	Board of Ordnance
Years of service	1816–1853[1]
Rank	Colonel
Service number	548[1]
Unit	Corps of Royal Engineers
Awards	Companion of the Order of the Bath[1]
Relations	Robert Dawson (father)

Early life

Robert K. Dawson was born in 1798 in Dover.^[2] His father was Robert Dawson, a surveyor.^[2] He studied at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.^[2]

Career

Dawson was commissioned in the Corps of Royal Engineers as 2nd Lieutenant on 1 March 1816, and between 1819 and 1829 took part in the triangulation and mapping of Ireland and Scotland under Thomas Colby.^[3]

In 1831, he was recalled to England to survey the boundaries of the proposed Parliamentary Boroughs for the Great Reform Act, producing a series of one-inch and two-inch maps that are preserved in two volumes in the British Library.^[3]

• 
  The proposed Parliamentary Borough of Birmingham, surveyed by Dawson in 1831 for the Great Reform Act
• 
  Bewdley from the Ordnance Survey
• 
  Horsham from the Ordnance Survey
• 
  Oxford from the Ordnance Survey

Death

He died at Lee Grove, Blackheath, London, on 28 March 1861.^[1][2]

See also

• Unknown (1862). "Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Obituary. Colonel Robert Kearsley Dawson, C.B., R.E., 1798-1861". Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers. 21 (1862): 582–584. doi:10.1680/imotp.1862.23428.
• Andrews, John Harwood (1975). A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in the Nineteenth Century. Clarendon Press.