Coningsby Dawson

Coningsby Dawson (26 February 1883 – 10 August 1959) was an Anglo-American novelist and soldier of the Canadian Field Artillery, born at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England. Dawson attended Merton College, Oxford, matriculating in 1902 and taking a second-class degree in Modern History in 1905. He spent a year taking a theological course at Union Seminary but decided on a career as a writer.

In the same year, he went to America, where he did special work for English newspapers on Canadian subjects, traveling widely during the period. He lived in Taunton, Massachusetts, from 1906 to 1910, when he became a literary adviser to the George H. Doran Publishing Company. At his parents' home in Taunton, Massachusetts, he wrote poems, short stories, and three novels: Garden Without Walls (1913), an immediate success, followed by The Raft and Slaves of Freedom.

In 1906 while traveling in western Canada collecting material for magazine articles, Coningsby stayed in Nelson, British Columbia. He was impressed with the beauty of the Kootenays and sent a telegram to his brother Reg, encouraging him to come west and try his hand at apple growing. Coningsby's father purchased 40 acres, and Reg cleared the land, built a cabin, and planted trees. The ranch, as it was called, became a summer destination for the family. 

Con fondly recalls the time spent at the ranch in his wartime letters home as he gazes at the moon from the battlefield trenches. In 1914, he went to Ottawa, saw Sir Sam Hughes, and was offered a commission in the Canadian Field Artillery on completing his training at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. "His long training at Kingston had been very severe. It included, besides the various classes which he attended, a great deal of hard exercise, long rides or foot marches over frozen roads before breakfast, and so forth."

In July 1916, he was selected, with twenty-four other officers, for immediate service in France. His younger brothers enlisted in the Naval Patrol and then were recruited in Canada by Commander Armstrong. Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force at the front in 1916 and continued in service until the end of World War I. He served in the Somme battlefield at Albert, Thiepval, Courcelette, and the taking of the Regina trench.

After having been wounded, he came twice to the United States (1917, 1918) on lecture tours. On behalf of the British Ministry of Information, he investigated 1918 the American military preparedness in France. In 1919, he went to England to study European reconstruction problems and subsequently lectured on the subject of the United States. He also visited and reported on the devastated regions of Central and Eastern Europe at the request of Herbert Hoover. He also edited, with his father, W. J. Dawson, The Reader's Library and Best Short Stories (1923).