When Dobbs died at the ‘ripe old age’ of 90 years in 1886, he was one of the last survivors of those who had fought under Lord Exmouth at the siege of Algiers in 1816.Belfast News-letter, 2 Mar. 1886; The Times, 8 Mar. 1886. His parliamentary career as Conservative MP for his local borough of Carrickfergus was brief, and his unseating almost led to the disenfranchisement of the constituency for which his grandfather had sat for many years in the Irish parliament.
The Dobbs family originated in Yorkshire and were established in Ireland by John Dobbs who accompanied Sir Henry Dockwra to Carrickfergus in 1596.Burke’s Landed Gentry (1848), i. 336-7. They acquired a large and valuable estate three miles to the north-east of the town, to which they remained ‘intimately connected’.W.A. Maguire, The Downshire Estates in Ireland 1801-1845. The management of Irish landed estates in the early nineteenth century (1972), 102. Dobbs’s great-grandfather, Arthur Dobbs (1689-1765), sat for Carrickfergus from 1727. After serving as surveyor-general of Ireland, he was from 1754 until his death the governor of North Carolina, where he acquired large possessions.R.M. Calhoon, ‘Dobbs, Arthur’, Oxf. DNB, xvi. 340-2; E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800 (2002), iv. 64-6. Dobbs’s grandfather and namesake was MP for the port of Carrickfergus, 1768-90, a borough which he controlled jointly with the marquess of Donegal.Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament, iv. 66-7. Dobbs was also the maternal great-grandson of Richard Acheson, 1st Viscount Gosford, whose family exerted a strong influence on the politics of county Armagh.Burke’s Irish Family Records (1976), 372-3.
Dobbs is thought to have attended Eton,F. Boase, Modern English Biography, i. 885. His name does not, however, appear in H.E.C. Stapylton, The Eton School Lists From 1791-1850 (2nd edn., 1854). and in September 1810 he entered the royal navy ‘at the usual age’. After serving for a short time in the Baltic, he proceeded to the Mediterranean, where he took part in the capture of Port d’Anzo. He subsequently sailed to the East Indies as an officer of the Cornwallis and the Theban, and in August 1816 served aboard the Superb at the siege of Algiers.The Times, 8 Mar. 1886. Having gone on the half pay list in 1822, he returned to Ireland and in 1828 attended a large meeting of Orangemen at Tandragee in order to establish a Brunswick club.Morning Chronicle, 4, 7 Oct. 1828.
Although Dobbs had been elected a burgess of the corporation of Carrickfergus, he appears to have had little experience of public affairs when he was called upon to offer for the borough at the 1832 general election as ‘a warm friend of the country’s “Protestant Institutions”’. The candidate of the corporation, he offered to support measures calculated ‘to induce the influx of Capital’ into Ireland, and promised his ‘vigilant watchfulness’ over the local interests of the town.Belfast News-letter, 13 Nov. 1832. Eager to go ‘muzzle to muzzle’ with a representative of the local patron, the marquess of Donegall, he addressed the electors ‘in his old sailor’s terms’, but ‘would say little’ of his political principles. Instead he emphasised his desire to prevent the borough remaining ‘an appendage of a single family’. Although he claimed to be ‘bound to no body or set of men but the Corporation’, his return required the backing of the marquess of Downshire and the Dublin Conservative Society.Belfast News-letter, 18 Dec. 1832; HP Commons, 1820-1832, iv. 646. After a five-day contest involving extensive bribery he defeated Sir Arthur Chichester by 495 votes to 447, following which a petition was presented against his return, 19 Feb. 1833.CJ, lxxxviii. 74.
In the meantime Dobbs voted against two radical amendments to the address, 8 Feb. 1833, and Hume’s motion for discontinuing naval and military sinecures, 14 Feb. He divided in favour of the first and second readings of the Irish coercion bill, 1, 11 Mar., and voted for Thomas Attwood’s inquiry into general distress, 21 Mar.Belfast News-letter, 25 Dec. 1832. Having remained a silent member, Dobbs was unseated when a committee voided his election, 15 Apr. 1833, on the grounds that his friends and agents had engaged in ‘the most gross and scandalous bribery’ amongst the unusually large number of borough freemen.CJ, lxxxviii. 271; PP 1833 (527) viii. 103; Belfast News-letter, 19 Apr. 1833. Although it was reported that Dobbs had not ‘appeared’ to have taken part, the writ was suspended until the 1835 general election while an attempt was made by Daniel O’Connell to have the borough disfranchised.HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 668; The Times, 16 Apr. 1833; D. O’Connell to P.V. Fitzgerald, 18 Apr. 1833, O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, v. 25-6; CJ, lxxxviii. 434.
Dobbs does not appear to have sought another seat but remained involved in local politics and administration. A member of the Belfast Society, he was an active member of the county Antrim grand jury, and in January 1840 succeeded to his father’s Carrickfergus estate.Belfast News-letter, 27 Dec. 1836. This included one of ‘the most picturesque’ demesnes in the county, which boasted a ‘handsome imposing house’ that had cost £12,000 to build, as well as 8,000 acres at Timahoe, county Kildare.Belfast News-letter, 18 Jan. 1866, 2 Mar. 1886; The Times, 7 Jan 1881; J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain (4th edn., 1883), 133. A magistrate for counties Antrim and Down, he joined the provisional committee of the Belfast, Larne and Carrickfergus Railway in 1845.Glasgow Herald, 17 Oct. 1845.
Meanwhile Dobbs had joined the ‘Ulster counter-agitation’ in favour of Lord Stanley’s Irish registration bill, and in 1841 was made sheriff of county Antrim and joined a Conservative deputation which waited upon the Irish viceroy, Earl De Grey.Morning Post, 7 May 1840, 13 Feb. 1841; Freeman’s Journal, 30 Dec. 1841. In December 1845 he seconded the Conservative candidate at a by-election at County Antrim and served as sheriff of county Kildare in 1846.Belfast News-letter, 23 Dec. 1845. He nominated Nathaniel Alexander for County Antrim at the 1847 general election, when he expressed his developing belief in the importance of scriptural education, and argued that popular education which was not based on the ‘the Word of God’ did ‘more harm than good’.Belfast News-letter, 13 Aug. 1847. In February 1852 he attended a large anti-Maynooth demonstration in Belfast, and worked in support of the Conservatives at the 1852 general election.Belfast News-letter, 18 Feb., 12 July 1852. At the 1857 general election he again nominated a Conservative candidate, and voiced his support for Lord Derby’s government and the recently defeated reform bill, and advocated a policy of ‘strict neutrality’ in foreign wars.Belfast News-letter, 11 May 1857. He also nominated candidates at by-elections in 1863 and 1869, when he told the electors that he had ‘never swerved’ from his principles, and remained ‘a true, staunch Conservative’.The Times, 8 May 1863; Belfast News-letter, 17 Aug. 1869.
Dobbs was the proprietor of a ‘well-managed, well-farmed estate of 5,669 acres’ on which the traditional means of protecting the interests of tenant farmers, known as ‘Ulster Custom’, existed ‘in its entirety’. He was a generous benefactor to funds raised for the benefit of victims of shipwrecks and a trustee of the Charles Sheils Charity, which administered almshouses in Carrickfergus.The Times, 7 Jan 1881; Belfast News-letter, 2 Mar. 1886. He died at Castle Dobbs in February 1886, when his personal estate in England and Ireland was proved at £51,000.Standard, 4 Mar. 1886; Morning Post, 11 June 1886, quoting Illustrated London News. He was succeeded by his only surviving son, Montagu William Edward Dobbs (1844-1906), a barrister who served as high sheriff of counties Kildare, 1871, and Armagh, 1888.Burke’s Irish Family Records, 373. His elder son, Richard Archibald Conway Dobbs (1842-53), had died of fever at Tandragee Castle: Belfast News-letter, 24 Feb. 1853. In 1850 Dobbs’s fifteen year old daughter Harriet Sydney had married George Montagu, 6th duke of Manchester, and in 1854 his eldest daughter Olivia Nichola married Sir James Macaulay Higginson, the governor of Mauritius.Burke’s Landed Gentry (1871), i. 355; Standard, 13 Nov. 1854; The Times, 7 July 1885.
