Robert K. Dawson (surveyor)
# Robert K. Dawson (surveyor)

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

## Early life

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

## 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.

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.

* 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.

