Walter Willson Cobbett

Walter Willson Cobbett (11 July 1847 – 22 January 1937) was an English businessman, amateur violinist and an influential patron of British chamber music. Cobbett sponsored a series of competitions for the composition of new chamber music works by British composers. He devised and encouraged the adaption of a short musical form called a 'phantasy' Cobbett compiled and edited the two-volume Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, published in 1929, a comprehensive review of the musical genre. His biographical entry in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, written when Cobbett was aged 80, says that he retired "at the age of sixty to what I consider to be what Idevote myself to" Cobbett died in 1937 at his home in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, and is buried in St Paul's Cathedral, London. He was the father of two children, one of whom died in a car accident in the early 1990s. He is survived by his wife, Ada Florence Sells, and his son, David Cobbett.