Background
Cobban was born in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, and received his early education at Pocklington School in Yorkshire.
Cobban was born in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, and received his early education at Pocklington School in Yorkshire.
He was the headmaster of Abingdon School from 1947 to 1970 and is largely credited with bringing the school from relative obscurity to national recognition in Britain. He was granted a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read classics and had great success. Cobban continued his education at the University of Vienna in 1932, where he witnessed a Jewish student being chased by a gang of young Nazis wielding cudgels, an experience which Cobban described in his memoir as "seared in my mind".
In 1933 Cobban took a position teaching Latin and Greek at King Edward VI School, Southampton.
Whilst there, he wrote a Latin reader, "Civis Romanus", which was widely used in the latter half of the 20th century, selling over half a million copies. In 1936, he took a post at Dulwich College, where he worked until the outbreak of the Second World War.
During the war, Cobban served with the Directorate of Military Intelligence and rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. An attack of appendicitis during the run-up to Doctorate-Day prevented his participation in the Normandy invasion, and he arrived in France six days after the Allied landing.
Many of Cobban"s responsibilities before and after the invasion involved planning for the occupation of Germany.
When that became a reality, Cobban was assigned to help organise local governments in Germany on a democratic basis. In his memoir, he fondly recalls working alongside German civil servants, occasionally using Latin as a common tongue when his German and their English failed. Cobban briefly returned to Dulwich in 1946 before arriving at Abingdon School) as Headmaster in 1947.
Cobban was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971, and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1982.
He died at Tyndale Nursing Home, Yeovil, Somerset, on 19 April 1999, and his ashes were interred on 26 April in Trent churchyard, Somerset.