Bertram left school and became an errand boy. In 1869, he married Eleanor Wymer. They had two sons Sydney C. b. 1870, Percy
J. b. 1872 and two daughters, Evelyn J. b. 1875 and Edith C. b. 1879. Bertram and Eleanor ran a
newsagents/stationers. A love of
second-hand books eventually led to the acquisition of a second-hand bookshop
in Charing Cross Road.
After is death in 1914, Bertram's son, Percy J. Dobell published a book about his father. Although Bertram died in 1914, he had begun to write poetry about the war. Percy said of his father:
“An omnivorous reader from boyhood, blessed with a retentive memory, and untrammelled by
scholastic training or the influence of any set educational system, he
developed a critical faculty which seldom led him astray, and which enabled
him, with unerring instinct, to recognise merit “. You can read more of Percy's book by following the link below.
Bertram Dobell’s WW1 poetry collections was ‘Sonnets and
Lyrics: A Little Book of Verse on the Present War’, published in 1917 by his
own publishing company. One of his poems was also published in a WW1 Anthology 'Pro patria et rege: poems on war, its characteristics and results Selected in aid of the Belgian Relief Fund from British and American sources', edited by William Angus Knight and published by Century, P. in 1915.https://archive.org/stream/cu31924007532041/cu31924007532041_djvu.txt
