The author of the highly controversial and much-criticised
God's Own Country; An Appreciation of Australia (1914), Charles Jacomb was born in Surrey and educated at the independent London private boys school, Harrow. He is likely to have excelled in music, and in particular the violin, while at the school. After graduating he trained as a horticulturalist, a career that in 1908 provided him with the opportunity to travel to Australia to take up a position in Mildura, situated on the Victorian side of the Murray River near the intersection with New South Wales and South Australia. During his five or six years in the region Jacomb was prominent in social circles as a musician.
After returning to London in 1913 or 1914 Jacomb drew on his memory and experiences in Mildura to write
God's Own County. In the book he presents an extraordinarily negative and derisive assessment of the landscape and its inhabitants, describing the men as ugly and the women as immoral and old before they tuned 30. While
God's Own Country caused an international furore, and was even raised in the Australian parliament, the most fervent dismissals of its content and author naturally came from the Mildura. According to a writer who knew him in during his time in Australia:
Jacomb was intensely English in manner, conversation and all ideas. He
lived alone at Mildura doing his own cooking on a small oil stove. While
[here] he married. He was a charming, pleasant young fellow to meet, as
his mannerisms, though pronounced, were not offensive. He became
extremely bitter about everything Australian, and when I saw him a few
days prior to his departure for Europe, [he] expressed emphatically his
extreme displeasure with the Government, place, people etc, and
prophesised disaster to Australia in less than two years (ctd.
Warrnambool Standard 21 February 1914, p.9
Following the outbreak of the First World War, Jacomb enlisted and was sent to Europe with the 23rd Royal Fusiliers. After being wounded in the leg at the Somme in 1917 or early 1918, he returned to England and spent the remainder of the war on home service. Having gained experience in international marketing during his time as a horticulturalist, Jacomb later turned his hand to financial journalism, working for many years with London's
Daily Mail. When war broke out again in 1939 he re-enlisted and was commissioned as Lieutenant, eventually rising to the rank of Captain in 1942.
He is believed to have returned to his career as journalist after the end of the Armistice.
Jacomb published at least four books in his lifetime, with the other three comprising vastly different genres. The first of these is a military critique based on his experiences in World War One,
Torment: A Study in Patriotism (Andrew Melrose, 1920); while the second is a music theory volume titled
Violin Harmonics: What are They and How do they Work (Strad Library, 1924). He then wrote a utopian/science fiction novel called
And a New Earth, which was published by Routledge in 1926.
Jacomb died in the London suburb of Paddington in 1961 aged 73. His wife, Dorothy Jane Jacomb, whom he married while in Australia (
Warrnambool Standard 21 February 1914, p.9) may have been a local woman.
