Thomas Cobley was born in the local parish of Dodbrooke in 1761 – the son of the vicar at the time (Benjamin Cobley – whose name appears as a Rector of St Thomas à Becket in Dodbrooke – in the heart of Kingsbridge where the local vicar still lives and works) – and, following the early death of his father, he was obliged to leave home and seek his fortune.  He moved to Russia and specifically to Odesa (now Ukraine) where he worked in military service during the time of Catherine II (“Catherine The Great”).  By 1792 he was a lieutenant-colonel and was given 32,000 acres of land on the left bank of the Odesa estuary as a reward for his historic participation against the Ottoman Empire. In 1801 he became an Odesa City Councillor and between 1811-1812 fought selflessly against a plague which took the lives of several thousand of the city’s inhabitants including almost all the doctors and pharmacists. He became Head of Administration between 1814-1815 and the citizens of Odesa marked their gratitude to him by naming one of the local streets Coblevskaya in his honour.