William Edward Dixon Bennett was the son of William Henry Bennett and his wife Rebecca. He applied for employment in the civil service of Natal Colony in 1898, but resigned in 1901. On 1 February 1902 he was appointed in the Department of Public Works of the Transvaal Colony and was stationed in the office of the district engineer in Johannesburg. He was still there in 1914, by which time he had risen to first grade clerical assistant. In April 1918 in Johannesburg he married Cecilia Eliza Toole.
Although Bennett appears to have had no training in electrical engineering he wrote two papers relating to that profession. The first, "Radiotelegraphy in modern practice", was published in the Transactions of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (1910, Vol. 2(11), p. 308). His second paper, "The effect of meteorological conditions on wireless transmission" was delivered at the annual congress of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Kimberley in 1914. Only the title was published in the association's Report of the meeting.
