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From the age of fourteen, Lazarus’s career in the Royal Navy had taken him across Europe, and to the West Indies, and his Coastguard postings kept him on the move around the coast of southern England, from Dorset and Hampshire to the North Sea.
However in 1855, following Mary’s death, and just a month after turning sixty-five, Lazarus left the East Coast and its bustling seaside towns and retired to Plymouth taking with him his youngest children Mary, Ellen, Catherine, Alfred and probably Edward. His son Henry may have already been living there, or had plans to, and encouraged Lazarus to make the move.
Plymouth And The ‘Naval Club’
The first thing Lazarus did on arrival at Plymouth was to take up the position of Secretary of the Royal Western Yacht Club. He was elected to the post, as reported in the South Devon Gazette of 29 September 1855.
How he moved his possessions and family across the country is unknown but it is noted in the Royal Western Yacht Club chronicles that among the privileges granted to yacht owners was one which permitted members to transport their own furniture from place to place in the United Kingdom without taking out a coasting licence.
Two years later, in 1857, an advert was placed in Bells Life in London and Sporting Chronicle:
FOR SALE, a handsome, fast-sailing CUTTER / YACHT, 50 tons o. m., new last season, copper fastened, iron floors, and cast iron ballast. Apply to Capt Roberts, Secretary, Royal Western Yacht Club, Plymouth.
Was this ‘new last season’ yacht Lazarus’s own vessel, used for the journey from Yarmouth to Plymouth, or was the Club advertising it on behalf of another member?
The Royal Western Yacht Club, situated on the Hoe, on the far left.
The Royal Western Yacht Club was established in 1829 and the club house, situated on the Hoe, overlooked the sea. It contained reading, writing, card, smoking and coffee rooms; also ‘a very good library and two billiard rooms’. The building was destroyed a century later, as was much of central Plymouth during bombing raids in the 1940s, and its records were also lost.
Luckily however, prior to this the Chronicles of the Royal Western Yacht Club of England, 1827 to 1900 was published in 1919 (now held at the Westcountry Studies Library). This draws on the now lost minute books to give a good idea of the Club’s activities during Lazarus’s tenure as Secretary.
Commander Roberts was no scrivener and according to the chronicles he omitted to record many important entries. Indeed, ‘his handwriting was so bad, that for the eight years he remained Secretary, it is difficult to decipher the Minutes entered in the Minute Book by him, and he discontinued keeping the book indexed’. Although it should be rememberd he was by no means a young man.
The entrance fee on election was five guineas and the annual subscription three-and-a-half guineas. One less than scrupulous proposal, noted for April 1860, was that the sum of £10 per annum should by paid by the Club to the Great Western Docks Company to prevent any building which would interfere with the view!
The minutes recorded the first use of ice in the Club. One hundredweight of North American‑imported Wenham Lake Ice being obtained from London in August 1860, in honour, perhaps, of Lazarus’s seventieth birthday, or the Club’s annual regatta which always took place in August. The chronicles point out that how long this took in transit, in those days of slow travel, or how much of it arrived, was not stated in the minutes.
Much activity appeared to take place (perhaps unsurprisingly) in the card room where, Lazarus notes, due to the increasing use of snuff, members were required to provide their own from 1861. The persistent defaulting by members in respect of gambling debts is minuted, resulting in occasional fights, one of which ‘caused the destruction of two chairs in the Card Room’. Despite the alleged inefficiencies at record keeping, Captain Roberts was secretary of the Club for eight years until his resignation in 1863.
Cobourg Place
In April 1861 Lazarus was at 1 Cobourg Place, in Plymouth. This was part of northern end of Cobourg Street and was later renumbered 71 Cobourg Street, on the corner of the curiously-named Albany Ope. These streets are now no more but can be seen on old maps of Plymouth. In 1851 the occupant was another Royal Navy captain, Josiah Oake, who had previously served in the West Africa Squadron.
According to the rate books from the 1860s, the property was owned by Jacob Nathan, a wealthy and prominent Jewish benefactor in mid-nineteenth-century Plymouth. That Lazarus rented from Nathan suggests this was done on a charitable basis and is an indication that he was a man of few means (as he indeed makes clear in his will).
Living with Lazarus at Cobourg Place in 1861 were his three daughters, his son Alfred, by now a clerk in the Royal Navy, and a servant named Louisa Taylor. It must have been here in January 1865 that Lazarus received the sad news that his youngest son, Edward, had perished two months earlier in the wreck of the Racehorse, in China.
St James Place
By the following year Lazarus was living at 4 St James Place in Plymouth, a house costing (in 1868) £22 11s per annum in rent. This was the address his son-in-law Edward Smyth gave in his claim for master’s certificate that year.
In 1869 Lazarus was finally granted his Greenwich out-pension, after a wait of nine years. A notice in The Times (of 6 February) read: ‘The Commander’s naval pension of £65 a year, vacant by the death of Capt H.L. Parry, has been awarded to retired Capt Lazarus Roberts.’
Lazarus was still at St James Place when the 1871 census was taken, with his family and a servant, and one of his thirty or so grandchildren, four-year-old Maude Smyth.
Lazarus’s Will
A studio photograph of Lazarus was taken around this time. He is seated, dressed in a frock coat, with his arm resting on a table by two books. He was indeed a man who enjoyed reading.
His will was drawn up on 30 September 1869 in Plymouth and provides a fascinating insight, as it consists mostly of bequeathments of books. ‘I have little of any value to leave yet I hope my children will accept the trifles I have to give as marks of my love and affection being the last gift of one whose prayers have ever been offered up for their welfare and happiness,’ he writes.
James was left his father's History of England; Maritime and Inland History; Lives of the English Navigators and a History of British India. Henry received Gibbons’s History of Rome, works by Congreve, Pope and Otway, and his chessmen.
It would appear that Charles had fallen out with his father and had not been heard of for many years by 1860. ‘I fear he has left this world before me,’ wrote Lazarus in his will, ‘but should he ever return again to his family I beg that he may understand that I fear I behaved harshly towards him and I beg his forgiveness. My sorrow on this account has been great and my heart has yearned towards him.’ Clearly whatever it was that caused the falling-out was of great regret to Lazarus at the end of his life.
Charles had escaped the family by joining the merchant navy. He passed the examination for second mate in 1852 and was last heard of in 1864, when he was included, shipless, in the Mercantile Navy List for that year. Where he ended up I have no idea, but should he have reappeared, he would have inherited his father’s atlas, placed in Arthur’s care.
The other children also received books. Alfred, then aged twenty-eight, was left an edition of Mutiny on the Bounty and a life of Napoleon. Mary, who had married an Edward Smyth, was left her father’s works of Shakespeare, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and Cottage Comforts. Son-in-law Edward received Lazarus’s spyglass and debenture for the Naval School.
Unmarried in 1860, the two youngest daughters, Ellen and Catherine, were comparatively well provided for by the will. In addition to more books (including his ‘large’ and ‘small’ bibles), Lazarus left them his savings and pension, furniture, plate and linen, and a silver salver given him by the ‘Naval Club’ (this apparently still exists and was in the hands of a collector in 2021).
In early 1872 Catherine married a naval lieutenant, Robert Stephens, and so, in a codicil to the will, Ellen became the sole beneficiary.
A Lieutenant Roberts RN was included in the list of subscribers to A Panorama of Falmouth, a useful contemporary survey of the Cornish town published by the Cornish Magazine in 1827. Was this Lazarus? If so, this is especially interesting, given the fractured relationship he must had with his father’s family, originally from Falmouth, and suggests a continued interest or family connection in the town – in 1827 he probably still had living relations at Falmouth, on his paternal grandparents’ side. It appears there was no copy of this book in his personal library at the end of his life, though.
Death and Burial
My great-great-great grandfather died at the grand age of eighty-two, on 4 July 1873, at St James Place. The cause of death was senile decay and the informant was an elderly nurse, Mary Oke, of nearby Clarence Street.
An obituary appeared in the United Service Journal:
Retired Captain Lazarus Roberts died on the 4th July at Plymouth, in his 82nd year. He entered the Navy, June 1, 1804, as lst-class volunteer, on board the Ville de Paris, bearing the flag in the Channel of Hon. William Cornwallis; under whom he appears to to have been present, August 22, 1805, in an attack made on the French fleet close in with Brest harbour. Being removed, in May, 1806, as Midshipman (a rating attained in October, 1804), to the Montagu, he sailed in that ship with Sir R. Strachan in pursuit of a French squadron to the West Indies. On subsequently proceeding to the Mediterranean he assisted at the evacuation of Scylla. He also took part in the defence of Gerona, and aided in taking possession of the fortress of Rosas. On his return. to England in the Malta, he joined, in December, 1808, the Revenge, part of the force employed in the following year in the expedition to the Walcheren. In June, 1810, he was received on board the Royal William, lying at Spithead; from May, 1811, to January, 1815, he served (the last 19 months as Master's Mate) on board the Zealous, m the Baltic; and on February 7 in the latter year, being then at Cork in the Boyne, he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant. On June 30, 1834 (having had command since June 27, 1831, of the Scout, Revenue cruiser), he obtained charge of a station in the Coastguard, in which service he continued for the remainder of his service, until promoted to the rank of Commander. January 1, 1849. Captain Roberts attained post rank, August 1, 1860, and was for many years secretary to the Royal Western Yacht Club and Naval Club of Plymouth, by whom he was presented with a piece of plate. The deceased officer was an excellent swimmer, and thrice saved sailors’ lives who had fallen overboard. One of his sons [Edward], a second master in the Navy, was drowned in the wreck of H.M S. Racehorse, 1864.
Lazarus requested that his funeral be conducted in the most simple and inexpensive manner possible. He was buried two days after his death, on Sunday, 6 July 1873 at Ford Park Cemetery in a freehold grave (Section CD, No. 27, Row 4).
Lazarus’s sons who had survived him must have been there, certainly those who lived locally: Henry and probably Alfred. I imagine my great-great grandfather James must have made the long journey down from Essex by train. Lazarus’s other sons Arthur and William perhaps also travelled down from London and the home counties.
My great grandfather, Frank may have accompanied his father, but it is unlikely Lazarus’s other grandchildren were there, as most were under sixteen.
Two of Lazarus’s sons would certainly have been absent on that summer Sunday afternoon. Charles was missing belived dead and Lazarus’s youngest son, Edward, had drowned in China in 1864. His name was included on the headstone as a memorial.
Funerals often excluded women in the Victorian era, although surely all three of Lazarus’s daughters would have attended, along with sons-in-law Robert Stephens and Edward Smyth? When she died in 1916, Ellen was buried with her father.
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