Lazarus and Mary named their first son, James Mackenzie, after Mary’s guardian/brother James Mackenzie Fooks. Their second son was named after Lazarus’s guardian, the Devon freeholder, Pascho Pollard. 

William Pollard Roberts, apparently known to the younger generation as ‘Uncle W.P.’, was born at Bournemouth, Hampshire (now Dorset) on 9 January 1826 and baptised at St James’s, Poole on 10 February. 

In June 1841 William was a fifteen-year-old pupil at the Royal Naval School at Alfred House, St Giles Camberwell, south London. This school, which was set up only temporarily at Camberwell, moved to Greenwich in 1843 (by St James’s Church, New Cross). It was established by charitable donation for the education of those sons of naval and marine officers whose scanty incomes did not allow them to provide a decent education for their boys. Around 150 pupils boarded at the school at the rate of £25 per annum. 

William’s brother Henry Came was also at the school in 1841 (my great great grandfather, James Mackenzie, may also have attended, although if so he had left by 1841). The Morning Post of 20 June 1838 reported that amongst the annual prize-giving that year, ‘Messrs Martyr and Roberts were awarded prizes for classics’. And in December 1840, a student named Roberts was awarded two prizes for mathematics. This must have been William or Henry, or James?

On leaving school, W.P. did not enter the Royal Navy. Instead he trained in medicine. The day after his sixteenth birthday, on 10 January 1842, he was  apprenticed to a John Vincent Hawkins (1804–68, obituary here on page 342), surgeon, of 63 George Street, Portman Square, London. According to Apothecaries’ Hall (Court of Examiners’ Candidates Qualification Entry Book 1846–49), W.P. attended lectures on a range of scientific topics, including sessions on chemistry, materia medica, anatomy, principles and practice of medicine, botany, midwifery, dissection and forensic medicine. For eighteen months he attended St George’s Hospital, London (at Hyde Park Corner) and was successfully examined in his subject by a Mr Randall.

After five years of training, he was awarded a license by the Society of Apothecaries, on 10 June 1847 and first appeared as an LSA in the London & Provincial Medical Directory, at Yarmouth, Norfolk, where his father was stationed in the Coastguard. Between 1815 and 1858 the Society examined and licensed medical students to practice as apothecaries (in effect general practitioners) anywhere in England and Wales and hence anyone wishing to practice as such had to hold an LSA. W.P. was not actually a member of the Society of Apothecaries, however the following year he was admitted as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS), England.

With this additional, vital qualification, W.P. was appointed assistant to William Stowe (c.1791–1860), a respected surgeon and author of books on toxicology – and an early fossil collector – who lived at Castle Street, Buckingham (see page 497 here). It would be an eventful posting. That summer, W.P. was mentioned in a notice published in Jackson’s Oxford Journal of 22 July 1848, reporting that a Samuel Beale, aged twenty, got into difficulty whilst bathing in the River Ouse at Jones’s Hill, ‘a short distance’ from Buckingham. ‘Mr. William Pollard Roberts, assistant to Mr. Stowe, surgeon, was at the place before the body was recovered,’ it reads. ‘For three-quarters of an hour efforts were unavailingly made to resuscitate the deceased,’ until W.P. declared Beale to have died from drowning. 

By 1851 W.P. had been replaced at Stowe by another young medical assistant, George Taunton. W.P. must have moved on. The London & Provincial Medical Directory for the years 1851–53 lists him as an MRCS (1848), LSA (1847), at 56 Portland Place, London. He is not here in the 1851  census, however, nor can he be found elsewhere. Neither does he appear in the medical directory between 1854 and 1858, in London or in the provinces. During this period, a William P. Roberts applied for a passport (number 4905), so foreign travel could account for his omission. 

The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe

In the brief family papers left by W.P.’s great niece and written in the 1950s, Dorothy Roberts claims that her great uncle was ‘for many years private physician to the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe’. She says little more than that, and provides no dates, but she must have been referring to Ernest Augustus, the 3rd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (1797–1861), whose family seat was Cotehele House at Saltash, Cornwall, near Plymouth. 

By 1851 the Earl had been unwell for a number of years, suffering from rheumatic gout and more. He certainly called upon a number of doctors over several years. In the 1851 census, taken in the spring, the Earl was in London with his family, at 4 Carlton Terrace, St Martin in the Fields. No doctor was listed with the family when the census was taken, but the household included two nurses, Marianne Palmer and Eliza Cook.

Later that year, according to family correspondence the Earl was wheelchair-bound, his health clearly declining. In the autumn of 1852 he was suddenly taken ill and was reportedly too unwell to take his seat in parliament. On 16 October the Western Times reported that ‘a physician was telegraphed for to Bath in the forenoon; he arrived by the afternoon’s express’. 

Before long the Earl was under close watch by no less than four doctors. A report of a visit to Cotehele in January 1853, in The Journal of the Friends Historical Society (Vol 20, No 1-2 [1923]) paints a sorry picture:

After waiting for more than an hour (the doctors four in number being with the Earl) ... we were at length summoned to the Earl’s room ... It was comparatively quite a small room, a French bed in the middle on which lay the poor stricken Earl, we believe about sixty years of age [56], but looking much older in consequence of his long affliction. He is unable to move a limb, and requires four men to move him in a kind of sling. His grey hair and long beard gave him a very striking appearance, and altogether it was a very touching scene. . 

If, as Dorothy Roberts claims, W.P. had been the Earl’s private physician ‘for many years’, was he perhaps one of the four doctors mentioned here? 

In 1855 the Earl built a winter villa for himself overlooking the sea at Stonehouse, Plymouth. He also had a new doctor. We hear of him from the Earl’s wife, Caroline (1808–81), in her correspondence. In a letter written from Cotehele House, dated Wednesday 29 August 1855, Caroline says: ‘Ld Mt E. [Lord Mount Edgcumbe] is in the “Cloud” [yacht] somewhere with Charlie [Charles Edgcumbe, younger son, 1838–1915] & his new Doctor – but I don’t exactly know where.’ 

In June of the following year, 1856, it was announced in the papers that the Earl had ‘left his residence, Winter Villa, Stonehouse, Cornwall [sic]’ for London and taken the south wing of the Queen’s Hotel, Upper Norwood, newly built for the nobility and gentry drawn, like the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, by the fresh air and tranquil environment and proximity to the Crystal Palace. The Earl spent a month at Norwood that summer, before moving into town, to Farrance’s Hotel, Belgravia. 

On another occasion, according to the Evening Mail, the Earl’s yacht went to the rescue of a drowning man who had capsized in a dinghy off Plymouth. ‘Dr Kidd, the medical gentleman on board the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe’s yacht was speedily present and ... promptly used every exertion that science could suggest to resuscitate the body, but to no avail.’ So the ‘new doctor’ mentioned in the letter could have been ‘Dr Kidd’ – the Godalming surgeon Richard Driver Kidd MRCS (1826–59).

Kidd became a freemason at Stonehouse in 1857, which firmly places him in attendance at the Earl’s Winter Villa, but by the time he died two years later, aged just thirty-three, he was listed in the medical directory, for the first time, in London, at 1 Leinster Square, Bayswater. The demise of the ‘late resident medical attendant to the Right Hon, the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe’ in April 1859 provoked ‘a great feeling of regret in the noble family’, according to the Royal Cornwall Gazette. I assume he was no longer the Earl’s ‘resident’ medical attendant at the Winter Villa in his final year. 

Whether W.P. worked alongside Kidd or replaced him as the Earl’s private physician in 1858/59, and whether this was just in London (there is no record of W.P. ever living in the West Country), is unclear. 

Other more senior specialists were also certainly called upon though. In July 1856 Caroline Edgcumbe writes, from Farrance’s:

Yesterday Milord [the Earl] had a consultation of Doctors, to see if any thing could be done to alleviate his state of constant suffering. This was one chief reason which brought us to London. The three magnates who saw him yesterday were Dr Ferguson, Dr Bence Jones & Sir Benjamin Brodie.

Brodie (1773–1862) was a leading joints specialist and surgeon to Prince Albert. Dr Fersuson could be William Fergusson (1808–77), professor and surgeon of George Street, Hanover Square (and also surgeon to Prince Albert). Bence Jones (1813–73) seemed to be something of a family doctor to the Edgcumbes as he is mentioned a few times in the correspondence. 

Whatever treatment the Earl received from these eminent consultants was ultimately to little effect. In the late summer of 1861 newspapers reported on his grave ill health. He died on 3 September, on board his steam yacht Mt Edgcumbe, lying off the Kent coast at Erith, surrounded by his family and his estate manager, Deeble Boger. Immediately, Caroline Edgcumbe wrote to her half brother:

The doctor who has been with him since we left London, has been most watchful & self-sacrificing, having been up many nights; & the nurse who has been with us the last ten years, has been a perfect Angel! ... He is to be taken to Plymouth in this Yacht, & Charlie goes, with the doctor & nurse.

The ‘watchful & self-sacrificing’ doctor referred to here, who left London with the Earl, could well have been W.P. and the nurse possibly one of the two who were with the family in 1851. 

The Earl’s body was taken back to Cornwall. His funeral at Maker on 11 September 1861 was a lavish affair with, it was reported, an estimated 4,000 people lining the road to the church to watch the cortège, amid the sound of tolling bells and battery gunfire. As well as family, servants and various dignitaries and aristocrats, the mourners at the graveside included ‘Mr Roberts (surgeon to the deceased)’ – clearly this is W.P.

This confirms Dorothy Roberts’s story. But how did the appointment of W.P. as surgeon, or private physician, come about? In August 1855, the 3rd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe was commodore of the Royal Western Yacht Club and his personal secretary, William Hunt, was in the running for the post of club secretary. In the end the appointment went to my 3xgreat grandfather Lazarus, so it is thus quite possible that W.P. gained the position of personal physician via his father’s connections with the club.

Cheshunt

W.P. and Matilda must have moved to Cheshunt, Hertfordshire by November 1864, as their daughter was baptised here and this is where they were when the 1871 census was taken, with five more children (all born at Cheshunt), three servants and a medical assistant, George Dant. 

Their address was given as simply ‘Cheshunt Street’ (now the northern section of the High Street). W.P. is described in the census as ‘surgeon’, but he was likely to have been a general practitioner. In 1875 he became a licentiate in midwifery and was admitted as a Licentiate of Royal College of Physicians (LLRP) of Edinburgh. 

W.P. and Matilda’s children – five girls and a boy (later generations of the Roberts family seemed to favour girls, many of whom remained unmarried) – were amongst my great grandfather’s cousins. Only two of them had children of their own.

Matilda Mary Jane Roberts

The eldest child, Matilda Mary Jane Roberts, was born at St John’s Wood, London (according to the 1891 census) on 3 May 1864 and baptised at Cheshunt in the November of that year. She was named after her mother and her two grandmothers (Mary Roberts and Jane Hayter). She was still living at home in 1911, Montague Road, Uxbridge, unmarried, aged forty-six and with ‘no occupation’. In 1930 she was living at 96 Cowley Mill Road, Uxbridge, it would seem lodging with a family called Groves.

Mary Elfrida Roberts

Mary Elfrida Roberts was born on 14 April 1865 and baptised at Cheshunt on 24 November that year. She married Alfred Williams at New Southgate, on 25 August 1891. Alfred (1855–1919) was a clerk in a merchant’s office when they married and gave his address as Hornsey Rise. By 1895 though, they were living in the Canary Islands, where Alfred worked in exchange and banking. 

By the 1910s this family were well established in the Canaries. It was reported that ‘Mr. Alfred Williams, started the trade of frozen meats in Gran Canaria in 1902’. In 1911 he was advertising packing material for fruits and potatoes, in the local newspaper La Prensa. Meanwhile Mary Elfrida, it would seem from various notices in the newspaper, made something of a name for herself locally as an opera singer. After Alfred’s death in 1919 she remained in Tenerife until the 1930s, when civil war erupted in Spain and the whole family returned to England, probably on consulate advice.

She died at Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire in 1956, aged ninety-one. 

Mary and Alfred had a son, Alfred Donovan (1892–1909), who died young. They then had three daughters, with typical Roberts names: Elfrida Gladys Ernestine (1895–1990; married Peter McConachie), Evelyn Sylvia (1896–1980) and Eileen Mary (1903–62). They were all born in the Canary Islands. Two daughters married Norwegians: Eileen was the first wife of the Norwegian illustrator and journalist Gösta Hammarlund (1903–87), whom she met in Tenerife when he was based there between 1925 and 1932, as shipping agent for his father’s shipping company, Frederik Olsen (still in operation).

William Arthur Roberts

W.P. also had twin boys, Edward Ernest (his middle name perhaps given in memory of the Earl of Edgcumbe?) and William Arthur Roberts, born at Cheshunt in 1868. Edward (Edmund E. in the 1871 census) died in 1888, aged twenty. His brother William married Lucy Alice Simmonds, at Harrow in 1894, aged twenty-six. He must have missed his brother terribly as he named his own son after him: Edward Ernest Roberts (1895–1972). 

William and Lucy settled in Berkshire, where William worked as a jeweller and watchmaker and Lucy was a school mistress. In 1901 they were living at the small village of Letcombe Regis, in the school house, and ten years on they were at Shaw School, Donnington, near Newbury. William Arthur died in 1934, by which time they were living near Reading. 

Edith Constance Roberts

Edith Constance Roberts was born in January 1869 and baptised at Cheshunt, like all the daughters. W.P.’s younger daughters had familiar occupations for single women of their generation and class. Edith was a ‘companion to mother’ at a household in Plaistow, east London in 1891 and a ‘lady’s help’ at Edgmond, Shropshire ten years on. 

Another ten years on, in 1911, she was lodging in Exeter, at 18 Verney Place, with no occupation and giving her age as thirty-eight: four years younger than she really was. Like her sisters Ernestine and Matilda, Edith also remained unmarried. 

She died on 29 December 1928, at Ernsborough House, a hospice in Colleton Crescent, Exeter. She must have been active in the Congregational Church as she left all her effects (£434 5s 10d) to one George McLuckie, a minister of that denomination. Lucky, indeed.

Annie Beatrice Roberts

By the late 1870s W.P. and his family were back in London where their last daughter, Annie Beatrice, was born in Marylebone in 1877. 

She married a John Black Dinnis Miskin (1882–1933), a bank official and son of a bank mangaer, on 25 April 1908, at Uxbridge. The wedding was reported in the Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette, which provided detailed descriptions of what everyone wore: sister Ernestine, for example, arrived in ‘a handsome Parisienne gown’ of pale grey crepe de chine, trimmed with Liberty satin and a bodice with a yoke of Cluny lace and crepe de chine bordered with a pretty galon of silver and grey, plus a large black hat of tulle trimmed with ostrich feathers and a bow of gold galon. Unfortunately no photographs were published.

The other guests included Annie’s cousin, the Finchley Road veterinary surgeon Arthur Roberts, and the ‘Misses D., W., and F. Roberts’, which must refer to Arthur’s daughters, Dorothy, (Muriel) Winifred and Elfrida. 

In 1911 the Miskins were at 10 Semley Road, Norbury, near Croydon, with their son and a servant. They were executors for W.P.’s will when he died in 1915. By 1921 they were living at 56 Argyle Road, Ealing.

John Miskin died in 1933, at Kingston, Surrey and Annie moved down to Devon. After the death of her sister Mary Elfrida in 1956, Annie was the last surviving child of William Pollard Roberts. She died near Newton Abbot, Devon in the winter of 1957, aged eighty.

They had a daughter Christine Elsie May (1911–74), who was unmarried, and a son, Philip Dinnis Francis (1909–74) who married Phyllis Hutchings in a Catholic ceremony at Ealing, three weeks after the start of the Second World War. Their marriage notice in the Middlesex County Times noted that like his father he worked for the Westminster Bank and added, ominously, that ‘unitl his resignation recently he was an active member of the Ealing branch of the British Union of Fascists’. I do not know if this was a reflection of his parents’ political views. 

If so, it is perhaps just as well that my great grandfather Frank, another of Annie’s cousins, was not listed among the guests at her wedding in 1908. It is likely neither Frank nor his daughters, including my grandmother Alice, had any contact with the ‘London Robertses’. Yet they must have all grown up with the same family stories, the same tales of Lazarus’s naval heroism.