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Baron Roe of Derby

An event took place on the evening of July 13th 1911 that has never been repeated. All that is left to remind us of it are any surviving copies of an elaborately produced booklet sent to every man and woman in the borough aged 79 or over by the then Mayor, Alderman Sir Thomas Roe MP.

Baron Roe of Derby

Included with the booklet was an invitation to these old people of the town to a dinner and entertainment in celebration of Sir Thomas entering his own 80th year and also to mark the principal event of that year, the Coronation of King George V and Queen Mary, as well as the investiture of Prince Edward as Prince of Wales.

Over 500 people of the qualifying ages received the booklet and more than 400 of these not affected by illness or other debilities were able to attend the Albert Hall in the Wardwick; and for those unable to reach there on foot, cabs and carriages were laid on.

The booklet lists a menu having a choice of soups; a fish course of salmon; sweetbreads and mushrooms, followed by roast chicken and sausage or boiled chicken and ham, new potatoes and peas, After which, those with the greater staying powers would have a choice of plum pudding, trifle or chartreuse of strawberries; and to make sure no-one went hungry there followed a dessert.

The dinner was accompanied by a ‘selection of music’ played by Mr C. W. Taylor’s orchestra which included works by Mendelssohn; Sullivan’s ‘Iolanthe’; Balfe’s ‘Bohemian Girl’; a gavotte by Karl Komzack and other chart toppers of the time

The dinner menu

The concert programme

‘Immediately after the dinner,’ the Derby Mercury reports: ‘the Mayor rose to propose the health of H.M King George V reminding them that they were gathered that evening for the purpose celebrating an event that few of them would have the opportunity of celebrating again, the Coronation of a King.’ Without doubt, taking into account the ages of his listeners, the truest of prophesies.

The same newspaper informs us: ‘there had been an excellent concert arranged for the old people. Mr Warren Jones, who acted as accompanist, contributed a capital pianoforte solo, and two excellent songs were rendered by Miss Eva Macdonald; [and] that popular comedian, Mr G. W. Stevens sang two comic songs. “When father papered the parlour” and “Tommy’s little tube of stickatine”’.

Sir Thomas (later Lord) Roe was one of Derby’s most popular Mayors and certainly the most successful. Born in the modest environment of Eagle Street on July 13th 1832, Thomas Roe was the eldest child of timber merchant, Thomas Roe senior, and Deborah, daughter of Abraham Oakley. This was five years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, and he gained most of his education at evening classes at the Mechanics’ Institute.

At the age of fourteen he started work in his father’s office and eight years later he was made a partner.

Derby was a stronghold of Liberalism in those days and, at the age of 26, Thomas Roe followed his father on to the town Council as a member for Castle Ward, and by the time he was 35 in 1867 he was Mayor of Derby. This was an office he was to hold on two more occasions; in 1897 the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and 1910-11, the year of King George V’s Coronation.

Not until after his first two mayoralties and he had turned 70 did he leave behind his bachelorhood when he married Miss Kirtley, whose father William Matthew Kirtley had been chief locomotive engineer of the old Midland Railway. She died before his third mayoralty, so it was his sister, Mrs Newbold, who acted as Mayoress on each occasion.

It wasn’t long before he was into politics in a serious way. He represented Derby as a Liberal in Parliament for something like 28 years with just one interruption when unseated by Sir Henry Bemrose and Mr Geoffrey Drage in 1895. Five years later he was back in the Commons where he remained until 1917 when he received his peerage.

He took the title, Baron Roe of the Borough of Derby and chose as his arms the Roebuck in the Park and a motto in English “Education, the Safeguard of Liberty”.

The motto reflects his interest in education, conscious as he always was of his own shortfall in that direction. Throughout his life he maintained an interest in securing for others and for generations to come the education that had been denied to him and concentrated much interest in the elementary schools of the day.

When the Derby School Board was established in 1870, soon after the passing of the Education Act, he was elected a member and served on it as long as the Board lasted, and in 1903 was appointed as chairman to the Education Committee of the Town Council.

In these days of university education for all one might well ask how a boy out of Eagle Street managed to make his way to the House of Lords. Although not clever academically, he was gifted with a shrewd common sense with the ability to make friends at any social level.

The Derby Daily Telegraph for June 10, 1923, informs us that for many years, up to 1894, the year he was knighted in recognition of public services, he was a member of the Derby Board of Public Guardians. Been president of the Royal Infirmary, took an interest in the beneficial work of the Children’s Hospital and had been one of the trustees of the Liversage Charity.

Other presidencies that he held were those of the Derby Club and Mechanics’ Institute. He was chairman of the Improvement and Hotel Company, had held directorships in the Derby Savings Bank and the old Notts and Derby Fire and Life Institution. He was a trustee of the Derbyshire Building Society. A Churchman but essentially catholic in his religious views, he was for 28 years a warden at St Peter’s Church.

Another of his thoughtful gestures was a present of a valuable Crown Derby mug to every child born on that same day the Health Insurance Act came into being.

Lord Roe’s career in Freemasonry was one of distinction and at the Royal Albert Hall in 1917 he was invested by the Duke of Connaught with the rank of Past Senior Grand Warden, the highest position ever filled by a Derbyshire Freemason.

But what has a more familiar ring to us these days and perhaps a portent of things to come was the railway strike of 1911. Following a crowded meeting in the Market Place, the great railway strike began on August 18th and within a couple of days the railways had practically ceased to function.

In several parts of the town there were hostile demonstrations, baton charges were made by the police resulting in may injuries on both sides. Some of the strikers, the Derby Daily Telegraph states, began to pull up the paving setts as missiles and ‘an ugly situation’ arose. Within a day or two, 1000 men of the Notts and Derby Regiment were drafted into the town, and were quartered on the old Midland Cricket Club’s ground within easy reach of the station. The Derby Daily Telegraph does not go into any detail on ‘the rights and wrongs of the case’ but in a later relieved after-statement lets us know that within a week a settlement had been reached.

Those pre-World War One days have mostly been seen as Great Britain at its greatest. The leading manufacturing country in the world and innovator in civil engineering both here and abroad, a stable economy and a more or less law-abiding populace, it was head of the largest Empire ever known.

Although Britain still ruled the waves, its position as the world’s superpower came increasingly under threat from a Germany intent on challenging Britain’s mastery of the sea.

On August 4, 1914, barely more than three years after the Mayor’s dinner for the old folk of the town, Britain declared war on Germany and it could be said the old order typified by the life of Lord Roe was to be lost forever in the muddy battlefields of France.

He lived long enough to see the beginning of this decline.

When he died in his ninety-first year on June 7, 1923, and having no son, something more than the Barony of the Borough of Derby died with him; Derby’s great Liberal tradition died too.

He was a man who won not only the esteem but also the affection of the whole town and there was no one to take his place.

I am indebted to local historian Maxwell Craven for the information that, up to 1974, Roe Street on the Pear Tree development carried his name for over a hundred years. It is doubtful, however, if the street name had any meaning even to those who lived there.

Sadly, even that has gone and all that is left to the memory of this eminent Victorian is a less than eminent Roe Walk

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