Ancestors

Osbert Croome Roach

Osbert Croome Roach was born at Clifton, Bristol, on 29 November 1879. He was baptized at St John the Evangelist, Clifton, on 28 December, as the son of Thomas and Emily Maria Roach. His father was the Rev. Thomas Roach, a Cambridge mathematician who had taught at Repton School and at Clifton College. His mother was Emily Maria Croome, a daughter of the Stroud-valley solicitor Thomas Clutterbuck Croome. Croome, his middle name, was her maiden name.

He was the sixth of twelve children born between 1873 and 1889. The 1881 census found the family at Clifton, in his father's household. In 1891 they were still there, and Osbert, aged eleven, was a scholar. Among his brothers were Francis Handley, later a clergyman at Lincoln, Harry, Thomas Malcolm, Alan Bruce and Edward Keith. Edward would become Edward Keith-Roach, District Commissioner of Jerusalem under the British Mandate.

He landed at Ellis Island on 30 July 1906. The passenger list describes him as English, single and about twenty-six, and gives his last residence as Bournemouth. His obituaries say he came to America "thirty years ago", which points to about 1904, and the 1910 census also gives 1904 as his year of arrival.

In America he founded a boys' boarding school at Tarrytown-on-Hudson, in Westchester County, and called it the Repton School. Repton, in Derbyshire, was the English school where his father had been an assistant master from 1870 to 1874, and the name was probably taken from it. Osbert was proprietor and headmaster. A 1909 advertisement placed the buildings "on a hill, in the center of the best residential section of Tarrytown." The school ran a summer camp on Lake Champlain from mid June to the end of August.

In the 1910 census he was living in Greenburgh, the town that takes in Tarrytown. His younger sister Ida was in the house with him. He crossed the Atlantic and came back on 7 January 1913, still single, giving Tarrytown as home and his brother H. W. Roach as his relative in England. In 1915 a nomination to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point was forwarded to the War Department from "O. C. Roach, Tarrytown-on-Hudson." He was also a member of an association of camp directors. On 25 March 1917 The Sun of New York printed a signed article by him, "Camp Life as a Form of Health Insurance."

When the United States entered the First World War he registered for the American draft in Westchester County. He gave his mother, "E M Roach", as his nearest relative. But he was still a British subject, and he served Britain. The Sun reported on 18 November 1917 that he and two other members of the camp directors' association were "in war service 'over there'." He rose to captain in the British transport service. Crew lists at Boston for 1917 and 1918, a seaman's identification card of 1918, and Ellis Island arrivals on 24 September and 10 November 1918 all carry his name. His obituary says he took his ship safely through several dangerous Atlantic crossings and made six voyages to Australia. The ship is not named in any of these.

His two obituaries differ on when he left the school. One says he was headmaster until 1914. The other says he ran it until he enlisted. Both agree that he closed it after the war. By 1921 a Captain Barrett was in charge of the Repton School at Tarrytown.

On 21 October 1919, in Manhattan, he married Josephine Sherman Evans. He was thirty-nine and she was thirty-one. She had been born in Chicago, the daughter of William Douglas Evans and Mercer Pool Little. Their son Malcolm Bruce was born in New York on 15 July 1920, and their daughter Mercer Radcliffe on 10 August 1922.

For a short time after the war he was executive secretary of the Exporters Association. From about 1924 he was an executive in the personnel department of the United States Rubber Company, and he stayed there until his death. He was naturalized an American citizen in Queens County, on a petition filed as volume 59, number 13489. The date is not known, but it came after 1918.

The family lived first at Ossining, probably in the early 1920s. They appear in the Bronxville papers from 1926. The 1930 census found them at Greenwich, Connecticut, with a servant and a Swedish-born man in the household. By 1931 they were settled at 64 Sagamore Road, Bronxville.

In Bronxville he took up the town's civic life. In 1934 he served as president and then vice president of the Parent-Teacher Association. He chaired the committee that founded the Bronxville Community Forum. He belonged to study groups and joined an adult class in public speaking. When he died, that class wrote a tribute to him, in the language of his war.

He died at Lawrence Hospital, Bronxville, on the morning of Tuesday 4 December 1934, after a short illness. The obituary gave his age as fifty-four. His funeral was held the next afternoon at Christ Church, Bronxville, with the rector, the Rev. Harold F. Hohly, officiating. He was buried in Fair Ridge Cemetery, Chappaqua. He left his widow, his son of fourteen and his daughter of twelve. In England he left his mother and two sisters at Twyford, a brother at Lincoln, and a brother in Palestine.

His father-in-law, William Douglas Evans, died in Manhattan six weeks later. Probate of Osbert's English estate was granted on 17 November 1937 to Francis George Playne and to his widow, Josephine Evans Roach. Playne was a Stroud-valley family name, from the same country as his mother's people. How Francis George Playne was connected to him is not known.

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Cite: Heirology, "Osbert Croome Roach (1879-1934)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/osbert-croome-roach-1879-1934-784763.