Stanley Boyd Roberts

My grandfather, Stanley Boyd Roberts was born on 21 October 1889 at No 2 Nelson Place Ecclesall Bierlow. His parents were Vincent Littlewood Roberts and Ellen Cundy, formerly Boyd. His father's occupation on Stanley's birth certificate is recorded as "Gentleman", the same as on his parent's marriage certificate just over a year earlier. Vincent had qualified as a doctor and by 1901 was practising at Chippingham House on Attercliffe Road (that must have been why Dad referred to him as "The Attercliffe Man").

Strangely, on the census of 1901, when Stanley is eleven, he is residing with his maternal grandmother (Ellen formerly Cundy, then Boyd) and her second husband, the highly successful electro plater and gilder (employing 19 men, 15 women, 6 boys and 3 girls) Arthur Millward. Stanley's mother Ellen had died when he was only three years old, but it is good to see he was still in touch with her mother. The reason why he is staying there must be because his step brother (John S Roberts) was only one month old and possibly ill, as he died when he was one year old. Stanley attended Dore and Totley High School and afterwards Wesley College.

He was still living with his grandmother in 1911 when he was 21. She was 70 by then , her husband Arthur had died, leaving her very comfortable with two servants at Clifford Lodge on Abbeydale Road. Maybe Stanley did not get on with his stepmother, as she and father Vincent lived not far away on Psalter Lane. Stanley was then studying the law at Sheffield University and he qualified as a solicitor. His obituary in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 13 January 1937 reads: "Mr Roberts was a musician with a medical ancestry and a legal history. He learned to play the piano when so young that he had to be lifted on to the piano stool. At Wesley College he received special musical instruction and won the music prize in his first term. Afterwards he received tuition from many eminent musicians, notably Mr Frederick Dawson. At the early age of sixteen, he was appointed organist of St John's Church, Abbeydale. He had a desire to take up music as a profession, but a career in law had been planned for him. He was admitted a solicitor in 1912."

Stanley married Edith Haywood Hoyland on 2 July 1913 at Christ Church in Dore. They had four children, all boys: John Haywood Boyd Roberts born 1915, Arthur Wynne Boyd Roberts born 1916, Peter Richard Boyd Roberts born 1917, David Littlewood Boyd Roberts born 1918 (who died of Spanish flue in 1919) and James Brian Boyd Roberts born 1923.

As a solicitor, Stanley was in partnership with Robert Benjamin Grayson in the firm of Roberts and Grayson. The partnership was dissolved on 30th November 1925. It seems that Stanley then practised on his own, but in 1932 he was made bankrupt. A petition was filed on 13th April 1932 in Sheffield Court. There is an Official Receiver's Summary of Affairs showing a deficiency of £1,930 12s and 5d. This seems to coincide with Dad and his brother Arthur having to find employment, they would have been 16 and 15 years old. They had been educated at home, instead of an expensive private school, so Stanley obviously had financial problems for some time.

After his failure as a solicitor, Stanley concentrated on his music. For the last six and a half years of his life, he was the conductor of the Sheffield Orpheus Male Voice Choir, and was involved in the Philharmonic Society. In 1936, he became organist and choirmaster at St Mathew's Church, Sheffield. Shortly before he died, he accompanied the Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus in an arduous rehearsal of Berlioz's Te Deum. He died suddenly of pneumonia on 12 January 1937 at his home at 88 Ashdell Road in Sheffield. He was 47.