Talbotousians Liber Vitae: Frederick Roberts

Editor of the Wipers Times

Warning, few biographies read like his… 

Frederick John Roberts was born in 1882 in Kilburn, London. His ancestors came from North Wales. He was the third of four children born to Henry and Mary Roberts. Already at the age of 14, he wanted to go to sea with the Royal Navy but his family prevented him. But by 17, he sailed to Gibraltar for army training, “to an army crammer” as he described it. On board ship he met “a lady” who he describes as “a grown up” and “not of his world”. He recounts how ‘amongst heaps of billowing lingerie he lost his shyness.”

At the age of 19 he changed course and sailed to South Africa to “learn the diamond business from the bottom”. He was very successful. By the age of 22 he banked equivalent to £6,000,000 back in England. He then sailed to Malaya where he convinced a power station manager that he was an engineer and he took engineering work and lived very well, hunting tigers amongst other adventures. 

At the age of 23 he moved on to Borneo and worked as a surveyor for Post and Telegraphs, laying telegraph line across Borneo. He is recorded as being the first European to have made the trek right across this head hunting country. He was really in search of gold. He then spent a year in England with relapsing malaria.

At the age of 25 he returned with De Beers to South Africa and the diamond fields. During this period he married Kathleen in Johannesburg. Kathleen deserted Fred after only a year of marriage, leaving him with the care of an infant son. They were divorced. At the age of 30 he was asked to go to Java in pursuit of an oil concession.

At the age of 32, at the outbreak of WW1, he sailed from South Africa for England with his six year old son. He was intent on enlisting for war. On board ship he met Katharine who was a returning missionary. Katherine had lost her fiancée to malaria. 

Fred joined the Nottingham and Derbyshire Regiment. His previous military and engineering experience help him making promotion with the 12^th Pioneer Battalion. After the Battle of Loos, they move to the Ypres Salient. It is here in February 1916 that Fred and his men stumble across a printing house. 

“Some printing-house and some square! There were parts of the building remaining, the rest was on top of the press. The type was all over the country-side; in fact the most perfect picture of the effects of Kultur as interpreted by 5.9’s ever seen. One of the our Sergeants, by nature an optimist and in a previous existence a printer, said he could make the press print if he had a  brace of light-duty men to help him. He got them, and was as good as his word, as within three or four days, he brought me a specimen of his handiwork. Paper was three, ink in plenty ,everything in fact except “copy”. As none of us were writing men, we just wrote down any old things that came into our heads. To get an idea of the birth of the paper, one has to try to visualize Wipers in those early days of 1916. We lived in rat-infested, water-logged cellars by day and at Hooge by night. As an existence it had little to recommend it.”

He appoints himself as editor, his subordinate Jack Pearson as sub-editor. Both make promotion and are awarded the MC before the war is out. In 1918, at the close of WW1, Fred nearly died in the great flu pandemic. He wrote no memoirs of his war, despite publishing 23 issues of the Times. Remarkable? Or perhaps not…

According to his family, Fred had vivid memories of visiting Talbot House. 

Fred and Katherine were married on 10/02/1917 during a very brief home leave from Flanders for Fred.  Katharine cared for Fred’s child, Bill, and she had 3 children of her own in quick succession at the end of the war.

When Fred recovered from the Spanish Flue, he had trouble settling down so he was glad to be given the task by the British Government. His connection was no other than Winston Churchill whom he met in the trenches near Ypres. He was sent to the newly created Soviet Union to persuade Trotsky and Lenin to sell the Russian crown jewels to the British government for a handsome sum. His efforts failed and the jewels were sold several years later to the USA for a much lesser sum. He had a fine knowledge of gems.

At the age of 44 he joined an expedition with his best friend to British Guiana in search of diamonds and gold, leaving his wife and 4 children in London. His best friend died of blackwater fever on this expedition. At the age of 56 Katharine died from a pulmonary embolus. She had been involved in a car accident and had been immobilised with a fractured leg. 

By this time the family were almost grown up. At the age of 57, just before the outbreak of WW2, heart broken at the loss of Katharine, he sailed to New York on the Queen Mary to start a new chapter.

He was very disappointed to be refused permission to enlist for WW2 on grounds of age; he made several attempts. However his knowledge of terrain where he had mined was used in the creation of allied airfields. President Roosevelt is another one of his contacts in those days. 

At the age of 68 Fred married an American, Irma, and they lived in USA and then Canada. Irma wrote children’s books with him and she also transcribed Fred’s memoirs which have never been considered worthy of publication. 

They made several voyages to England. On the last voyage to England, when he was 77, he dined with Winston Churchill twice at Chartwell. They had known each other since WW1 days.

At the age of 82 in 1964 he died in Toronto. His ashes were returned to England and interred at Brookwood cemetery in Surrey.

Thank you to Viv Child, his grand-daughter providing additional detailed information

She only met him once, aged 9. “I remember him as an imposing figure with big bushy eyebrows that moved up and down.  He seemed old fashioned to me. He was wearing a formal suit on a hot summer’s day. When he bent down to kiss my little sister, he caught her shoulder with his lighted cigarette- in every way a man of his time. 

My mother, his elder daughter, adored him, referring to him as her darlingest Pops when writing. She thought he was loving and fun and brave. Others referred to him as fearless, generous to a fault, devoted to his family and a loyal friend. Although he was absent from home most of the time, when he came home ‘flush’ there were treats, outings, picnics and lots of fun. His wife, Katherine, said family life was ‘something of a bust or starve’ but she said that she knew he would always be faithful to her.

Fred Roberts was a man of many voyages. He spent 40 yrs of his life in search of diamonds and gold and adventure. He was an intrepid adventurer and a huge risk taker. He made fortunes and lost them.”

Talbot House was able to obtain all 23 copies owned by Fred Roberts from his family in Jun 2025. They felt the should come home again, to Talbot House which Fred loved dearly.

Sources:

Westhorp, C. (2018). The Wipers Times: The Famous First World War Trench Newspaper. Osprey Publishing