Leonard Rogers, 1868-1962

Abstract

Leonard Rogers was born of Cornish parents on 18 January 1868, at Hartley House, Mannamead, Plymouth. His father was Captain Henry Rogers, R.N., of Penrose, Helston, Cornwall, who in the course of his naval career saw much service in sailing ships. He spent some time in the waters off West Africa, where his ship was engaged in the suppression of the slave trade, took part in the first China War, and in the Crimean War was with the Naval Brigade in the siege of Sevastopol. Later his ship, H.M.S. Mutine , was wrecked near Venice, and he attempted to swim ashore with a rope. Although he was unsuccessful and had to be hauled back, the rope drifted ashore, and all hands were saved. As the result of this exposure he contracted rheumatic fever, and was invalided out of the Navy while still in the prime of life. Leonard’s mother, who died when he was six years of age, was Jane Erys of Erys, Penryn, the grand-daughter of Davies Gilbert of Relisick, a mathematician and President of the Royal Society from 1825 to 1827. Leonard was the youngest of seven brothers, two of whom died before he was born. Although his father was only a fifth son, the boy deemed this to be near enough to the proverbial seventh son of a seventh son, and from an early age believed that he was destined to be a doctor. His father remarried after his first wife’s death, and had three sons and three daughters of this second marriage, so that Leonard was one of fourteen. Captain Rogers, who was deeply religious, brought up his children in an atmosphere of strict discipline. Nevertheless, the family was a happy one and, writing later in life, Leonard made generous acknowledgment of the training he had received from his father, attributing such success as he had achieved to the sense of duty instilled into him in his youth. Hartley House, where the family lived, was two miles north of Plymouth Hoe, and had seven acres of land with its own dairy, orchard and vegetable garden—an ideal place for a large family. All eight brothers who reached adult life served either in the Church, the Navy, the Army, or in one of the Indian Services. Leonard’s three half-brothers were killed in the 1914-1918 war. In 1914 he married Miss Una Elsie North, daughter of an architect, who had come a year previously from the London Hospital to be Sister-in-Charge of the surgical block of the Medical College Hospital in Calcutta. By a curious coincidence she, like her husband, was the seventh of a family of fourteen. Of their wedding Rogers writes characteristically: ‘On the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 all leave was stopped, so we were married at the Cathedral (Calcutta) onSeptember 19th. This date was selected to take advantage of the Puja vacation for a three weeks’ honeymoon at the beautiful hill station of Shillong. During this we prepared scale plans for the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, for the construction of which I raised the funds. Thus, rather late in life, I had the good fortune to find a perfect companion and helpmate, who unselfishly encouraged me to continue my researches.’ They had three sons one of whom became a physicist, another a mathematician, and the third a doctor of medicine. The mathematician, Claude Ambrose Rogers, was, to his father’s great joy, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1959.