Francis John Worsley Roughton, 1899-1972

Abstract

Francis John Worsley Roughton was born on 6 June 1899 at Kettering, and died suddenly at Cambridge on 29 April 1972. His only sister died in 1933. His father was the fifth consecutive Roughton to practise medicine in Kettering, and his family had numerous connexions among the merchants and farmers of the area Perhaps the most colourful of his forebears was Thomas Sturgeon, footman to the Duke of Rockingham who, about 1775, eloped with the Duke’s daughter, the Lady Henrietta Wentworth. Using her fortune, he set up a china factory in Rouen, in which he introduced the use of coal for firing his products (the local industry had used wood), but the venture was not a financial success and became insolvent two or three years before the beginning of the French Revolution. Sturgeon, however, after the end of the Napoleonic wars, applied for a large sum in compensation for the loss of the business, and did in act receive some £6000, a small fraction of his original claim for £40 000, but still a stately sum in those times. He showed great perseverance in pressing the claim and the papers show that the matter finally engaged the attention of the Duke of Wellington who suggested settlement to be rid of the affair. The connexion with Sturgeon was that a daughter of his was one of Roughton s great-great-gran mothers. There was an oral family tradition, roughly as described, and about 1955 it occurred to Roughton to pursue the story. The project expanded into a continuing hobby which occupied his leisure hours for some years, and led to expeditions to Rouen to consult the voluminous French archives, as well as to many hours of library work with the English papers, much of the correspondence of Sturgeon and Henrietta with the Duke of Rockingham having survived.