Frederick Roberts(1832–1914)

Frederick Sleigh Roberts was born at Cawnpore in India on 30 September 1832, the son of General Sir Abraham Roberts, an officer of the East India Company's army from a family of the Roberts name long settled in Ireland. He was a small, slight child, blind in one eye after a childhood illness, and was thought too frail for a soldier's life; but he was set on the army, was educated at Eton, Sandhurst and Addiscombe, and was commissioned into the Bengal Artillery in 1851, going out to join his father's world on the north-west frontier of India.

He was a young staff officer when the great rising of 1857 broke out. Through the marches and battles of that year he showed a complete personal disregard for danger, and at Khudaganj on 2 January 1858 he rode alone after a party of mutineers, cut down a man who was carrying off a captured standard, and saved the life of a sowar who was being attacked, taking the standard for himself. For this he was awarded the Victoria Cross. He spent the next twenty years rising steadily through the staff and the campaigns of the Indian army, a meticulous organiser of supply and movement who never lost the frontline boldness of his subaltern days.

The chance that made his name came in the Second Afghan War. After the British mission in Kabul was massacred in 1879, Roberts led a force up through the passes, won the action at Charasiab, and occupied Kabul. Then, in the late summer of 1880, came the news that a British brigade had been defeated at Maiwand and the survivors besieged in Kandahar, far to the south-west. Roberts assembled a hand-picked column of about ten thousand men and marched it from Kabul to Kandahar, roughly three hundred miles of waterless mountain country, in some three weeks, arriving with his force in hand and fit to fight.

On 1 September 1880, the day after he arrived, he attacked the army of Ayub Khan outside the city and broke it completely, capturing the whole of its artillery and its camp and lifting the siege at a stroke. The march and the battle together were celebrated across the empire as a model of speed, endurance and decision, and they remain the cleanest single stroke of the Afghan wars: a relief column that arrived in time and won outright the day it gave battle. He was loaded with honours and became, as Lord Roberts of Kandahar, one of the most popular soldiers Britain had.

He went on to be Commander-in-Chief in India and then, in the South African war of 1899 to 1900, was sent out as Commander-in-Chief after the early reverses, relieved Kimberley, broke the Boer field armies and took Bloemfontein and Pretoria, restoring the British position before handing over and coming home to be created an earl and the last Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. His soldiers called him Bobs, and the affection in the name was real: he was famous for knowing his men, sharing their hardships, and caring for the ordinary soldier's welfare. He died on 14 November 1914 at St Omer, of pneumonia caught while visiting Indian troops in the field in the first winter of the Great War, and was given a state funeral and buried in St Paul's. The Roberts name carries his memory as little Bobs, the one-eyed subaltern who won the Cross and grew into the field marshal of the march to Kandahar.