Robert Evelyn Roy

Born	c1820
Education	Boston Grammar School (1835); Oakham School; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (BA)
Spouse	Miss Kenrick
Parents	William Roy

Robert Evelyn Roy was educated at Boston Grammar School (1835). He left us the earliest account by a pupil of life at Boston Grammar School.

He was the son of William Roy, rector of Skirbeck from 1834, when his returned from India, to his death in 1853.

He left BGS for Oakham School from where he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He gained a BA and was ordained Deacon in 1843 and priest in 1845. He gained his MA in 1847. He was curate at Boulston in Pembbrokshire from 1843. He became curate to his father at Skirbeck in 1845 and curate at Coningsby in 1850. He succeeded his father as rector of Skirbeck in 1853 and stayed there until his death in 1902.

William built the large rectory at Skirbeck (later used as a school, part of the Boston College and now apartments) in 1848, following the 1847 fire which burnt hown its predecessor together with most of Roy's valuable plate and Indian furniture. Robert's choice of home was more modest, as befitted his reduced financial circumstances: his professional income and his wife's private means (she was a Kenrick) were 'reduced by agricultural depression almost to vanishing point'. He moved to a riverbank bungalow adjoining St Nicholas' churchyard - the former Neptune Inn, which earlier sported river bathin facilities. Robert Roy 'could not fill his father's place though he was:

earnest, self-denying and abstemious, strictly correct in money matters... kindly and charitable, quite unable to bear malice permanently... (he) made constant efforts to assert his authority, but this only provoked ridicule which made him fall into absurd, though only temporary exhibitions of rage, so that baiting him became an amusement to malicious parishoners.

Nevertheless, he saw to it that regular Sunday morning and afternoon services which his father had allowed to lapse, were resumed at St Nicholas' Church, and in 1862 St Nicholas' School was erected by subscription on land Robert gave in Fishtoft Road. It opened with 110 pupils and was extended twice within Robert's lifetime. The oprder in council obtained in 1875 which made Holy Trinity a separate ecclesiastical district enabled Roy to pay more attention to Skirbeck Quarter, that part of his parish on the other side of the river.

In 1865 a church weekday school was started in Skirbeck Quarter in the almshouses supported by the charity founded by Sir Thomas Middlecott, the seventeenth century mayor of Boston (1613, 1620). In 1866 St Thomas' School opened and, eleven years later, was licensed for worship and regular Sunday afternoon services began.

Before long, the Quarter's residents undertook to pay for the full-time services of a curate, 'as the inhabitants have found it impractical to attend their parish church (St Nicholas') and naturally do not care to go to Boston churches where they are mere strangers'. These early curates included Sydney Herbert Nobbs, descended from a Bounty mutineer, who ended his ministry as chaplain of Guernsey prison, and Robert Lingen Burton, formerly an ostrich farmer in South Africa, who did not 'hit it off' with Rector Roy.

Near the end of his long life, Roy recalled of Boston Grammar School that by 1850 when headmaster Thomas Homer resigned, 'the Old School had reached the lowest possible condition of weakness, so that the last spark of life was dying out'. But, he pointed out, it was 'not by any means so bad ten or fifteen years before'. His account is the earliest we have of life at BGS as seen through the eyes of a pupil. Of the school shortly before Victoria came to the throne, Roy wrote:

The elderly Dr Homer was doing a creditable amount of work on a small scale, and there were some fifty or sixty boys in regular attendance; but, of course, we had not one who was distinguished for scholarship, or even went to the university direct from the school... we met punctually at 7 o'clock, a.m., and woe be to the lad who came under the Doctor's strap, if he were late| At 8 we had an hour for breakfast, and I, living nearly a mile off, always took from home materials for that meal, which was deposited at a shop close by and duly consumed there, with a very congenial companion, one William Porter, who rode up on his pony from Kyme Tower. I had only one class-fellow, a nephew of the Archdeacon of Kildare, and grandson of a former Bishop of that see... We had a very pleasant time of it, sitting together in a little enclosed desk just big enough to hold us both and under the Doctor's right hand, he being mounted in a square enclosure against the south end, having on his left one lonely wight, in a class by himself, which was the 2nd Class. Richard Lindsay and I formed the 1st Class.

After Brelsford Asling of Class 2, came a group of some dozen or more boys at a desk on an elevated platform against the east wall. I only remember them as reading Virgil and Caesar... After them were a lot under the second master, or usher, at a desk down the middle of the room. Mr Martin was a very efficient, painstaking and pleasant man of the Commercial School type, who taught reading, writing and arithmetic with surveying and book-keeping. We upper boys came under him part of the afternoon, and my father having a chain and other paraphernalia for surveying, we took the dimensions of Mr Hopkins' field, now Mr Oldrid's. This occupied several afternoons...

Speaking now of my own class of two, our morning hour was spent in having our Latin exercises looked over, prose and verse, by the Doctor, who in the summertime would do this walking up and down the playground under the tall poplar trees... the Doctor was the author of a little book, teaching how to make Hex and Pen verses: passages of Cripture to be turned into verse, with the aid of a dictionary and gradus at the end. It certainly made the work interesting. After breakfast we went through translations in Greek and Latin verse and prose, and got through two Greek plays of Sophocles, the Oedipus Coloneus and Tyrannus, in the year, besides a little Horace and Livy. But what astonishes me more than all, is that we managed to learn Hebrew, and got through twentyeight chapters of Genesis, besides a few Psalms, and six chapters of Isaiah. This was the Doctor's pet language, and kept us after hours. On Saturday night or Sunday we had to write a theme on some moral subject, which, I regret to say, was my great aversion, and probably the Doctor's.