The Byzantine notions of Britain’s nobility and class structures can easily confuse a citizen of a republic, even the neighbouring one, so I sought out a cicerone to explain how it all worked. Sir David O’Grady Roche (77), a Carlow-born baronet living in Britain since the 1960s, promised to guide me.
Roche (he dropped the O’Grady leg of his name in Britain years ago) suggested we meet at his mews home in west London, down a charming cobbled street near Lancaster Gate.
We had met a couple of times previously – once for lunch and, long before that, when he had effectively gatecrashed an Irish Times interview with politician Nigel Farage at a raffish restaurant in Mayfair. They shared a mutual friend, who had also pitched up to join the conversation.
At that first meeting, Roche had landed at our table on the restaurant’s roof, puffing on his pipe and bearing a roguish grin. Now, more than a year later, he answers the door of his mews home in precisely the same demeanour – his eyes glinting behind the curls of blue smoke rising from his pipe.
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He leads me to a downstairs front room filled with artefacts and family heirlooms including old furniture from Aghade, his family’s long since-sold Carlow estate, as well as pictures of his ancestors. Roche pauses beneath a photograph on the wall of a military vessel. “That was my father’s ship.”
His father, Sir Standish O’Grady Roche, became the 4th Baronet of Carass in Limerick at the age of three. He later joined the Royal Navy and, aged in his early 30s, commanded the destroyer HMS Beaufort during the second World War.
Standish saw action near the coast of Malta during the second Battle of Sirte in 1942. A British convoy survived a heavy attack by enemy Italian battleships. But the violence of war left a dark legacy for Standish. He ended up suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. After the war, he struggled to keep Aghade afloat and eventually sold it in the late 1960s. The mariner’s eldest son, Roche, moved to London virtually penniless.
“I sought the counsel of a man more experienced in these things, and asked him what I should do. He told me to become a chartered accountant,” says Roche, who inherited his father’s title upon his death in 1977. He trained with KPMG and embarked on a successful career in business.
“Just because you’ve got a title, people expect you to be born rich. But I came here [to London] without a shilling. Whatever I did, I did myself. Eventually I did make a lot of money. But, well, I spent it all on yachts and things,” he says, clearly facetiously, as his eyes glint ever brighter.
We move upstairs to the kitchen, where Roche has laid on an eclectic buffet of egg mayonnaise and prawn sandwiches, Mars bars and Bordeaux wine. As we tuck in, he explains at length and with great entertainment the differences between the strata of nobility – barons and baronets (the latter are the lowest ranked, but are still above knights), viscounts, earls, marquesses and the highest ranked, dukes. Titles are inherited along the male line.
“The notion of titles is more or less dying out,” he says. “Nobody really uses them any more.” Roche argues that this trend, while desired by many in society, presents a problem for the British monarchy.
“The king sits at the top of a pyramid of honours. That pyramid always gave the monarchy strength and stability. But now, instead of that pyramid, there is more of a narrow pillar of honour that runs directly between the monarchy and its popularity with the people. Pillars are much easier to knock over than pyramids. This has introduced an element of vulnerability to the monarchy,” says Roche.
For example, he says, the last hereditary baronetcy to be created by the monarchy was for Denis Thatcher, husband of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, back in 1990. Denis Thatcher was a friend of Roche’s, whose ancestors were granted their Irish baronetcy in 1838 during the coronation honours of Queen Victoria. All the family’s subsequent baronets – there have been five, including the incumbent – were christened either David or Standish, he says.
As the afternoon draws to a close, Roche says he has a son, David, who will one day inherit his baronetcy and the right in Britain to the title “Sir”. He had another son, his first born, who sadly died at the age of two. I ask what happened. Roche reveals the boy drowned.
“And what was his name?”
“Standish,” he replies, softly.
It surely must be true that titles bring privilege and social advantage that others never experience. Some things, however, are universal and don’t discriminate, no matter what.
