LIVES REMEMBERED MArTiN JAMeS roChe (OS, 1967) Editor’s note: We are very grateful to Martin for remembering QEGS in his will and for his incredibly generous gift left to the school. In line with Martin’s love for music and his wishes, we are creating a recording studio within the music department. This will allow the boys to access music technology aspects of the GCSE and A-level courses and in addition the department will be able to produce state of the art recordings of performances which can take place anywhere on the QEGS site. Martin Roche spent most of his working life as a sole practitioner vet in Colac, 100 miles southwest of Melbourne in Australia. He was born in Morley, Yorkshire, and schooled at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield, where he was a Prefect and played quality rugby for the 4th XV. His A Level results took him to Vet Science at Cambridge where his parents had met during WW2. Martin and his father were residents of Queens’ College, and his mother Ruth did her degree in chemistry at Newnham. His parents and younger siblings emigrated to Colac in 1968, and Dr James Roche (“Doc”) became Colac’s ophthalmic surgeon for the next thirty years. Martin followed them to Australia in 1972 and finished his Vet Science Degree at the University of Melbourne. On Mart’s first trip to Australia Doc met him at Melbourne Airport. As they drove through Melbourne’s suburbs and through Geelong en route to Colac, Mart was positively unimpressed. But once into the typically Australian countryside he began to think maybe this wasn’t so bad after all. By the time they reached Colac, with its large freshwater lake, he was captivated. He grew to love the Aussie bush and felt privileged to have been able to live there. As a child he spent a lot of time in the Yorkshire Dales and in Ireland mucking around in boats with home-made sails on rivers and lakes. He became a keen sailor, and was a member of the Colac Yacht Club for decades. His love of a variety of sports never faltered. He watched every Formula 1 Grand Prix and F.A. Cup Final live. He continued to follow Leeds United through thick and thin, and was also a keen student of rugby union and cricket. Whilst he loved his adopted country he always rooted for England in sports against Australia - perhaps because he felt one was duty bound to root for the underdog. But his greatest passion was his bassoon, which he played for 55 years. He started when a student at QEGS water torture for his siblings trying to sleep next door, which might explain why their academic record was not a patch on Martin’s. He became a proficient bassoonist and
some of the most rewarding parts of his life in Australia were the decades he spent playing with the Warrnambool, Geelong and Ballarat orchestras. He practised as a vet in Colac until 2001 after which he worked for the Department of Primary Industry in Warrnambool for a decade before retiring back to Colac. In retirement he volunteered as maintenance manager at the Anam Cara Hospice (a respite and palliative care facility in Colac). He also enjoyed losing his and his nieces’ dogs in the bush, accompanying his partner Robyn on camping holidays, and entertaining his blind sister Mary. He died unexpectedly on 26 July 2019 and far too soon. He was idiosyncratic, eccentric, quirky and different, but was much loved and certainly irreplaceable. Mick Roche (brother) Australia
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