For an all-too short period between the summer of 2018 and summer 2019, Stephen Roberts was the Reviews Editor of The Local Historian, a role which he relished and which - not least because of its contact with local historians far and wide - gave him great pleasure. Sadly, he was soon forced to resign because of ill health. In July this year we learned of his death. I treasured his friendship and when I visited him at home in Sutton Coldfield our conversation was always fascinating and full of variety (from his love of 1960s and 1970s popular music to the esoteric details of working-class radicalism in the Victorian period). I was shocked by the news of his passing, and am deeply grateful to Andrew Reekes, Stephen’s friend and co-author, for his permission to republish this moving tribute, which appeared on the West Midlands History web-site on 25 July 2022.
Alan Crosby (Editor of The Local Historian)
From top to toe of his not inconsiderable frame Stephen Roberts (1958-2022) was a Birmingham historian. Born and educated in Sutton Coldfield, and then studying at the University of Birmingham, he had by the time he graduated developed a passion both for Aston Villa and for the Chartists, about whom he would write, research and publish for more than forty years. His tutor at the university was Dorothy Thompson, that doyenne of Chartist Studies; she and her husband, the great historian of the working-classes, E P Thompson, welcomed Stephen into their Wick Episcopi home near Worcester and proved to be the most important cultural and intellectual influences of his life, shaping his own interest in working-class radicals, and his own sympathy for political movements of the Left.
From university he went into teaching - at Hagley Catholic High School where he was Head of History - but all the While he retained research interests at the University of Birmingham and from the 1990s he was publishing on aspects of Chartism and Victorian history Steadily, however his focus came to centre on Birmingham’s history. He had Written an important article on ‘Politics and the Birmingham Working Class’ back in the early 1980s; but in his last twenty years he returned to research his beloved city, especially its Victorian incarnation. and he unearthed a rich seam of heroic and intrepid figures, which he mined energetically for he was a prolific writer, and an excellent lecturer. Though not an active churchman he admired the vision and humanity of ministers like George Dawson Robert Dale and Henry Crosskey, about all of whom he wrote with great insight. But he was especially attracted to those Birmingham businessmen, pioneers of a golden age, who were later forgotten or under-appreciated, and his little Birmingham Biographies on Sir Richard Tangye, Joseph Gillott, James Whateley and others succeeded in rescuing a number of important Birmingham figures from what his mentor Thompson described as the enormous condescension of posterity’. In many ways Stephen was happiest when transported back into the company of the members of the Shakespeare Club, planning the celebration of the Bard, or discussing schemes for improving the physical and moral lives of fellow Birmingham citizens at the Arts Club, and he spoke, and wrote, with great sympathy and affection for his heroes, like Sam Timmins, John Skirrow Wright, J A Langford. He had an enviable knack of truffling in histories byways to find just that little human detail or telling anecdote which both brought them to life anu made his writing so readable. These men, he felt, represented an energy, a nobility arid a selflessness largely and depressingly absent two centuries on.
His research and writing was his consolation, for his last years were not easy. He was the most dutiful of carers for his mother; that arid the onset of Covid, coinciding with the onset of his own health issues, severely limited his social and professional contacts. He felt that sense of isolation keenly, but he continued to publish new material to the end. He was one of the last of a generation of historians passionate about - and actively writing on - 19th century Birmingham, and he would be pleased to think that in a number of ways has valuably added to our knowledge and understanding of the individuals who made Birmingham the ‘best governed city in world’
[Andrew co-authored with Steven, George Dawson & his Circle: The Civic Gospel in Victorian Birmingham (Merlin Press. 2021)]