Alfred Roberts
British grocer (1892-1970)
Alfred Roberts (18 April 1892 – 10 February 1970) was an English grocer, preacher and local politician. He served Grantham as alderman from 1943 to 1952 and mayor from 1945 to 1946. His second daughter, Margaret, was the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Early life
Roberts was born in Ringstead, a village in Northamptonshire, the fifth of seven children. His father was Benjamin Ebenezer Roberts (28 December 1857 – 17 September 1925), from a Ringstead family, and his mother was Ellen Smith (20 November 1857 – 1 May 1935), whose own mother, Catherine Sullivan, was born at Kenmare in Ireland. At the 1871 census, Benjamin Roberts was a shoemaker's apprentice in Ringstead. At the 1921 census, he was an out-of-work shoemaker.
Roberts initially wanted to become a schoolteacher, but he left school at thirteen to help support his family. He is listed in the 1911 census as a boarder in Oundle, Northamptonshire, working as a grocer's assistant. He later moved to Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he was apprenticed to a greengrocer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alfred Roberts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.