Jonathan Roberts was known as “the Knight of the Stihl”, after his beloved German tractor mower that he spent hours on mowing the grass of our medieval hamlet. On Friday 3 January he will be buried in the Norman churchyard of St Michael’s, Upton Cressett, in Shropshire, whose grass he mowed so lovingly and in such orderly lines.
After a remarkable personal recovery and returning to the sacraments, my 68-year-old Stonyhurst-educated uncle, head tour guide at Upton Cressett, died unexpectedly in his sleep – a heart attack – in the early hours of December 6, the feast of St Nicholas. He lived with us and had attended Mass with our family on the first Sunday of Advent. I found him dead in his pyjamas, surrounded by his library of thousands of books, in the little caretaker’s flat that we had built for him in a former pig barn (known as the “Pig Palazzo”) at our historic family home in Shropshire.
Family deaths at this time of year are especially sad, with Christmas being a time of joy, togetherness and celebration of new birth and the hope of salvation. But Jonathan’s death was different as his life – at least in the last year – was almost like witnessing a real <em>Christmas Carol</em> conversion story. Part of his clinical condition was that he was a fully medicated “bibliomaniac”, suffering from a compulsive obsessive order to buy books that he never read, or opened. This is a condition the Japanese call <em>tsundoku</em>, a term originating as 19<sup>th</sup>-century Japanese slang.
He was no financial Scrooge, but for almost two decades he was a <em>Grinch-</em>like spiritually lonely manic depressive, dependent on medication and doctors; obsessed with his health and not getting Covid; a procrastinator utterly unable to cope with life, family, relationships, any paperwork or the real world. He tried to commit suicide twice.
When he first arrived to convalesce with us in June 2021 (after being removed from the Michael Carlisle Centre – a mental hospital in Sheffield – by the police, having refused to leave) he looked like a cross between the Ancient Mariner and some medieval hermit who had finally been persuaded to come down from fasting on ants up a pillar. My wife Laura was not allowed to see him for the first week as my mother said Jonathan “looked like a tramp”, not having had his hair cut since before the pandemic.
But it was Laura who was mostly to thank for us taking him in as a live-in member of our family, and giving him the chance to enjoy his extraordinary new Second Act of life. However, she made clear what the house rules were when he unexpectedly showed up in a taxi on our son Rex’s birthday having been shuttled around various Shropshire hospitals for 18 months after I found him lying semi-conscious in a pool of blood in September 2021. “If you come back to live here,” she told him, ”you will come to Sunday Mass and you will never bore on about your mental health issues. If you are ill, go and see a doctor.” It took him a while to take the sacraments but we’ll get to his spiritual restoration later.
A week after his death, I found myself seated in a high-backed armchair looking out over the River Severn in the office of Perry & Phillips, the local undertakers, giving a sketch of Jonathan’s biographical details, as part of the arrangements for his requiem at St John the Evangelist, Bridgnorth. These were to be sent on to Fr Iain, our local parish priest, who had only met Jonathan after Mass and didn’t know him well.
“Occupation?” asked the undertaker politely. “You said he mowed the churchyard at St Michael’s, Upton Cressett. Maybe we could put ‘Sexton’?”
“Err… not exactly… but, yes, he did keep the church grass immaculate, swept the bat droppings off the pews and gave tours of the Norman church to our visitors and passing walkers,” I said. “But he was just a volunteer. He simply adored the little medieval hamlet of Upton Cressett. It was his whole life.”
Trying to describe my uncle’s strange life and career, spiritual and mental transfiguration and the unusual role he played in our family dynamics as a form of “lay-brother” is not straightforward. In addition to being the family tutor, tea-maker, driver, lawn-mower in chief, barman (at parties), head children’s bed- time story-teller and house archaeologist, he was also our locally-loved head tour guide – always known as “Uncle Joe”.
He was also “front of house” for our <em>Fawlty Towers</em>-style holiday-let business, patiently dealing with complaints at all hours. Through 2024, he gave expert and knowledgeable house tours to hundreds of visitors, many of whom wrote specific reviews on Tripadvisor highlighting Jonathan as the star of the show.
Jonathan was genuinely kind and eccentric, which can be infectious. He wanted for nothing and expected no payment or anything more than to be invited for supper or lunch occasionally by Laura, who adored him. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of local Shropshire history and a special gift for connecting with people over history. Yes, he often went on far too long and more than one guest complained light heartedly of being “uncled” during a two-hour tour, from which there was no escape, and which I would have done in 40 minutes. But he became part of the tour.
Educated by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst in the late sixties, where he was taught classics by JRR Tolkien’s son Michael, he spent a happy school childhood. He also attended the college’s St Mary’s Prep School and talked of his attachment to playing in the woods that run along the River Hodder – which inspired some of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s most famous poems. He hinted to me that he might have suffered from some trauma, most likely some abuse, as a boy at the school – although he never went into any great detail. It was hard to know what to believe as for many years he liked to play “victim”, claiming to suffer from a myriad of psychological and physical disorders including long Covid, acute gastrointestinal pain, chronic liver and gall bladder issues as well as suffering acutely from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
In around 2012 he voluntarily gave up his driving license on the grounds that he was subject to blackouts. For decades, when living alone in Sheffield, we always invited him to “family Christmas” at Upton Cressett as my father (pictured above) was his closest living relation. He would say “yes, I’m coming” but would invariably text on Christmas Eve to say that he was ill and couldn’t make it. Typical pre-Christmas texts would read: “I have to be on my own in dealing with these terrible medical symptoms and I am actively trying to get medical help.”
Yet this year, tragically, Jonathan was actively looking forward to his first family Christmas for over two decades. Presents for the family were wrapped and ready for the Christmas tree. This may not seem a big thing, but it was all part of his spiritual catharsis. He had lived alone for over 15 years since moving out of his parents’ house in Sheffield after their deaths in 2010 within six months of each other. He had moved back in with them – aged 45 – after leaving his job in 2001 on medical grounds as a research archaeologist with The Canterbury Archaeology Trust.
This was an example of how Jonathan was not suited for normal life. He may have been better off as a member of a religious order. He had problems completing anything, from exams to basic emails. I had to fill in his new passport form for him. I was later to learn that acute procrastination is often not simply laziness, but a symptom of manic depression.
Looking back, this child-like unworldliness – he rarely opened any post and was largely indifferent to bills that were not by direct debit or pre-paid on Amazon – was part of what drew him to my children and others who came into his Gandalf-like orbit. There was much unselfish domestic saintliness to him that I could never have hoped to match. His last living act was to give a gardener a cup of tea despite mentioning chest pains and saying he was feeling tired.
By the time of his death Jonathan had amassed thousands of books – mainly Roman, Saxon history, archaeology and military history (Waterloo and World War II). The compulsion bankrupted him, and was probably rooted in some craving for academic acceptance and a desire to somehow feel that he “owned” the knowledge contained on the unread books that piled up in his flat and in storage.
“You could not walk around the flat,” said his nephew Tom Roberts, after a visit. “You had to crawl through a tunnel system of books and boxes with a single mattress on the floor. The loo was a solitary chamber which you were enclosed by tower-like piles of books. The council once rang me to say that the weight of the books was a ‘structural hazard’ for the building and insisted they were moved into storage.”
No wonder his only Christmas cards were from rare or antiquarian booksellers with whom he spent a fortune. His compulsive book-buying was definitely a serious addiction, like the smuggled bottles of whisky or wine that the French priest refers to when Charles Ryder visits Sebastian Flyte at his end in a hospital in Morocco in <em>Brideshead Revisited.</em> Jonathan and Sebastian were similar addicts but, in the end, both were saved by God’s grace. They came to live simply, like a lay-brother, lacking all ambition other than to be of some service. As Sebastian says: “Of course it had to be someone pretty <em>hopeless</em> to need looking after by me.”
His mental decline spiralled after his parents’ deaths; he burned through his inheritance over two years staying for 18 months in a four-star hotel in Sheffield, which was the closest hotel he could find to where his parents were buried. Any psychiatrist could have told you this was as a result of trauma. He blamed himself for the circumstances of both their deaths. He had been lying in bed when my grandmother died, while my grandfather had slipped over in the snow whilst putting out a wheelie-bin for collection.
When living in the hotel, he hardly ever left his room and lived off room-service. He then found himself broke, homeless and reduced to living off food banks. In around 2014 he finally found social housing in Sheffield in a one-bed local authority flat in Coningsby House, and his serious mental decline and depression set in as well as heavy dependency on medication.
The next decade was a period of spiritual despair, as far as I could gather. He didn’t go to Mass or Confession and, lost in fog of medication, became the family black sheep. Yet we have all been badly traumatised by his death and part of the reason for writing this piece is to understand why. I have lost many dear and close friends – including the best man at my 2014 wedding – but Jonathan’s death has been different.
From being the person who cornered people at events and parties and bored them into submission with his issues, he took note of my wife’s instruction not to bang on about his health and went the other way in the last year. He hadn’t even seen a doctor since February, a record, and he looked in his late 50s, even getting a sun-tan in the summer after spending regular eight-hour days on his Stihl tractor-mower. There can be no doubt that – along with loving our children – it was mowing and engaging again with nature and the medieval landscape he loved, and not medication, that cured him.
When it heavily snowed a few weeks ago, Laura and I were astounded to come back in the late afternoon dark to see him wearing Victorian style socks up to his knees, shovelling grit on to the drive. “He now just does everything possible to help at all hours,” said Laura. “He doesn’t even wait to be asked.”
He became like a lay-brother, loving nothing more than mowing the fruit orchards, even in winter, under headlights. Only recently, in November he had been given a mouthful by an irate neighbour who berated him for mowing away until 8pm when there were a few dry days. “When are you going to stop?” she shouted.
A breakthrough moment was a doctor’s letter that got his driving licence back and a new car that gave him independence after 18 months of being incarcerated in hospitals. He enjoyed having his beard and hair cut for £12 in the local barber's. He began buying new cologne from Truefitt & Hill and had been invited to several local drinks parties over Christmas. He wore smart tweed jackets and cords. No longer was he the quasi-tramp who had to be hidden away. The last time I saw him was at Moor Park School when, against all the odds (the road had been closed due to an accident at Ludlow race course) he had shown up to see my daughter Cosima in the school nativity musical. I was amazed to turn around, about half way through, and see his smiling and happy face in a chair in the wings.
The headmaster, James Duffield, later told me that he had met him a few times and that he had seen him “swapping numbers” with another parent at the mince piece gathering afterwards. He wrote: “I had only known Uncle Joe for a short time but what a lovely, gentle, kind man who was always happy to stop for a chat.”
So what caused him to miraculously turn his life around, spiritually and physically? Laura thinks that he was transformed by feeling “part of the family” and the unconditional (and reciprocated) love he had for our two children, whom he adored. He read them bed-time stories; he taught Rex how to make a bow and arrow from a willow sapling; he taught him Mah Jong; he read him Roger Lancet-Green’s <em>King Arthur</em>; he read him <em>Just William</em>; he showed both of them around the Tower of London; he was our expert historian and map reader on a memorable trip to Normandy to commemorate the 75<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Normandy landings in which Rex’s great-grandfather, Captain Paul Cash MC, was killed at the Battle of Caen. His Christmas present to Rex was a set of Dinky toys of a 25-pounder field gun set, similar to what my grandfather was using against German Panzers when he was killed at the Battle of Caen in July 1944.
His recovery started with going to Mass and mowing, and then accelerated with his driving our two young children back to their prep school; it made him return to his own childhood, where he had been happy. He never married or had his own children, and his unconditional love and kindness towards ours resulted in a new calling for him. He became the Great Uncle Bulgaria of Upton Cressett (for those not familiar with the 1970’s BBC TV children’s series <em>The Wombles</em>, he was a father figure to all the family, and always read <em>The Times</em> every morning).
Graham Greene once wrote that “no man is a success to himself”. The last year of Jonathan’s life made me reflect on what it is that makes any life a success, especially when it comes to God’s grace and witnessing genuine and endless kindness and charity.
On the face it, my uncle’s life was not much of a career success, certainly not in terms of conventional ideas of achievement, as compared to his two brothers. My father, Bill, was an MP for 40 years, was knighted for political service and made a Companion of Honour; my other uncle, Mark (Jonathan’s middle brother) was a leading art conservationist. “Uncle Joe”, as he was always known, may have had an academic knowledge of history but he never actually got a degree as his fragile mental state meant that he invariably had some sort of breakdown before exams. This was before the days when people with such issues could be awarded degrees based on coursework.
Yet he died a happy man, a transformed man, and in many ways a holy man – surrounded by his favourite books, all meticulously ordered in his flat. Much of his final happiness came from substituting the Arcadian world of his childhood at Stonyhurst with the ancient estate of Upton Cressett. Our wish is that the Jonathan Roberts Library – many thousands of specialist books for archaeological and military historian scholars – will remain here as part of his living spirit. He once sent me a copy of Gerald Durrell’s <em>Spirit of Place</em> and I believe Jonathan’s books will remain his spiritual legacy.
He died close to God – <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-miracle-of-st-fillan/">he often prayed to St Fillan, the patron saint of mental illness</a> – and a much loved member of his family (after years of exile) whose life had new purpose. </mark>For the first few times we went to Mass this year, after his return, he didn’t receive Communion. But then something changed; he returned to God and his Catholic origins. He died as an example of the great mystery of God’s grace in a state not unlike the spiritual conversion of Scrooge who, as a new man invested with the spirit of Christmas cheer, goes to church, walks the streets, pats children on the head, looks into kitchen windows, visits his nephew for Christmas lunch and “never dreamed that any walk – that anything – could give him so much happiness”. May he rest in peace.
<em>(Photos: William Cash)</em>
