mathematics at Queen's College, Cork. In 1867 he was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall; on 11 June of the same year he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, and took chambers at 4 New Square, whence some years later he moved to 16 Old Buildings. In the law list of 1868 his connexion with the home circuit and Sussex and Brighton sessions was announced; but he soon developed a practice in the chancery courts, and the reference to sessions was not repeated in later issues. His chancery practice increased rapidly and for several years he was one of the busiest juniors. In 1881 he was made a Q.C., and practised at first for a brief time before the master of the Rolls, Sir George Jessel; but when under the Judicature Act (1881) that judge became a member of the Court of Appeal, Romer went to the court of Sir Joseph William Chitty. He was a very successful advocate, quick, learned, and lucid, with something of a genial audacity. Among chancery advocates he was especially noted for his skill in the art (at that time still a novelty in their traditions) of dealing with witnesses in the box. In 1884 he was made a bencher of Lincoln's Inn, and in the same year stood unsuccessfully for parliament at Brighton as a liberal; but he was never a keen politician.
On 17 November 1890, upon the elevation of Sir Edward E. Kay to the Court of Appeal, Romer was appointed a judge of the chancery division, and knighted. Lord Halsbury's selection of judges was not always applauded, but no one had any doubt about the propriety of this choice. Apart from his professional distinction, the new judge enjoyed a popularity of which his being almost universally known as ‘Bob’ Romer was significant. His career on the bench added to the distinction, and did not decrease the popularity. In 1899, on the death of Chitty, he was promoted to the Court of Appeal and made a privy councillor. Sitting in the Court of Appeal was perhaps less congenial to him than his work as a judge of first instance, and in the long vacation of 1906 he retired from the bench. In the first part of that year it was possible for the Court of Appeal to consist of three senior wranglers (Romer, Stirling, and Fletcher Moulton), as a few years before it could consist of three ‘rowing blues’ (Lord Esher, Chitty, and A. L. Smith).
Romer's acute and active mind was always interested in other things besides the law. In 1899 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, primarily in virtue of his eminence as a mathematician. In 1900 he was appointed chairman of the royal commission to inquire into the management of military hospitals in the South African War, and he received the G.C.B. in recognition of his services. After his retirement in 1906 he lived at Great Hormead, Hertfordshire, and enjoyed the pleasures of country life, of which, and of shooting in particular, he had always been fond. Lady Romer died in 1916, and Romer himself died at Bath on 19 March 1918. Five sons, of whom the second, Sir Mark Lemon Romer, has followed in his father's footsteps as a judge of the chancery division, and one daughter, survived them. A portrait of Romer, by Lowes Dickinson, hangs in the combination room at Trinity Hall.
[The Times, 21 March 1918; Law Journal, 23 March 1918; Law Lists; H. E. Malden, History of Trinity Hall, 1902.]
ROOS-KEPPEL, Sir GEORGE OLOF (1866–1921), soldier and Anglo-Indian administrator, was born in London 7 September 1866, the elder son of Gustaf Ehrenreich Roos, a Swede who had settled in England as a young man, by his wife, Elizabeth Annie, eldest daughter of George Roffey, of Twickenham. He was educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, Devon, and afterwards at Bonn and Geneva. In 1890 he changed his name to Roos-Keppel, at the wish of his grandmother, who was the last representative of a branch of the Keppel family that had emigrated from Holland to Sweden many generations before.
After a course at Sandhurst, Roos joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers in August 1886, and served in the third Burma War (1885–1886). He was soon, however, transferred to the North-Western Frontier, where he quickly displayed his remarkable aptitude for dealing with the wild mountaineers of that region. After serving for six years as political officer in the Kurram valley he was made political agent in the Khyber in 1899, and in the following January he was gazetted C.I.E. for his successful campaign against the Para Chamkannis. From October 1903 the post of commandant of the Khyber Rifles was added to his other duties. His great influence over the border clans, particularly the Afridis, pointed him out as the natural successor of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir H. A. Deane, and accordingly, on the latter's death in July 1908, Lieutenant-Colonel Roos-Keppel became chief commissioner of the North-West Frontier Province and agent to the governor--
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