Gerald Robarts (15 April 1878 – 27 December 1961) was a British Army officer, banker, and leading squash rackets player. He was a director of Coutts & Co. until 1931.
Contents
Early life
Robarts was born in Buckinghamshire on 15 April 1878. He was the second son of Abraham John Robarts and the former Hon. Edith Barrington, a daughter of Percy Barrington, 8th Viscount Barrington. He had an older brother, John, and four sisters, Mary Edith, Elsie, Marjorie Alice, and Laura Louise.
Although Robarts's father was the tenant at Lillingstone Dayrell of the Dayrell family, in 1868 he paid for the restoration of the parish church. He was High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1869, and in 1882 he built Tile House, Lillingstone Dayrell, where he later lived, designed by Ewan Christian and described by Pevsner as "Neo-Elizabethan, big and forbidding with groups of huge chimneys. His grandson David was High Sheriff in 1963.
Through his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Sarah Smyth, Robarts was a descendant of Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Grafton, an illegitimate son of King Charles II. The third Duke’s daughter Lady Georgiana Fitzroy (1757–1799), married John Smyth, a Whig politician, who was Robarts's great-grandfather. His father's first cousin Diana Elizabeth Smyth married Henry Lascelles, 4th Earl of Harewood, and her great-grandson George Lascelles was the husband of Mary, Princess Royal, only daughter of George V.