Fonds GB 0210 CARHER - Caryl and Herbert Roese Papers

Caryl Blodwen Margaret Roberts was born in Ystradgynlais on 22 Febuary 1937. She studied singing and the organ at The Royal Academy of Music, London, and graduated in 1960. She married Herbert Roese in 1960. Caryl and Herbert Roese moved to South Africa in 1965. She was a lecturer at Cape Town University and a professional singer there; she sang the part of Esmeralda in ‘The bartered bride’ in 1965. They returned to London in 1968. Caryl Roese attended a course in Salzburg on Orf Schulwerk. She was appointed a music lecturer in the Institute of Higher Education in Cardiff in 1970 and later studied for a part time BEd degree. In 1987 she was appointed the Head of the Music Department and retired in 2002; she visited Ghana in 1995 where she had drum lessons. She was an adjudicator in eisteddfodau and a conductor of Llantrisant Male Voice Choir. Her other interests involve art and design, sculpture, textiles and stained glass. Exhibitions of her work have been held in galleries, 2005-2011.

Caryl Roese’s parents were friends with the Polish-British painter Josef Herman and she was a trustee of The Josef Herman Art Fountation Cymru Trust Ltd. She gave a lunchtime talk at the Drwm, National Library of Wales, on ‘The Roese collection of contemporary Welsh paintings’ in 2019, artworks which were donated by her and her husband Dr Herbert Roese to the Library.

Dr Herbert Eckart Roese was an engineer, archaeologist and author. He was born in 1935. He originally trained as a mechanical engineer in Cologne. In 1979 he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis, ‘An investigation into the topographical location and distribution of Neolithic and Bronze age monuments in Wales’. He worked as a freelance researcher and published a number of articles in journals, including ‘Lovespoons in perspective’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 1988, a book entitled African wood carvings: the sculptural art of West Africa (Cardiff, [2011]), and a biography of his wife Caryl Roese, Only a miner's daughter : a biography, in 2011.