Tireless service of a Catholic layman

Don Edward Cruise, OSB, pays tribute to the memory of Lawrence Redmond Roche
LAWRENCE REDMOND ROCHE was born in 1909 and was educated at Beaumont and Universit) College Oxford and was admitted as a solicitor in 1933. During the war he was Wing Commander in the RAF. His mother was French and Lawrence was bilingual and this was partly responsible for his being security officer at a secret HQ for the training of allied agents and saboteurs and for his work in Europe with the Allies at the end of the war.
After the war he was appointed deputy to the solicitor and legal adviser of the BBC. In 1959 he himself became the solicitor and head of the legal department in the BBC. It was an ideal post to display his legal knowledge, his integrity, his quickness of mind, his administrative ability, his capacity to relate with others and his courage.
The sixties were the years of "That Was
the Week That Was" and of much social and political satire. His "brief" was to protect the BBC from slander and at the same time to have lhe courage and clarify off mind to be able to say "yes", rather than to play for safety. Many of his colleagues remember that courage and clarity with gratitude.
The professional responsibility of such a position might have been sufficient for a man with a wife and family of four children growing up, but Lawrence's sense of what was expected of a Catholic layman went far deeper. lie would perhaps best like us to remember his very many years of work with the Sociel) of St Vincent de Paul for the poor, the aged and the sick. It was one of his great preoccupations. But there was also his work for the Newman Association.
This stretches over many years and led to his holding almost every important appointment in the Newman including that of Chairman of the International Committee and in 1953-5 president of the Newman. Among so much else there was his prison visiting..
Those who knew Lawrence well knew that his wonderful life and the values it embodied flowed from his deep faith and From his absolute loyalty to his saviour and to the Church he founded.
All of us, as we get older, expect to suffer a decline in our powers; poor Lawrence was called upon in his last years to suffer from severe depressions.
As we think of the pain of these last years and of a lifetime given to the love of Jesus and of his fellow human beings and of how fully he had used the talents he had been given, we can only rejoice that he has gone 10 the reward he now enjoys for all eternity in Heaven.