ROY LEAVER

ROY LEAVER

January, 2008

Obituary by Roger Smith

Roy was born in 1931 and was a pupil at Richmond & East Sheen County Grammar School until in or about 1947/8 when he left school and became a trainee with Barclays Bank.    Apparently one of his first jobs was in Brentford and involved counting the cash amounts paid into the Bank by Brentford Football Club.     With attendances at Grffin Park in those days frequently over 30,000 that was clearly no small task!

I first met Roy in the early to mid 1970s when a client of my law firm took delight in introducing me to his bank manager, Roy Leaver   By then Roy was the manager of the Westcombe Park Branch of Barclays Bank and it did not take many minutes to discover at that first meeting that Roy had grown up just off the Upper Richmond Road in East Sheen and had been a pupil at the School.

From Westcombe Park Roy moved to be the manager of the Sutton Branch of Barclays Bank and eventually took early retirement in the mid 1980s to run a pig farm near Ashford, Kent with his two sons - a venture that seems to have been unsuccessful on account of the changing market conditions within the EEC.

The pig farm land was sold during the 1990s for residential development and Roy and his wife, Margaret, moved a few years ago to Wells in Somerset where Roy lived out his last few years, becoming a victim of Alzheimer's Disease several years ago.

Roy was a friendly, outgoing man who in later years became a staunch member of the Baptist Church.   He leaves a widow, Margaret, to whom he had been married for more than 51 years, four children and a number of grandchildren.   It was a pleasure to have known him.