Dr Charles Roe AM, born in Brisbane on 14 February 1919, was the eldest child of Arthur Stanley Roe (Queensland's first Rhodes Scholar) and the eldest grandchild of Reginald Heber Roe, second Headmaster of Brisbane Grammar School from 1876 to 1909.
After leaving Toowong State School on a state scholarship, he entered BGS in 1932. He became a Prefect, member of the School Committee and librarian; in 1936 he was the School's Singles Tennis Champion and Captain of Tennis, Vice Captain of the First XI and a member of the First XV, and played GPS All-Schools Cricket.
He enrolled at The University of Queensland in 1937, gaining a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1942, and married fellow medical student Esther Gilmore Wilson. They had four children, three of whom became medical practitioners. He served as a Medical Officer in the RAAF from 1943 to 1945, then returned to Brisbane and, like his father, became a urologist. He was awarded Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1977.
In 1991, Dr Roe endowed the Arthur Stanley Roe Scholarship with other members of his family to preserve the name of his father within the School. In 2005 he was appointed Assistant Professor (part-time) in the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine at Bond University. He was recognised in the 2011 Australia Day Honours List (AM) for services to medicine, particularly through contributions to the Australian Medical Association Queensland and to the community.
An advocate of physical fitness, he won several veterans' tennis championships and jogged well into his 90s near Roe's Kamp (originally Whirobo), his home on South Stradbroke Island, named after the School's first outdoor camp started by his grandfather Reginald in the early 1880s.
Dr Roe died in his 99th year on 15 January 2019, a month shy of 100 years. He donated a rich body of material to the School Archives over the years, a gold seam for researchers, and much drawn on in the School's sesquicentenary history Light dark blue.
Source: Grammar News Winter 2019. Read the original edition