Robert S de Ropp - Early Life

Early Life

Robert de Ropp was born in London, England in 1913, the son of William de Ropp and his wife Ruth de Ropp (née Fisher). The de Ropp family had been land-owning barons in Lithuania. William was of Teutonic-Cossack descent and although entitled to apply the designation “Baron” as part of his name, was perpetually in shaky financial circumstances. He had settled in England in 1910 and become naturalised in 1913. De Ropp's mother, Ruth, was a daughter of Albert Bulteel Fisher, whose brother was the academic historian Herbert William Fisher. Ruth died in the 1918 flu pandemic. Robert de Ropp had also contracted the flu during the pandemic, and by the time he fully recovered from its ravages he was seven years old.

Much later in Robert's life, Adeline, one of de Ropp's mother's cousins, was to figure quite importantly in Robert's development. Adeline was the first wife of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

After Robert's recovery from the flu, his father sent him to board at a prep school and during the school holidays de Ropp lived with various relations on his mother's side including an aunt in Leicestershire and a great aunt at Salisbury. This prep institution, Cheam School, offered the conventional curriculum of the Greek and Latin classics, English literature, and Muscular Christianity. Though subsequently questioning the premises of formal religion, de Ropp had his first spiritual experience during his confirmation.

In 1925 de Ropp's father, being financially strained, could not pay for Robert's expensive education and took him from school. His father also remarried and the family went to live in the old baronial estate in Lithuania. Shortly after, de Ropp's father obtained work as an agent for an aircraft company in Berlin and, taking his wife there with him, abandoned Robert in the rambling ruin of the family home where he lived with a family of Latvians attached to the old de Ropp baronial estate. He lived a rustic existence in Lithuania, left to his own devices and picking up the ways of the peasants. Two years later, when he was fourteen, his father shipped him off to the semi-desert south-Australian "outback" to live with, and work for, a hardscrabble-farm family. Three years later the farm went bankrupt amid dust storms. Lonely and nearly penniless, hard-bitten Robert eventually made his way back to England, where one of his maternal aunts took him in. In a while, he moved in with his mother's cousin, Adeline, who lived in Dorking with her husband, the celebrated composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.