Rev Rokeby

Rev Hubert Denys Eddowes Rokeby was born in 1904.

In 1925 there are recorded visits to Canada and the USA. Perhaps this is where his liking for North American postcards started? By 1928 he was to be found in Kettering, Northants.

By 1932 he was a vicar in Aldershot, Surrey and by the late 1930s he was at 88, Staines Road, Twickenham, London, where he lived with his mother Lucy.

At the beginning of the Second World War, he had moved to a parsonage in Stranraer, Scotland. In 1942 he married Agnes Forsyth (1903 to 1991) in Exeter. Then at the end of World War Two he became a vicar at The Rectory, Mundford, Norfolk, where a number of postcards in this collection are addressed to him.

In 1952, he again visited the USA. One postcard from an American collector, from around this time, asked when he was "coming over". His mother passed away in Liverpool in 1957 leaving him £4,000, which in those days was a substantial amount.

By the late 1960s he had moved to The Green in the village of Barrow, near Bury St.Edmunds, Suffolk. He passed away in 1969.

Library of Birmingham acquired a large number of railway-related postcards that were sent to him.

A Liverpool historian, Mr Paul Bolger (Liverpool Daily Post 20 March 2007) says Rev Rokeby was as “mad as a hatter”, had a collection of thousands of postcards and took over 100,000 photos.

His extensive collection of railway photographs, which can be viewed, is deposited with the English Heritage archive in Swindon.