David Rolt was an artist (1) who painted portraits, landscapes and seascapes.  Amongst others, he painted portraits of Winston Churchill and Air Chief Marshal “Bomber” Harris.   He spent the last years of his life in Budleigh Salterton and is buried in the town cemetery. 

He was born in Yorkshire in 1915 (2), the son of the Revd. Cecil Henry Rolt and his wife, Mary Foxley Norris, (the daughter of the Dean of Westminster). He was registered as Charles David but obviously preferred David as his Christian name.  His mother underwent a difficult labour and one side of David’s head was damaged by a clumsy forceps delivery and he sustained permanent neurological damage that resulted in underdevelopment of his upper and a lower right limb.  Amazingly his grandfather Dr Norris apparently formed the idea that this deformity was God’s curse on himself and disowned David from birth.  

Henry Rolt became Dean of Cape Town in 1917 (3) and David spent his early years in South Africa.  His father retired in 1924 and died in September 1926 when David was still only ten.  David went to Lancing College and finally to study at the Slade School of Art.  He immediately started to earn his living as an artist.  He worked in the late 1930s and 1940s from his home in Tarling in Essex and from a studio in London at 118 Ebery Mews, Belgravia.  

Because of his physical disabilities David could not fight in WW2 but had a younger brother Captain Cecil Francis Burney Rolt, 23rd Hussars, who was killed in action on April 6th 1945.  Cecil has a tenuous connection with Budleigh because in February 1945 he had married the Hon. Lavinia Mary Yolande  Lyttelton (daughter of the 9th Viscount Cobham), and when she remarried, to Major John Edward Dennys  MC, she lived in Budleigh Salterton (4).  As she didn’t die until 4 July 2007, I wonder whether that is why David moved to the town in 1980, having kept in touch with his former sister-in-law since his brother’s death. 

David had considerable success as an artist after the war and examples of his work are to be found, at the Gulbenkian Foundation, at Chatsworth House, and in collections owned by the Astor, Westminster, Mountbatten and Churchill families, plus many others.  He was based at this time in County Mayo in Ireland but also travelled and painted extensively throughout Europe.  David Rolt is also said to have turned down Honorary Membership of the Royal Academy due to a mistrust of clubs (probably as a result of the difficult time he had at Lancing College due to his physical disability). 

He had a seventeen year relationship with Mel Russell Cook whose father John Smith had been the Captain of the Titanic.  Mel was considerably older than him and David’s friend, the actress Valerie Hobson, apparently helped to persuade David to marry a young debutant Penelope Bradford for whom he had formed an attachment.  They married in 1960 in Westminster Abbey which is ironic when you consider his grandfather the former Dean’s attitude towards him.  The marriage lasted less than ten years but they had two children (2), Catherine A Rolt born in Hammersmith in 1961 and Andrew Tobias Champion Rolt (Toby) born in the Wantage area in1963, who later became an actor.  

When his marriage broke up David moved to Wiltshire and then finally to Budleigh Salterton in 1980 and was living at 2a Coastguard Road (5).  It is interesting to record that at the same time there was a J.B. Rolt living at 2 Coastguard Road (5) but I have been unable to establish a connection between them. 

David underwent a hip replacement operation in 1985 and died under the anaesthetic; he had apparently thought this outcome to be likely. 

Contributed by Roger Lendon, © 2011

(1)I am indebted to the following web-site for much of the information in this article: http://www.davidrolt.com/index.php

(2)FreeBMD.com

(3)Wikipedia.org

(4)thePEERAGE.com

(5)Telephone Directories

114 BS-B-00043 Biography any