The Lord-Lieutenant of West Yorkshire

Dr Ingrid M Roscoe BA, PhD, FSA

Ingrid Roscoe was born at Rugby School on 27 May 1944. Her father, Dr Arthur Allen, a wartime squadron-leader in the RAF, was in Devon with the forces being mobilised for D-Day. Her future god-father, a house-master at Rugby and a school friend of Arthur, provided a refuge for Ingrid’s mother, Else. In the impulsive manner of the times, Else had come to England from Sweden in February 1940, to marry a man she had met only three times, boarding the last civilian ship to make it safely across the North Sea. Arthur Allen died during Ingrid’s childhood and in 1958 her mother married a Yorkshire industrialist, Brigadier Kenneth Hargreaves (Lord-Lieutenant 1970-78) and the family moved to Wetherby. She studied English for a year at Nottingham University and jettisoned her degree to marry a Yorkshireman, Marshall Roscoe, at the age of 19. The couple settled near Wetherby and have three children. Ingrid started to become involved in voluntary activities as a young mother, first locally and then nationally, choosing principally to support arts-orientated causes. She began to publish articles on aspects of the fine and applied arts.

In 1980, with her children all settled at school, she enrolled at the University of Leeds, where she took a BA in the Fine and Decorative Arts and then a PhD on aspects of eighteenth-century British sculpture. This was adapted for publication by the Walpole Society. She lectured at Leeds University through most of the 1990s and took on co-editorship of a learned journal, whilst continuing to publish on British sculpture. Since 2000 she has been committed to a major project as editor-in-chief and co-author of A Biographical Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851, published by Yale University Press in 2009. It runs to 1,600 pages!

Ingrid was made a Deputy Lieutenant in 1994, Vice Lord-Lieutenant in 1999 and became the first lady Lord-Lieutenant in the north of England in 2004. She was High Steward of Selby Abbey from 2000 to 2008. She is a trustee of York Minster and of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She is Honorary Colonel of Leeds University OTC, is a Commander of the Order of St John and has an Honorary Doctorate (LLD) from Huddersfield University, and another, in 2008, from Leeds Carnegie University (DCL). Dr Roscoe holds a number of other voluntary positions, of which the following are a selection:

Patron of the Prince’s Trust for West Yorkshire
Patron of the National Mining Museum
President of the Royal British Legion in West Yorkshire
Patron of Yorkshire Historic Churches
Patron of the Safe Anchor Trust
President of Calderdale Community Foundation
Patron of the Yorkshire Volunteers Regimental Association
Patron of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society
President of the Leeds Philharmonic Society

Involvement in her family, which now includes 8 lively grandchildren, is a joyful mainstay of her private life. Other particular enthusiasms are British history, Shakespeare’s plays, the Visual Arts and Architecture, fresh air and exercise, but she also loves a good party. Her favourite writers are probably George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Ian McEwan and she finds the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and T S Eliot particularly satisfying.