Samuel Granville Roberts was a son of Samuel Roberts and Annie Elizabeth nee Jones. He had a sister Jessie M who married John Sharpe. In 1939 the family were at 126 Primrose Hill, Blackwell. Other siblings born before 1911 were Elsie, Lillian, John, Olive , and Eric. We would welcome a photo of Granville to add to the site if anyone knows of one.
An amateur player with Huthwaite Swifts and The Huthwaite Colliery Team, Granville signed with Nottm Forest in 1937 , and played 6 matches with the Reds before the outbreak of World War 2. He was an inside right and made his debut against Luton Town on 15th April 1938. These extracts from a Luton Newspaper report on Roberts in this debut game.
Samuel was the first Blackwell Parish soldier to lose his life overseas. He was a private serving with the 2nd Btn. West Yorks Reg. (Prince of Wales’s Own), part of the British Expeditionary Force in France, and was killed on 3rd June 1940 during the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Our thanks to the site https://www.forzagaribaldi.com/the-foresters-who-played-and-fought/ for this story relating to Samuel Grenville Roberts
“As had occurred in 1914/15 established Forest players were enlisted and left to fight abroad. In his book, The Official History of the Original Reds, Don Wright regales a story from 2011 when a woman wrote to Forest enquiring about a man that had served with her grandfather:
‘’Shortly before he died last year my grandfather wrote his memoirs, including his experiences serving in the West Yorkshire regiment in the Second World War. He described an incident in May / June 1940 in which his company was fired upon by German Stuka planes, injuring the colleague next to him who later died from his wounds.
According to grandpa’s account, this man was a professional footballer for Nottingham Forest and one of the injuries he sustained was his foot being sliced off by a piece of shrapnel. My grandpa wrote that he wished he could remember the brave man’s name but that, with the passage of time, he could not. ‘’