Roth, Felix Norman (c.1855-1921)
Titles
Doctor, Mr.
Description
Felix Norman Roth joined the British Medical Service of the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1892. At the time of the colonial expedition in 1897, Roth was vice consul and district medical officer in Warri, and he accompanied the British Military Campaign on Benin as advance surgeon to the flying column. Among his five brothers were Henry Ling Roth (1855–1925), curator of Bankfield Museum,... Read more
Felix Norman Roth joined the British Medical Service of the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1892. At the time of the colonial expedition in 1897, Roth was vice consul and district medical officer in Warri, and he accompanied the British Military Campaign on Benin as advance surgeon to the flying column.
Among his five brothers were Henry Ling Roth (1855–1925), curator of Bankfield Museum, Halifax, and author of Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903), and Dr. W. E. Roth, ethnographer in Australia. (Home, 1982, 129 ; Phillips, 2021, 85).
He was photographed in Ọba Palace with other officers, and the diary he kept during the expedition confirms he visited and looted it (Phillips, 2021, 138). His diary, ‘A Diary of a Surgeon with the Benin Punitive Expedition’, published in his brother’s book Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (Roth, 1903 ), indicates he was with ‘Colonel Bruce Meade Hamilton, Major Frederick William Bainbridge Landon, Captains Carter, C. H. Ringer, and Searle, and Gregory, of HMS Theseus, (…) with 260 Protectorate troops, one Maxim, two seven-pounders, and carriers (…) at Ceri (…) on February 6th, 1897’.
He is identified in the provenance of several Benin pieces, generally sold or donated by him or his brother Henry Ling Roth to museums such as the British Museum (London), the Pitt Rivers Museum (Farnham, later Oxford), the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum (New York). Some of the objects he sold to the World Museum, Liverpool, were badly damaged or destroyed during the Liverpool Blitz in May 1941 (Phillips, 2021, 336). A group of eighteen objects looted by his brother was offered by H. L. Roth to the Penn Museum (Philadelphia) in 1899.
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