Roos lament loss of Roger Lamb
“RAMJET” was a close friend of ours over quite a long period of time that started at the Dubbo Rugby Club in the 1970s when he was a player and then President of the club and I was on the board.
After he left Dubbo and went to Sydney, in a senior management position for Grazcos with whom he had also worked with in Dubbo, he went through a subsequent takeover of that company and then moved to Coopers Veterinary Products. From there he went to Elders moving to Adelaide and eventually became, under John Elliot the CEO of Elders IXL, the merchandise manager for all of Australia.
He was eventually moved back to Sydney with a brief to try and manage a merger between Elders and Dalgety’s, this unfortunately did not eventuate and in Roger’s words, he made himself redundant. He and Judy moved from Sydney to Corlette near Port Stephens where they owned a small house near the water.
In 1992, three of us bought the Yates Seeds business, Narromine Transplants, then owned by Adelaide Steamship Company. This was a nursery that I had built and managed for Yates but had been away from for four years at Lismore, it was badly in need of rejuvenation. I asked Roger if he would help us with the future management of the company to which he agreed, and we subsequently made him chairman. That started for me a period of time when Roger, Judy, Di and I and my two business partners spent the next 10 years in intense change and development, it really was a roller coaster ride but a good one.
Roger’s management style was fantastic and was underwritten by the same motivation and determination that he displayed on the football field, never taking no for an answer and also taking some pretty audacious risks along the way. After the demise of the Managed Investment Schemes in the Forestry Sector, who had become our major clients and subsequently left us with a mountain of bad debts, Roger helped advise me in buying out my partners and we set about once again restructuring the company in the early 2000s.
During all of this time we became fairly constant companions travelling both in Australia and overseas, went to some interesting places investigating possible opportunities for plant growing and seeking out potential customers. Never a dull moment travelling with Roger, I can tell you. He told me on a number of occasions that he was really grateful that I had offered him the opportunity to use the knowledge and skills that he had acquired in senior management over the years, rather than hibernate at Port Stephens. We reached a point where we downgraded our involvement with one another although we kept in close contact. Roger’s health was not too good but Judy, being the good nurse that she was, managed to get him back to operating capacity on a number of occasions. Then suddenly, Judy became ill and died in a very short period of time. Judy was his rock and for those of us that knew them both we could not believe this had happened, we figured she would easily have outlasted him. Di and I and Ted and Di Baker went to a memorial service for Judy, Roger was unbelievably stoic during the whole day and of course we carried on into the night, back at the house with a number of their other friends and family.
From there, Roger sold the house and moved into a retirement village near Corlette and from there his daughter Jenny, talked him into moving closer to her just north of Gosford. Declining health, no Judy to keep up the fight and the fact that he didn’t know many people where he was living and of course the limitations that Covid placed on visitations to retirement villages, I think all contributed to his untimely death. I can’t quite believe that he is no longer with us and that we have lost such a good friend.
RIP Roger.