22 Sep 1941 - 12 Aug 2020

At the start of the war, Sancia’s mother, Elsie Le Lacheur, was evacuated from Guernsey together with other family members and they stayed for several years in Westmorland. It was there that Elsie married Richard Rosoman, who was based further north, in Fort William. Sancia was born in 1941 in the Lancaster Royal Infirmary and in 1945, at the end of the war, the three of them returned to Guernsey and to the house that Richard and Elsie had built before the war started.

Sancia spent her early school days at the Guernsey Ladies’ College and later attended St Swithun’s School in Winchester. She went on to train at the London College of Secretaries. 

In the mid-60s she spent almost a year in Canada, first in Ottawa and then in Vancouver.

One of Sancia’s favourite jobs was as secretary to the Director of the Royal Ballet School. One of her colleagues said, “We shared an office for several years and had a lot of fun there. It was so interesting, you never knew who was going to turn up. In the winter it was Rudi Nureyev dressed from top to toe in fur, including a Cossack hat! Sometimes it was Margot Fonteyn - once she asked me how to use the photocopier. We had Russian ballet companies visiting and wanting to use the practice studios and many well-known faces in the ballet world.”

It is probably no coincidence that Sancia’s love of music and ballet was influenced by the fact that her four times great grandfather was Thomas Rosoman who, in the mid-1700s, managed the theatre that had been built much earlier by one Richard Sadler, who had founded a spa called Sadler’s Wells and built a theatre alongside. Thomas rebuilt the theatre and concentrated mainly on opera. Ballet productions were introduced later. Over subsequent years both opera and ballet were shuttled between Sadler’s Wells in Rosebery Avenue and the Old Vic in Covent Garden before finding a more permanent base in the Royal Opera House. For many years Sancia enjoyed performances of the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden in the company of family and friends.

She had a wide range of interests ranging from music and ballet, travelling, photography, art and dining out with friends. Many of her friends enjoyed meals and a glass or two of wine in Sancia’s company. In a break from secretarial work, she spent several months as a waitress at the prestigious Cordon Bleu Restaurant in Marylebone. She was a staunch supporter of the Guernsey Society’s London branch and used to look forward to their meetings, which were often based around a meal in one of the pubs in London.

When, a few years ago, she became ill, Sancia refused to let this prevent her from meeting friends, visiting art galleries, enjoying music and the ballet, and even taking part in guided walks around London. Latterly she still met friends more locally and greatly enjoyed the Friday lunchtime concerts at St Barnabas Church in Ealing and the Sunday afternoon concerts at St Mary’s, Perivale.