William Roe completed a photography course at the London School of Photography. In 1847 he married Mary Ann Durham and in 1858 came to South Africa with his family and settled in Graaff-Reinet. There he practiced as a photographer until his death in 1916. He visited various places in South Africa in connection with his work, which was of a high standard.
In 1895 Roe forwarded specimens of insects from Graaff-Reinet, with information about the damage they caused, to the newly appointed government entomologist of the Cape Colony, Charles P. Lounsbury*. Two years later he published two articles in the Agricultural Journal of the Cape of Good Hope. One of these, "Notes on the geology of the Midlands in relation to water seeking" (Vol. 10(3), pp. 165-170), dealt with the influence of dolerite dykes, and the size of the catchment area at a site, on the amount of available ground water. In the other, "Notes on a form of irrigation well suited to a large portion of the Colony and especially the Karroo and inland plateau" (Vol. 10(1), pp. 25-27), Roe expressed the view that inland lakes had fairly recently existed in the interior of southern Africa, but had dried up. (A specific proposal for restoring inland lakes assumed to have existed in the Kalahari was published by F. Gessert* of Namibia this same year, which probably formed the basis of E.H.L. Schwarz's* later "Kalahari Sheme"). Roe proposed that all the gaps in the dolerite dykes of the Karoo where rivers passed through them should be filled up. Thus run-off would be reduced and groundwater increased, while the series of dams created in each river could be used for irrigation.
