Alexander Roche, Baron Roche

Alexander Adair Roche, Baron Roche PC (24 July 1871 – 22 December 1956), known under his second surname, was a British barrister and law lord.

He was the second son of William Brock Roche and his wife Mary Fraser, daughter of William Fraser. Roche was educated at Ipswich School and studied then at Wadham College, Oxford, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1894 and a Master of Arts in 1913. He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1896 and went to the Northern Circuit.

Roche became a King's Counsel in 1912 and was elected a bencher in 1917. Later in that year, he was appointed to the High Court of Justice (King's Bench Division), on which occasion he was created a Knight Bachelor. He served as chairman of the Oxfordshire Quarter Sessions from 1932 and held the same post in the Central Agricultural Wages Board from 1940.

In 1934, Roche was made a Lord Justice of Appeal and was sworn of the Privy Council. On 14 October 1935 to fill a vacancy he was nominated a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary receiving the traditional life peerage as Baron Roche, of Chadlington, in the County of Oxfordshire. Roche retired in 1938 and a year thereafter he became Treasurer of the Inner Temple.

Speaking in January 1933, shortly after the passing of the Children and Young Persons Act of 1932 which had provoked debate about the use of corporal punishment, Roche argued that "the preservation of the power to whip, in proper cases, might be a useful thing". He went on to reflect that "looking back on their own boyhood, they could not fail to recognise that the right of their masters to correct them in that fashion was probably a useful thing in helping to mould their character"

On 22 March 1902, he married Elfreda Gabriel, third daughter of John Fenwick and had by her two sons and a daughter.