 Roberts left primary school in Shrewsbury at the age of thirteen, having declined a scholarship to the Shrewsbury School of Art, to work in a coal mine to help support ultimately ten siblings.He worked as an engineering worker for many years, much blacklisted and dismissed for trade union activities, until he became Assistant General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in 1957.Ideologically, he was on the left-wing of the Labour Party.