He was the son of John Edwin Benjamin Rose (auditor-general of the Cape Colony) and Emmerentia Johanna Steytler.
[1] At the end of 1896, he started to work as assistant analyst in the Government Analytical Laboratory, Cape Town.
In the Anglo-Boer War between 1899 and 1902, he was a captain in the Cape Colonial Cycle Corps, and received the Queen's South Africa Medal.
During World War I, he was assigned to the mechanical transport in the German South West Africa project, receiving the Star medal[9] and Croix de Guerre.
He obtained the rank of lieutenant-colonel and later became the chief inspector of mechanical transport in East Africa.