Mervyn Lawrence Rogers was born in 1952 and studied Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, graduating with 1st Class Honours. He became a Traffic Management Trainee with British Rail: Eastern Region in 1973. He then took on junior management posts at Shirebrook, Tees Yard, Shenfield, and Broxbourne between 1975 and 1983. He was appointed as the Area Manager at Shenfield in 1983 and then undertook the same role at Stratford, and subsequently became Area Manager for North Thameside from 1984 to 1985. He left the railways in 1985 and worked as a Senior Consultant and then as a Manager with Deloitte Haskins & Sells. The firm merged with Coopers & Lybrand in 1990 and he was promoted to be the Director in 1993. The company merged to become PricewaterhouseCoopers. In 2002 his consultancy was sold to IBM and he retired in 2012.