GRANDFATHER LIONEL GIBBS
My grandfather, Lionel, architect son of solicitor Joseph Gibbs, mayor of Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1878, fell in love with La Belle France and its language on a bicycle tour of Europe with his younger brother, Horace, (helped with tyres and other equipment provided by Dunlop).
A friendship with a Frenchman led him to become a lodger in a boarding house in Crouch End, London, kept by a Frenchwoman, and there he met and fell in love with a fellow lodger, my grandmother, Gabrielle Meras, daughter of a wealthy vineyard-owning family from Beaujeu, near Lyons – she had moved to London to study English.
Horace meanwhile had emigrated to Alberta, where he bought land at Fort Saskatchewan, close to Edmonton, and carved a farm out of the bitterly-bleak landscape, sharing 320 acres with a partner.
He wrote to Lionel to say there were opportunities for architects in fast-expanding Edmonton and my grandfather decided the only way he could marry Gabrielle was to get established in Canada - he also wanted “to escape the family squabbles in Newport.”
He travelled to Edmonton in 1906 and then in November, 1907, sent for my grandmother, who by then was living back in France with her parents. She sailed alone to New York, where Lionel met her, but took her on to be married at All Saints Church in French-speaking Montreal, because he did not want to be wed in the United States.
My mother, Christiane, was born on November 8, 1908, and my uncle, Eric, followed on December 8, 1910.
Edmonton at that time had many reminders of its frontier heritage, with dirt pavements all around and ice having to be delivered for the ice boxes, which were used instead of refrigerators, but it was to prove a bonanza for Lionel and the architectural practice he had set up with another Englishman, Percy Barnes, a business which lasted until 1914.
They were responsible for major Edmonton projects, including the General Hospital, the Holy Trinity Church and the iconic and ground-breaking Arlington Apartment Block (1909), one of the first multi-storey residential buildings in Western Canada and named no doubt after his father Joseph’s legal chambers back in Commercial Street, Newport.
When my mother was six, war was declared in Europe and two years later Lionel joined the 196th Battalion attached to the University of Alberta and travelled to England with his family.
He was again following in the footsteps of his farmer brother, Horace, who had given up his hard-won acres to serve King and Country.
By 1918, more troops were needed and Lionel, who was a quartermaster sergeant, was made a stretcher bearer and sent to the French front in March, but he survived to see the armistice declared on his birthday, November 11.
His brother, Horace, who had sent poems and a battlefield account back to his sister, Mildred, by then living in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, was not so fortunate.
He had died just over two years earlier on September 27, 1916, in the battle for Thiepval Ridge in Picardy and is commemorated on the Vimy Ridge Memorial, on another memorial in Great Malvern Priory and thousands of miles away across the Atlantic on the Fort Saskatchewan Cenotaph.
Lionel and his young family arrived back in Edmonton in late 1919 having survived the war to end all wars and eager to resume their life in what was becoming Alberta’s premier city.
My grandfather had begun to take an interest in local politics before the war, unsuccessfully running for alderman in 1910 and chairing the city's Parks Commission in 1912.
He returned fired with a burning sense of justice for all, no doubt coloured by his first-hand experience of the sacrifices made by his comrades amid the butchery of World War One and the callous indifference with which they were treated once victory was won.
He was especially scathing of the Hudson Bay Company, who he called “gentlemen adventurers.”
For Gabrielle it meant a growing role as a captivating hostess beside her husband at social gatherings in their home, which attracted the cream of Edmonton’s intelligentsia.
Lionel quickly rose to political prominence in the Alberta Labour Party, becoming its revered hero and champion and a member of the Alberta Leglislature (parliament).
My mother wrote: “He generally topped the polls as there was proportional representation and he was everybody’s second choice.”
He was also a co-founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), formed in Calgary in 1932 as a political coalition of progressive, socialist and labour groups that wanted economic reform to help Canadians affected by the Great Depression.
Lionel was apparently a mesmerising and inspirational speaker, holding an audience in thrall with his oratory and the power of his message, delivered one presumes with a tinge of the Welsh accent of his native Newport, Monmouthshire.
Lionel was aged just 56 when he died suddenly in a hospital in Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario, after being taken ill on his way with Gabrielle to attend a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) CCF conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
His party colleagues and members were left “devastated and in despair” by the loss of a dynamic leader, who at the time of his death was being suggested as a candidate for the Canadian national parliament, where his bi-lingual skills would have been a decided asset.
A highly emotional editorial in the Alberta Labor News stated: “In a very real way, Lionel Gibbs laid down his life in the great conflict against the forces of evil. He died while storming the battlements of oppression and greed. He was fighting to attain a new world for his fellow men. Tonight I think I hear him as he throws back to us who are left the challenge:
“Take up the quarrel with the foe:
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep…..”
A subscription was raised to have his portrait painted, although its whereabouts remain unknown, and the city of Edmonton came to a standstill on the day of his funeral, with flags at half mast on all public and many private buildings.