THE GIBBS’ COINCIDENCES
My history and that of the Gibbs family is littered with coincidences, some of which I have already recorded in the chapters written so far.
Their regular appearance continues to amuse me, although as my daughter, Katie, will often tell me: “It’s a small world, Dad.”
One of the first that I was conscious of came when my then wife, Alison, and I took our first holiday in 1969 - a camping expedition to the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall.
We had a small tent and a borrowed blow-up double airbed, which had the unfortunate habit of gradually deflating after we had gone to sleep, so we would wake a few hours later in close contact with the ground.
It was a typical British summer and the constant rain turned our campsite into such a quagmire that when we decided to cut our losses and return home, we found that our car was bogged down in mud.
The campsite owner’s son helpfully towed us to firmer ground and then invited us to have a cup of tea with his mother at their home a short distance away.
The lady was delighted to meet us and when we told her we had been married in Herefordshire the year before, she asked where, as she had lived in the county.
We said the wedding had taken place in a small village, called Peterchurch, followed by the reception in the local Fairfield Secondary School, where Alison’s father, Ronald, was headmaster.
Not only did the lady know the village - she told us delightedly the school had been established in the large house, which had been her home before moving to Cornwall.
The next notable coincidence came nearly 20 years later during the frenetic time, when I was putting together the committee for the Bristol Aero Collection, and I spent several weeks at the home of my friends, Pat and Bob Calver, in Berrow, near Burnham-on-Sea.
The initial idea for the aircraft museum had come from my former newspaper colleague, Graham Kilsby, who shared his vision with me while on a visit to Bristol from his then home in Houston, Texas.
He was in the UK just after Christmas in 1987 to follow up a proposal from a New York financier for an investment in a then Bridgwater, Somerset, company, Purimachos, makers of fire-resistant coatings.
And while I was staying at Berrow the following Spring he had a meeting with the company’s accountant – the Calvers’ next door neighbour.
At around the same time, my son, Paul, had become a fan of the Rocky Horror Show and was keen for me to see the film of the show and so brought along a video, which we duly put into the VHS player.
The video channel on the television had been showing an unrelated film, starring Michael Rennie, and I said that he had starred in one of my favourite movies, The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was of little interest to Paul.
But when we played his video, the first words on the soundtrack were – “Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still.” - Paul for all his love of the show had never taken in the words before.
I’m sure there were plenty more coincidences over the next decades, but another came in November, 2016, when I was in the middle of researching the Gibbs family history and my mate, Nigel, and I were walking the Oxford Canal.
An inquiry to a website for a Warwickshire branch of the family prompted an email from one Sue Lester, who said she lived in a village, called Cropredy, which I had probably never heard of, but if I was ever in the area, she would be happy to show me her collection of Gibbs photographs and documents.
A few hours later, Nigel informed me that we could add an extra day to our walk and that, I soon discovered, would take us to Cropredy, where we ended up staying in the local pub close to Sue’s home and having supper with her and her husband, Martyn.
On our next section of the canal walk we stayed with a cousin of Nigel’s wife, Jenny, who lived in Fritwell, the next door village to Souldern, the clock-making base of my great great grandfather Joseph.
And the day after that we called at a church in Lower Heyford for tea and cake after finding the village pub closed and were greeted by the priest, whose parish also included Fritwell and Souldern,
More family research led me to one Aulden Dunipace, who was related to William Gibbs, creator of Tyntesfield in Wraxall, near Bristol, now National Trust-owned and where Sally had been a volunteer cataloguing items for the inventory.
It turned out that William and Aulden, who was linked with the educational side of the Bloodhound world land speed record attempt team in Avonmouth, Bristol, were not related to my branch of the family.
But amazingly he had chosen to live in Souldern because of its central location between his and wife’s workplaces, unaware of its connection to my great great grandfather.
My research into Joseph and his time-pieces brought two coincidences involving my friend, Ken, a retired saddler, who lives with his amateur artist wife, Maureen, near Bampton, Oxfordshire.
They joined me on a visit to a remote farm house in Over Worton, Oxfordshire, where I mistakenly believed my great great great grandfather had lived in the 18th century – the farmer had been a Gibbs and a distant relation, but not a direct ancestor.
But as we drove into the farmyard past a stable block, Ken recognised this as where he had visited many years to fit saddles for the then owner, whose grand-daughter still lived there.
Some time later one of my many Google searches for Joseph Gibbs' clocks and watches led me to the auctioneers firm of Mallams in Oxford, where I was told that their specialist was Clive Turner, who operated from his home in Abingdon, and they said they would ask him to call me.
That afternoon I told Ken of my inquiries and he produced a 23-year-old receipt for a clock he had bought from Clive’s father, Edward, a neighbour of his saddlery shop in Appleton, Oxfordshire.
When Clive telephoned me later that afternoon to tell me sadly that he had no knowledge of any Gibbs Souldern clocks or watches on the market, he was amazed to know that I knew Ken and asked me to pass on his best wishes.
My mother’s stories of the clock-making heritage hinted of a link to a London family and a call to the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers revealed a Joshua Gibbs apprenticed in 1689 to a Thomas Gibbs, the latter becoming a Master of the company in 1710.
A call to Oliver Bartrum at the company’s base in London, failed to produce any further clues to link Joshua or Thomas Gibbs with Great great grandfather Joseph , but he did reveal that his own father-in-law lived in Souldern, although had nothing to do with clock-making.
He suggested that if I was still intent on establishing a link I should contact the The Consultant Keeper of the Clockmakers' Museum – none other than Sir George White, great grandson of the founder of the Bristol Aeroplane Company and a member of original Bristol Aero Collection committee.
The Gibbs-aircraft connection reappeared in 2017 when I was organising newspaper features about a project to bring an original Bristol F2b Fighter over from the United States to complete its restoration at the Aerospace Bristol museum.
Graham Kilsby, who had bought the aircraft in Texas, told me it was one of six that had been stored at a World War One airfield in Weston-on-the-Green, Oxfordshire, and then sold in 1919 to a local wheelwright, called Reginald Boddington.
He used them to prop up the roof of his workshop and they remained undiscovered until the mid-Sixties, when rescued by the Shuttleworth Trust after a tip-off.
A quick search on AA Route Finder revealed that the village was less than ten miles from Souldern, home of my great great grandmother, Jane (nee Boddington), making Reginald likely to have been a distant relative.