CLOCKMAKER JOSEPH GIBBS

 

My great great grandfather Joseph Gibbs was born in 1807 at the stone-built Hethe Brede Farm, Hethe, near Bicester, North Oxfordshire, the son of Thomas Gibbs and his wife, Sarah Plumb, who had moved there from Ascott in Warwickshire, where many of my ancestors are buried in the nearby churchyard at Whichford.

 

Joseph was no doubt educated initially in one of the village’s two dame schools – small primary schools run by elderly women, often in their own homes.

 

The death of his father when he was 12 left his mother with debts in excess of £4,000 and she was forced to sell the farm to the Mansfield family, whose descendants live there to this day.

 

After serving an apprenticeship with the celebrated Fardon clock-making family, Joseph started making long case clocks and pocket watches in the 1830s at his home, The Cottage, alongside the parish pump in the High Street of Souldern, near Bicester.

 

He was one of large number of fellow non-conformist craftsmen, who had set up shop in North Oxfordshire in the 18th and 19th centuries after some of their number were excluded from working in Oxford because of their Quaker religion.

 

That our family had included a clockmaker was only a distant vague memory for my mother, but the census records for great grandfather, Joseph, one-time mayor of Newport, Monmouthshire, revealed he had been born in Souldern, so I Googled the name plus clockmaker Gibbs.

 

The search produced a detailed description of two of my great great grandfather’s time-pieces on a website for villages in the neighbouring Upper Heyford area of Oxfordshire.

 

The feature was written by Henry Westbury, who lives in the west of the county and had inherited a Gibbs Souldern long case 30-hour clock six years before on the death of his Aunt Vera, who had lived in The Cottage, with her husband, Les.

 

Les, an engineer, knowing his home's connection to the clockmaker, had been hunting for such a rarity for years and was overjoyed when he heard one had been discovered, in a sad state of disrepair, in the cellar of a house in nearby Fritwell.

 

He bought it and over the following months lovingly cleaned and repaired the clock and no one was allowed to touch it, where it stood in the front room, let alone wind it as was required daily.

 

When Les died in 1993, Henry, who had long admired the clock, volunteered to keep it in proper working order for his Aunt Vera, winding it carefully and even untangling the weight chains when necessary.

 

Once the tall clock was safely installed in Henry’s home following his aunt’s death, he brought it back to mint condition and it joined an exquisite Gibbs Souldern silver pocket watch, which he had bought in an internet auction several years earlier.

 

In February, 2016, I at last came face to face with these two perfect examples of my great great grandfather's craft.

 

The clock was housed in a mahogany and oak case and the 11-inch square, hand- painted dial was decorated with a rustic cottage over the centre and sea shells on each of the corner margins, the day of the month being visible through a calendar aperture.

 

The pocket watch had a two-inch diameter solid silver hunting case to give it full protection and JOSh Gibbs Souldern 1833 was finely engraved on the gilded back plate of the movement.

 

I was entranced by the clock’s intricately-pierced hands and flamboyant Gibbs Souldern signature and the shining perfection of the pocket watch and it was all the more amazing because I had lived in Clanfield, West Oxfordshire, for a number of years and never known that my great great grandfather's creations and 19th century workshop were so close.

 

Joseph, whose wife, Jane, was a member of the local Boddington farming family (hence my great uncle Horace’s second Christian name) later moved from Souldern to nearby Deddington, where he added maintenance of the parish church clock to his other activities.

 

Two of his grandfather clocks, these inscribed with Gibbs Deddington on the face, still survive in the village.

 

In the 1840s the clock-making industry ran into difficulties due to cheap imports from Switzerland and the United States and in 1847 Joseph Gibbs assigned his estate and effects to John Boddington of Souldern (his brother-in-law) and John Robinson, a draper, of Deddington.

 

An newspaper advertisement showed that Joseph later re-started his business in Deddington, adding jewellery to the products on sale.

 

Joseph ended his days a few miles further on in a rented house in Adderbury, a centre for Quakers since the mid-17th century - indeed one Bray Doyley was jailed for eight years after building a Friends meeting house there in 1675, before the 1689 Act of Toleration legalised such worship.

 

Meanwhile his son, also Joseph, became a solicitor, helped by an education funded by a Plumb family great uncle, and moved eventually to Wales and civic and business success in Newport, Monmouthshire.

 

One of his daughters, Ann (Auntie Annie), who was an artist, became a governess in London, living with a vicar and his family in Marylebone.

 

In 1881 she returned to Oxfordshire and started Lindisfarne, a boarding school for the daughters of gentlemen, in Iffley Road, Cowley, Oxford, with a governess  from Germany, and ten pupils, aged from 11-19, including one from Australia and two from India.

 

Her mother, Jane, who lived to 95 – an amazing age in those days - was described as head of the household in the 1891 census, and staying with them were two of Jane's grand-daughters from Newport, Ethel (Auntie Dollie) and Mildred (Auntie Mim).

 

The Lindisfarne pupils included Emmy Wood, whose family owned Burletts, a mansion in Sussex, and it was there that Mildred met her friend’s brother, Hugh - an encounter that was to lead to marriage and the founding of Southlea Preparatory School in Malvern, under his headship.