CHAPTER ONE – BIRTH, NEAR DEATH AND THE GREAT WAR
My mother, Christiane, was born in the frozen heart of Canada on November 8, 1908, in the then frontier town of Edmonton, Alberta - daughter of a Welsh-born architect, Lionel Gibbs *4, and his French-born bride of a year, Gabrielle Meras.
Lionel, son of solicitor Joseph Gibbs*2, mayor of Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1878, had fallen in love with La Belle France and its language on a bicycle tour of Europe with his younger brother, Horace*3, (helped with tyres and other equipment provided by Dunlop).
Lionel (left) and Horace in their teens
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, 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 grandmother sat on the train to Montreal fighting back tears because of the heavy boots, which her autocratic father had forced her to buy as “being suitable for the West”. My grandfather looked at her and asked:”Do you think you can run a house?” and although she had never even boiled an egg, she proved very capable.
As my mother wrote later: “She had to be capable. The first house had no water – a water cart delivered it – and a fire had to be lit for all the cooking. My mother had never done any housework and then I started to come and she would look at the slop pail and feel ill. However by the time I was born, business was good and they had moved to a modern house. “
Horace was her godfather in December, 1908, when my mother was christened Muriel Christiane Gabrielle Gibbs, although Grandmother Gabrielle later came to dislike the name Muriel.
Horace (left) at Christiane's christening
It had no doubt been suggested by Lionel, but his wife was less than pleased when she discovered it was shared with a bridesmaid he had met when best man at my other grandfather Raymond’s marriage to Winnie Michelmore in Paignton, Devon, in 1904.
Muriel Michelmore, a niece of the bride, would probably have been flattered to be so remembered, but the name was dropped and Christiane was how my mother eventually became known, as well as a succession of affectionate nicknames.
Her christening prompted a congratulatory postcard from Raymond and Winnie on which they were pictured sitting on Clevedon Pier, no doubt having taken one of the then popular steamer trips from Newport.
Winnie and Raymond on Clevedon Pier
Prophetically they had included a kiss to Muriel from their children, Eileen and Jeffrey – my father’s first to my mother, but by no means the last.
It was a typical Gibbs coincidence that on the self-same pier 100 years later a plaque celebrating my mother’s remarkable life was placed on a bench seat-back facing Clevedon’s Poets Walk and that memorial was joined five years later by a plaque for my Sally, who shared her love of the North Somerset town.
My uncle, Eric *6, was born on December 8, 1910, and as my mother wrote: “He was very bright, so that the difference in age soon vanished and we were more like twins.”
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.
So successful were the partners that in 1912 my proud grandparents decided to take their children to Europe to show them to the respective families and set sail on the renowned Mauretania, holder for 20 years of the record for the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing and just back from a tour of the Tropics.
It was a fateful voyage that might have ended my mother’s story, but for an underlying iron constitution and for Gabrielle’s stubborn determination.
My mother wrote: “There were no facilities for children and my mother had to take her meals on deck with Eric, who was a very difficult baby - he could only be kept quiet with biscuits, which he called ‘ackin’, and also when he could watch my mother combing her hair and dressing.
“The first night on the ship many people were ill, including myself. My mother had either bathed me or given me water to drink and I caught dysentery. When they arrived in England, I was very ill.”
My grandparents took my mother to Malvern, where Lionel’s sister, Mim (Mildred) lived with her husband, Hugh Wood*4, who had opened Southlea Preparatory School, which Eric and my father were later to attend.
My mother wrote: "A doctor was called, who had mainly treated old ladies, and he told my mother: ‘The child is moribund.’ My father was shattered as he called me ‘Notre soleil pendant deux ans’ (Our sun for two years). My mother reacted by saying: ‘We shall take her to France. If my child is to die, she shall die there.’
In Paris: Gabrielle (left) with Eric and Christiane on the right
"When they arrived in Paris a very clever Jewish doctor, called Wormser, said: ‘What have they been doing to this child’. He told my mother to give me raw minced beef and saline injections and I began to recover, although all through my childhood I had bouts of stomach pain.
"When we returned to Canada, the rented house we had lived in had been sold and father had to buy a newly-built house on the outskirts of Edmonton.
"As Eric and I were bilingual and we were in English-speaking Canada, my mother decided to teach us at home by the Montessori method. I learned to read in French and I can still see the book with children running away from a wolf – “ou, ou ecoutez le loup, enfants sauvez vous (oh, oh, hear the wolf – children save yourselves.)
"My mother then said English was the same and gave us a book of English nursery rhymes and it worked well until I read about ‘Mary had a little lamb and the children laughed and played.’ I read it as ‘logged and played’ as they had logging in Canada, but it did puzzle me until several years later.”
During her early years in Canada, my mother was called Zouzoute and Eric Nonomme, but when they started to go to children’s parties the names proved difficult and they reverted to their given names.
My mother wrote: “For years people who had known me then called me Suzie. I became Christiane, not my first name, Muriel, as my mother had found out about the name by then."
When my mother was six, war was declared in Europe and two years later her father joined the 196th Battalion attached to the University of Alberta and was sent to England.
Horace's army photograph
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.
“My mother tried to sell the house, but could not, so she let it at a nominal charge, which paid the rates, and she decided to take my brother and myself to Europe – by then I was eight and Eric nearly six, “ wrote my mother.
“My mother travelled alone with us – we stopped on the way with friends in Montreal and then went on to New York at the end of November, 1916, to take a French ship, La Touraine (one of the ships that four years earlier had radioed warnings of icebergs to the Titanic).
“In New York we spent a day in a hotel by the docks, which the travel agent had recommended. It was very queer and my mother was glad to get on the ship, where we were the only children on board. We had a terribly rough crossing. There were gunners on board who used to throw planks into the sea with canes sticking up pretending to be submarine periscopes. The gunners shot at these to Eric’s joy.
“I enjoyed myself – as the only little girl I was made much of. I was given chocolates and the officers used to give me ice cream. Eric at nearly six was as resourceful as ever. My mother had her money in a belt round her waist and somehow she had lost it in the dining room. Eric went back and found it for her.
“We arrived in Bordeaux and went to Paris by train and then stayed in a hotel until my mother took a flat in Levallois with her father and two sisters. I tasted chips for the first time and sardine sandwiches. While we were there my mother took us out every day to see all the sights – Les Invalides, etc. Then in the summer she decided to take us to Berck (France) where Auntie Dollie (Ethel) lived. It was in the war zone, so we had to have special permits from the doctor. They treated people with TB in Berck and it was close to Etaples, where English troops were stationed.
“Just before we went to Berck my mother had taken us to the Luxembourg Gardens (in Paris) and we had to shelter from a summer storm. I caught a chill on the kidneys and when we arrived in Berck I had to stay in bed for a week. I spent my time reading all the French children’s books. When I recovered, I went barefoot much to the indignation of people, who said only fisherfolk did that. My feet became so hard that I once stepped on glass without feeling it.
“While we were in Berck, Eric had quarrelled with a family and he had heard that the names of animals were rude in French, so he stood in front of their beach hut and shouted all the names of animals he knew, much to the indignation of the French.
“The Germans were getting closer so my mother decided to take us to England to be near my father, who was at Bramshott. (In another of the many coincidences which litter our family’s history, Lionel’s grandson, Roderick, Eric’s first son, was born in a military hospital in the same small Hampshire village 28 years later.) .
My mother wrote: “We sailed from Boulogne and standing in the street saw German planes going over to bomb England. On the ship there were a lot of English soldiers and Eric made them laugh because he told them he did not like the English because they burned Joan of Arc.
“When we landed in England, we took the train to Paddington, as we were going to Haslemere (near Bramshott). There was an air raid and I remember them singing all the old songs in the station – Over There, Take Me Back To Blighty, etc.
“When the raid was over we finally took the train to Haslemere and arrived in the early hours of the morning. My father had gone back to camp, the local hotel would not open its doors and my mother and another wife of a soldier were told they could not spend the night in the waiting room. My mother objected and said that Eric and I had eaten nothing since the morning. The station master took pity and came to give us some sugarless, milkless cocoa, which I can still taste.
“In the morning when my father arrived to collect us, he told my mother he had found digs for us in the village of Critchmere. I was a lonely child as Eric was happy with his drawings, while I would have liked the company of other children. However I spent a lot of time with the landlady’s baby, from whom I caught whooping cough.
“I also made friends with a Miss Harding across the way. She and her brother had a small market garden. She gave me books and let me clean her parrot’s cage. While my father was in Bramshott, we used to go to the cinema in Haslemere and I remember making drawings of the family shining torches down the dark lanes.
“By 1918, more troops were needed and my father, who was a quartermaster sergeant, was made a stretcher bearer and sent to the front in March. We went to see them off in the evening on a dark common. The men round my father emptied their pockets of all their English coins and gave them to Eric and myself. My father said later: ‘Few of them ever came back.’”
My mother told one story of how Lionel and his fellow stretcher bearers were returning from the Front when they came upon a wounded soldier from another unit and her father said they should take him to the nearest field hospital.
The other bearers refused, saying he should be left for his own company to collect, but Lionel ignored their advice and took the soldier to the hospital.
He learned subsequently that the same stretcher bearers, who had been his close companions, had been killed in a shell burst later that day.
With her husband gone to the front, my grandmother decided she should go with the children to Malvern, Worcestershire, to be close to Mim and Hugh as well as another Gibbs sister, Flo (Florence), who was matron at Southlea, and her mother-in-law, Kitty, who lived in the town and helped with needlework and mending at the school, making all the pupils’ ties.
The pupils included my father, Jeffrey, and his school photographs show his metamorphosis from a shy ten-year-old to a confident teenager.
Jeffrey (second row left) at Southlea in July, 1918
On the way he earned a proud place in the school cricket team and shone at sports, although he only received a certificate for winning the 100 yards in May, 1917, as it had been decided to give the value of all prizes to war charities.
My mother’s journey to Worcestershire was delayed because she and Eric had caught measles, but in the summer of 1918 they moved into digs with Auntie Mim’s cook, Mrs Haggerty, in Barnard’s Green, a suburb of Malvern.
My mother wrote: “For me this was a happy time. At last I had companions. There was another child living with the Haggertys – there were kittens. My mother had no housework, so could give us all her time.
“Eric became a pupil at Southlea and I took part in all the outside activities. I had access to the books – boys’ books, The Captain, Boys Own, etc.
Uncle Eric as a pupil at Southlea in 1918
“I went to the study nights when the boys played games and I was allowed to ‘rag’ with the boys – an hour when they were allowed to let off steam – on those days I was not shy, so it was great fun.
“Auntie Mim gave a party for my tenth birthday and she asked me to choose a partner when we went in to tea. I chose Jeffrey probably because I knew him better. I had not remembered, but he had when I met him 14 years later. He had impressed me when we went out with my grandmother (Kitty), who gave us all money to buy something. He bought me a silver thimble.
“Three days later on November 11, 1918, the war ended with the Armistice. My father was in the front line and he said to the other men: ‘It is sure to be the Armistice today – it is my birthday.’
“In England my mother only relaxed when she got a message to say he was safe. As my father spoke French fluently, he was sent to find billets as the Canadian army moved through France. He came to a town, Valenciennes, la ville dentelle (the lace-making town), where he went to a jeweller, who had just opened his shop again. He found a silver brooch with the name, Christiane, and sent it to me.”
The present delighted my mother, but it was nothing to the joy of the family when Lionel arrived back in England and they were reunited once more.
*See numberered author's notes
Lionel (left) and Horace (above) in Canadian army uniform