In search of Perceval Gibbon

Pieter D Williams
Department of English
University of the OFS
Bloemfontein 9300

IN SEARCH OF PERCEVAL GIBBON

10 December 1899. Great Britain and the Boer Republics have been at war for two months. As dawn breaks on the rough, rocky terrain of the north-eastern Karoo near Stormberg (the key rail junction of lines between Port Elizabeth, East London and the Orange Free State) a weary column of 2,600 footsoldiers with 12 field guns, trudge after their energetic general. He has dismounted and is leading his horse towards the nek between two ridges of the Kesieberg. No flankers and no scouts have been sent out. The general believes firmly in night march and dawn attack. Two days ago, a war correspondent of The Times (London) sent an advance report of the general’s intended attack to his newspaper.[efn_note]Johannes Meintjies, Stormberg: a lost opportunity (Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1969), p. 77.[/efn_note] Another English newspaper has already reported on it as follows:

… General Gatacre may be able to make a dash over the open country upon Bloemfontein, which, if it does not stagger humanity, will at least astonish the world[efn_note]M Davitt, The Boer fight for freedom (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902), p. 229.[/efn_note] …

Suddenly a shot rings out from a steep hill on his right, then another and another. Soon the British troops are under fire at fairly close range from 460 Boer Mauser rifles and a single Krupp field piece and Gatacre’s own guns firing short!

It is all over within half an hour. Gatacre’s Irish Fusiliers, East Lancastrians and Northumberlanders beat an ignominious retreat before General Olivier’s surprised burghers: 28 British killed, 61 wounded, 634 taken prisoner; Boer losses – 6 dead, 27 wounded. Olivier now spreads his mopping-up operations over the Stormberg and Orange River areas …[efn_note]See James Barbary, The Boer War (London: Gollancz, 1971), pp. 59-60; J H Breytenbach, Die geskiedenis van die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog in Suid-Afrika, 1899-1902, Deel II: die eerste Britse offensief, Nov. -Des. 1899 (Pretoria: Staatsdrukker, 1971), pp. 196-225; Edgar Holt, The Boer War (london: Putnam, 1958), pp. 137-139; Rayne Kruger, Goodbye Dolly Gray (London: Pan, 1974), pp. 122-125; Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Macdonald, 1982), pp. 214-215, 248.[/efn_note]

One of the prisoners taken by General (Commandant) Olivier in the mopping-up operations was a 21-year-old Welshman, front line representative of a syndicate of colonial newspapers.[efn_note]Ashley Gibson, ‘Mr Perceval Gibbon’, The Bookman Gallery, November 1908, p. 121.[/efn_note] That war correspondent was Perceval Gibbon. Whether he entrained with Gatacre’s troops at Queenstown isn’t certain. Gibbon’s name doesn’t appear in the official List of casualties in South African Field Force (11 October 1899 – 20 March 1900)[efn_note]War Museum, Bloemfontein.[/efn_note] which includes prisoners-of-war – he was ever an individualist, an outsider. That he was a free-lance journalist in the Queenstown area during the 18 months before the war, there is fair evidence.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 121.[/efn_note] At least one source refers directly to Queenstown;[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon,’Afrikander memories’, The English Review, 1908, p. 266.[/efn_note] his novel Souls in bondage (1904)[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, Souls in bondage (Edinburgh and London: Blackwell, 1904).[/efn_note] is set in Dopfontein, a town very like Queenstown; and Margaret Harding (1911)[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, Margaret Harding (London: Methuen, 1911); re-issued ed. Pieter Williams (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983).[/efn_note] refers to Dopfontein, as well as to a sister Karoo town, Fereira. The Komani River which flows near Queenstown, served as the inspiration for Gibbon’s poem ‘Komani’ in African items (1903);[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, African items (London: Elliot Stock, 1903).[/efn_note] it is also mentioned elsewhere in his work. Whether Gibbon was responsible for the reports I’ve quoted, we shall probably never know. That he was in the operational area (one report locates him ‘across the Orange River, somewhere north of Aliwal North’),[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 122.[/efn_note] that he knew about the plan, and about the whole British strategy, there is no doubt. A revealing telegram, one of many transmitted to the Government in Pretoria, miraculously preserved in an old tin trunk, and later published, reads:

T.D. Z.A.R. 14.12.1899
From President, Bloemfontein
To Government, Pretoria, begins –
Following telegram received from Landdros’s clerk Rouxville begins – When the P.O.W. Gibbon was imprisoned I also went in and allowed myself to be treated as a prisoner. He placed so much trust in me that we concerted plans to escape together. He told me that Buller (sic) was at De Aar with 1,700 English troops and shortly expected 8,000 more; he would then move this week towards Kimberley, from there to Bloemfontein and then up to Pretoria. He also said that if all the troops in South Africa were totalled there would be approximately 50,000 – ends.–Gibbon was captured by Commandant Oliver (sic) as a spy hiding in some brushwood this side of the Orange River – ends.[efn_note]C W l de Souza, No charge for delivery (Cape Town:
Books of Africa, 1969), p. 54.[/efn_note]

By this time Gibbon, putting to use his talent for languages, had learned to speak Afrikaans (then known as ‘Cape Dutch’ or ‘Boer Dutch’). The Vrouw Grobelaar’s leading cases (1905)[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, The Vrouw Grobelaar’s leading Cases (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1905).[/efn_note], and Margaret Harding reveal his more than passing interest in Afrikaans.

Winston Churchill’s epic flight from Pretoria had already taken place (12 December 1899),[efn_note]Randolph S Churchill, Winston S Churchill, Volume I, Youth: 1874-1900 (London: Heinemann, 1966), Ch. 14.[/efn_note] but Gibbon was not to know this until later. Gibbon escaped from prison in Bloemfontein with a friend in the Cape Mounted Police.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 122. Records: Mill Hill School, London NW 7.[/efn_note] A South African version of the Canadian ‘mounties’, the Cape Mounted Police feature prominently in Margaret Harding, and Sub-Inspector Van Zyl and the nameless troopers might well have been modelled on persons Gibbon actually knew in the CMP.

Gibbon then resumed work as a war correspondent, probably attached to a utility unit such as the Brabant Horse (one of my informants says, erroneously, I think, ‘Buller’s Horse’). He held the rank of Captain.[efn_note]Letter: Mrs Nan Podger to P D Williams, 20 November 1978. (author’s collection).[/efn_note] I have a photograph of him taken at about this time, in the company of fellow war correspondents. It shows a dapper, dark-haired, lightly-built man with sharp features, resplendent in tunic, Sam Browne, riding breeches and boots. His military commitments then took him to Natal.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 122.[/efn_note]

Gibbon made time to write a few articles which appeared in The London Daily Chronicle.[efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note] It is in keeping with the ironic reversals of Gibbon’s life and art that he should have found acceptance in Fleet Street at a distance of thousands of kilometres when he had tried in vain to do so in person before coming to Africa.

For 18 months (1902-1904) after the close of the Anglo-Boer War, Gibbon stayed in South Africa, working for The Natal Witness in whose service he rapidly rose to the position of chief reporter.[efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note] He added to the verse he had already written in newspaper offices, on the veld and in prison, and published a slim volume under the title African items (1903). Gibbon’s association with another fascinating figure, Douglas Blackburn, during this period in Natal, is recorded by Stephen Gray in his monograph on Douglas Blackburn.[efn_note]Stephen Gray, Douglas Blackburn (Boston: Twayne Publishers G K Hall, 1984).[/efn_note]

Several authoritative biographies have referred to Gibbon’s further literary apprenticeship with The Rand Daily Mail from its early beginnings in 1902.[efn_note]See Avis Taylor: GIBBON, Perceval, Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa, Volume 5 (Cape Town: Nasou, 1972), p. 195; E Pereira: Gibbon, Perceval: Dictionary of South African Biography III (HSRC; Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1977), p. 324-5.[/efn_note] It is quite possible that he was employed as ‘outside staff’, but a search in the files of the RDM has brought to light no by-lines, only a few poems (sometimes under the name Percival Gibson), quoted from African items, at a time when Gibbon was definitely known to have been in England. Furthermore, there is no circumstantial or textual evidence that I can find in the novels, the short stories or the articles, to suggest a protracted stay in Johannesburg – only tangential mention of his having been in the Transvaal, in ‘Afrikander memories’.[efn_note]Gibbon, ‘Afrikander memories’. p. 274 ff.[/efn_note]

More solid evidence about Gibbon’s further activities in Africa comes from Ashley Gibson’s article, written after an interview with Gibbon and published only four years after his return from Africa. It makes no reference whatsoever to Johannesburg or The Rand Daily Mail, although it mentions several other places and newspapers by name. This article locates Gibbon in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), as the editor of The Rhodesian Times.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 122.[/efn_note] Two of Gibbon’s stories are set in the Mozambique area bordering on Rhodesia.[efn_note]See ‘The trader of the Last Notch’ in The second-class passenger. (London: Methuen. 1913); ‘A season of miracles’ in The adventures of Miss Gregory (London: Dent, 1912).[/efn_note] F C Slater’s potted biography of Gibbon accompanying his anthology of South African verse confirms Gibbon’s presence in Rhodesia, but is otherwise vague and inaccurate,[efn_note]Francis Carey Slater, The New Centenary Book of South African Verse (London: Longmans, Green, 1945), p. 221. Slater’s review of Margaret Harding in The South African Bookman, April 1912, pp. 33-37, furnishes no further biographical details. H.M.S.’s article ‘The work of Mr. Perceval Gibbon’ in The South African Bookman, November 1914, pp. 349-352, also Iacks biographical material. E.R. Seary’s A biographical and bibliographical record of South African literature in English is sketchy and has several inaccuracies. J P L Snyman’s ‘South African Writers 45’ in Femina, 8 April 1965, p. 93 adds nothing new. The same applies to G M Miller and Howard Sergeant’s, A critical survey of South African poetry in English (Cape Town: Balkema, 1957), p. 36. Biographical notes accompanying anthologies of poetry, or short stories, perpetuate the inaccuracies of earlier sources, e.g. Guy Butler’s A Book of South African Verse (Cape Town: Oxford, 1959), p. 216; Guy Butler and Chris Mann’s A New Book of South African Verse (Cape Town: Oxford, 1979), p. 282; Michael Chapman’s A Century of South African Poetry (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1981), p. 377; E R Seary’s South African Short Stories (Cape Town: Oxford, 1947), p. 45; E Lennox-Short and R E Lighton’s Stories South African (Johannesburg: APB, n d ), p. 140.[/efn_note] as are most of the mini­biographies of Gibbon. Editors and archivists in Zimbabwe with whom I’ve corresponded, haven’t been able to supply any further information, and histories of the press that I’ve consulted, offer no detailed records of the period in question.[efn_note]Letters: The Director, National Archives of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia; The Librarian of Parliament, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia; The Editor, The Rhodesian Herald; The Editor, The Bulawayo Chronicle, to P D Williams, 1978-9. Argus group, Today’s news today: the story of the Argus Company (Johannesburg: Argus, 1956), p. 309; W D Gale, The Rhodesian Press (Salisbury: Rhodesian Printing and Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 59-66; Ratcliffe’sGuide to the South African Press (1902-3) (London: Ratcliffe, Dunbar, 1902), pp. 88-91.[/efn_note] Ashley Gibson goes on to say:

Then, after wanderings through Central Africa and along the East Coast, after encounters with lions, meetings and talks with mighty hunters, native chiefs, adventurers, pioneers, and explorers, he came home.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., pp. 121, 122.[/efn_note]

These exploits have secondary confirmation in Salvator (1908), The adventures of Miss Gregory (1912),[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, Salvator (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1908); Perceval Gibbon, The adventures of Miss Gregory (London: Dent, 1912).[/efn_note] and some of Gibbon’s short stories.[efn_note]See ‘The second-class passenger’ and ‘The trader of Last Notch’ in The second-class passenger (London: Methuen, 1913); ‘The dago’ and ‘The darkened path’ in Those who smiled (London: Cassell, 1920).[/efn_note]

So, after something like six years abroad, the journalist was home from Africa and the war, back in London where he had spent some of his childhood and adolescence. Gibbon would be drawn again and again to other countries, especially those in crisis or in conflict. Crisis, confrontation, conflict, violence, and the heroism that accompanies them, such as we find in Margaret Harding and Salvator, were to hold a strange fascination for Gibbon all his days. His daughter relates that he often would say, ‘A brave man is not the one who knows no fear, but the one who is afraid and goes on all the same’.[efn_note]Letter: Mrs Joan Keen to P D Williams, 12 December 1978 (author’s collection).[/efn_note]>

Though Gibbon returned to London, he was no Londoner. He was born at the town of Trelech in an agricultural and lead-mining area of Carmarthenshire (Dyfed), Wales. Trelech at that time had a population of nearly 1,400.[efn_note]Parish registers, Trelech, Carmarthenshire (Dyfed), Wales; information supplied by Muriel Bowen Evans.[/efn_note] The year of Gibbon’s birth is usually given as 1879.[efn_note]See References 21) and 25).[/efn_note] His official birth certificate, of which I have a copy, records 4 November 1878.[efn_note]Copy of birth certificate, issued 4 April 1978, by D P Thomas, Carmarthen, Dyfed, Wales.[/efn_note] This year is confirmed by two other new sources (see later). His father was the Reverend James Morgan Gibbon (1855-1932), Independent minister at Trelech (1875-80), then Congregational minister at Castle Street, Swansea (1880-5), Highgate, London (1885-9), and Stamford Hill, London (1889-1932), one time chairman of the Congregational Union.[efn_note]Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to 1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), pp. 275-6; Who was who, 1929-1940 (London: Black, 1940), p. 307; The Congregational Year Book 1933, pp. 231-2.[/efn_note] A prominent churchman, a powerful preacher, a literary man and author of several religious books, proud of his prowess in English,[efn_note]) Rev. T Mardy Rees, ‘Y Celt yn y Pulpud’, Yspred yr Oes, 1932, p. 39, translated for author by John E Bowen, Ealing, London; Dr R Gwlfa Roberts, Y Dysgedydd, 1932, pp. 127-8, translated for author by Prof. R Tudor Jones, University College, Bangor.[/efn_note] J Morgan Gibbon was certainly in large measure responsible for his son’s proficiency and interest in languages and literature, the moral temper of his mind. J Morgan Gibbon’s wife, Hannah Lewis from Carmarthen, was also of Welsh stock, but English was their home language.[efn_note]See Reference 30).[/efn_note] Gibbon dedicated his first novel, Souls in bondage, to them. They were proud parents of several remarkable children besides Perceval: Elizabeth, Sir Douglas (Chief Legal Taxing Master), Gwladys, Muriel (barrister, journalist, politician – probably Gibbon’s model for Miss Gregory – to whom he dedicated Those who smiled), Maie and Marjorie.[efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note] Gibbon was registered as Reginald Percival (with an i)[efn_note]See Reference 33).[/efn_note] Gibbon – Gibbon the author signed his name R Perceval (with an e) Gibbon, or plain Perceval Gibbon.[efn_note]Contracts: William Blackwood and R Perceval Gibbon, 22 September 1905; Thomas Nelson and Perceval Gibbon (date not disclosed: Letter, 30 May 1978, Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd to P D Williams).[/efn_note] There was probably some personal, romantic identification with the literary Perceval (Parzifal) of French, Germanic and Arthurian legend, a character who went questing for the Holy Grail.[efn_note]Charles Johnson and Linwood Sleigh, Names for boys and girls (London: Pan, 1975), pp. 166-7.[/efn_note]

Gibbon went to schools in London, the last of them being Mill Hill School, NW 7. His date of birth appears in the school records as 14.11.78, and he left this school on 7.3.94[efn_note]Records: Mill Hill School, London NW 7.[/efn_note] for the Moravian School (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine) at Königsfeld, Baden. Here he was registered as Reginald Gibbon, d.o.b. 4 November 1878, date of enrolment 29 March 1894, date of departure 12 April 1895.[efn_note]Records: Zinzendorf-Gymnasium, Königsfeld, Baden, Germany.[/efn_note], on 7 April

1895. Of his 93 school fellows, no less than 28 were English, 22 Swiss, 25 of various other nationalities, only 18 Germans – it was customary for non-German pupils who were at this ‘finishing school’ learning German to stay for a year or two.[efn_note]Letter: Klaus Verbeek, Librarian, Zinzendorf-Gymnasium, Königsfeld, to P D Williams, 14 September 1976 (author’s collection).[/efn_note] The discipline was very strict· but loving,44[efn_note]See Kurzer Abriss unserer Erziehungs-Grundsätze, nebst den nöthigen Hausordnungen für die Pensions Knäbchen Anstalt zu Königsfeld (1832), ie. Summary of rules and regulations at the Boys’ School, Königsfeld; also Hans-Christoph Hahn and Hellmut Reichel, Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüder (Hamburg: Wittig, 1977).[/efn_note] and it is quite probable that Gibbon’s father felt a stern loving hand besides his own was needed to complete the lad’s education. (There is no record in extant Moravian diaries in South Africa of Gibbon’s having visited any of the Moravian institutions when he was here.)[efn_note]B Krüger, The pear tree blossoms (Genadendal: Moravian Press, 1966); also Diaries of South African Moravian mission stations, by courtesy of Dr B Krüger, Cape Town.[/efn_note] Gibbon later mentioned to an interviewer that he had caught a glimpse of the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck, of “Blut und Eisen” fame, when he was at school in Germany.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 122.[/efn_note] This chance meeting was prophetic, for the course and quality of Gibbon’s life was to be governed to a large extent by the machinations of European war-lords. Gibbon thus added German to his linguistic accomplishments which later were to include Afrikaans, Russian and Italian besides the customary French learned by British schoolboys.[efn_note]See References 16) and 30).[/efn_note] Several of Gibbon’s short stories are either set in Germany or deal with German (Teutonic) characters, or are set in Paris and portray French personages.[efn_note]See ‘The victim’, ‘The master’, ‘Parisienne’, ‘Lola’ in The second-class passenger; ‘Those who smiled’, ‘Plain German’, ‘Arms and the man’, ‘The day of omena’ in Those who smiled; ‘The man of science’ in The dark places; ‘The elopement’, ‘The adventuress’ in The adventures of Miss Gregory.[/efn_note]

After leaving Königsfeld, Gibbon joined the Merchant Navy as a cadet under sail.[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note] He went to sea, so Ashley Gibson relates, because ‘as a boy he used to think he should be fond of the sea’.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 122.[/efn_note] His second wife adds that he obtained his extra master’s certificate while too young.to use it,[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note] but I haven’t been able to confirm this officially. Neither have I been able to discover on which ships Gibbon sailed, nor at which ports he called. None of the maritime museums, registries of shipping and seamen, nor any of the other nautical sources I consulted in the UK, the USA, and France have any entries that could be found, to shed light on Gibbon’s naval career.[efn_note]Main sources consulted: General Registry of Ships and Seamen, Cardiff; Lloyd’s Registry of British and Foreign Shipping, London; Mariners’ Museum, Newport, USA; Maritime History Group, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada; Ministry of Defence, Naval Historical Branch, London; Mystic Seaport Museum, USA; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; Nautical Magazine, Glasgow; l’université de Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Montpellier, France.[/efn_note] Several mini-biographies of Gibbon mention that he sailed on British, American and French ships. Internal evidence in the stories suggests that he might have sailed on coaling vessels between Swansea and the Continent (‘The captain’s arm’), on German windjammers (‘The murderer’), put in at San Francisco (‘A man before the mast’), New York (‘The girl’), East Africa (‘The dago’). Sailing also features prominently in Salvator. And then there was his friendship with that other sailor-author, Joseph Conrad; his affinity with the author of that central sea-adventure in English literature, Treasure island. Gibbon writes with authority about the sea, ships and sailing, especially in The triumph of the Royal Navy (1919).[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, The triumph of the Royal Navy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919).[/efn_note]

Gibbon must have been a sailor for a year and more, then suddenly he seemed to tire of it. He started as a would-be journalist in London, but fair chance or wanderlust drove him to sea again, and to South Africa. With ominous signs of an Anglo-Boer war in the offing, every reporter and journalist that was able, made his way to South Africa. Gibbon probably sensed that his destiny lay in South Africa.[efn_note]Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 365.[/efn_note] In the June of 1898 he landed, and, as Ashley Gibson describes it, ‘wandered over the country, taking up one after another that vague sort of appointments whose holders are characterised as on the ‘outside staff’ of papers’.[efn_note]Gibson, op.cit., p. 121.[/efn_note] Until the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the Boer Republics, and his baptism of fire during the Northern Cape campaign!

Back in London after his African adventures, Gibbon found he had a reputation, but had still to establish himself as a front-rank journalist and author. While he was scripting for The Morning Leader in the hopes of gaining a sub-editorship, The British Weekly started publishing his short stories. Then came his lucky break with ‘Maga’, Blackwood’s prestige publication which put out his Vrouw Grobelaar stories in serial form. Blackwood also published his Souls in bondage, The Vrouw Grobelaar’s leading cases in book form, and Salvator. Gibbon claims to have written the 13 chapters of Souls in bondage in as many nights. In his own words, the book ‘went like fun’.[efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note] The habit of nocturnal composition, acquired in newspaper rooms, was to stay with Gibbon all his days, assisted (so his second wife tells me) with deep draughts of strong coffee. His manuscripts were beautifully written in a strong neat hand with very few emendations.[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note] Like Maupassant, one of his literary heroes, Gibbon first worked out a story fully in his mind before setting pen to paper.[efn_note]Gibson, Op. cit., p. 121; see; see Reference 30).[/efn_note]

After this period of apprenticeship came a spell as chief staff writer of McClure’s Magazine in New York, with incidental assignments for other papers. Popularity, success, publicity (sometimes exaggerated and false) and a literary scoop followed – a genuine R L Stevenson manuscript which Gibbon found in an office drawer at McClure’s, and which he brought back to Britain![efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note]

Gibbon also undertook an assignment for the Standard (some sources say The Daily Mail), as a correspondent in St Petersburg, Russia (later Leningrad). He is said to have met and interviewed De Plehve (1845-1904), but where he did so isn’t certain.[efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note] This Russian statesman carried out the ‘russification’ of the alien provinces within the Russian Empire, and was a determined opponent of Count Sergius Witte’s pro-monarchic policies.[efn_note]Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume XXI (Cambridge: CUP, 1911), p. 835; Anthony Cash, The Russian Revolution (London: Ernest Benn, 1967), pp. 22-23; Lionel Kochan, The making of modern Russia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 213, 216.[/efn_note] On July 1904 Plehve was assassinated. Gibbon was to visit Russia in 1905, intending to report on and write a novel about the explosive situation there.[efn_note]Letter: James B Pinker to William Blackwood, 3 November 1905 (National Library of Scotland).[/efn_note] The Russian novel didn’t materialize; the Russian experiences were later channelled into Salvator, a novel owing something to Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), as Conrad’s Under Western eyes (1911) owes something to Gibbon’s Russian experiences. Salvator deals with the ‘web of revolution’ in Portuguese East Africa. Ten years after his first visit to Russia, Gibbon was to go there again as a war correspondent;[efn_note]The London Daily Chronicle, 2 November 1914 to 11 June 1916.[/efn_note] by then he was quite conversant with the Russian language. Gibbon’s Russian short stories appear in The second-class passenger (1912), Those who smiled (1920), and The dark places (1926); his Russian articles include ‘Sergius Witte’ and ‘The web of revolution’ (Blackwood’s Magazine).[efn_note]Blackwood’s Magazine (Edinburgh: Blackwood), 1906/7.[/efn_note]

Gibbon managed to fit marriage into his busy programme. The lady of his choice was May Daniels, 21, of Melford Lodge, 127 Stamford Hill, daughter of Joseph Samuel Daniels, a potato merchant. Gibbon was at that time resident at 116 Clapton Common, Upper Clapton. His father officiated at the wedding ceremony solemnized on 28 December 1904 at the Stamford Hill Congregational Church.[efn_note]Certified copy of an Entry of Marriage, General Register Office, London, PAS 90995/78/f.[/efn_note] May, or Maisie, as her family and friends knew her, was the ‘Madonna’ to whom Gibbon, in troubadour fashion, dedicated African items. The dedication ‘To my wife’ appearing in both Vrouw Grobelaar and The dark places was, according to Gibbon’s daughter, intended for Maisie too.[efn_note]See Reference 30).[/efn_note]

The Gibbons’ address during the years 1905 to 1911 or so, was first Barnes and Mortlake (London)[efn_note]Contracts: William Blackwood and Perceval Glbbon, 22 September 1905 (The Vrou Grobelaar’s leading cases ; 10 July 1908 (Salvator).[/efn_note], then Trottescliffe, a small village in Kent, known locally as Trosley.[efn_note]See Reference 30).[/efn_note] At last Gibbon seemed to have opted, at least partly, for a more settled family life, although there were journalistic excursions. Two daughters, Muriel and Joan, were born to the Gibbons. They feature in Gibbon’s short stories, e.g. ‘wood-ladies’[efn_note]Gibbon, Those who smiled.[/efn_note] and ‘The dark ride’.[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, The dark places (London: Methuen, 1926).[/efn_note]

Interesting sidelights on Gibbon’s family life at this time are those given me by his second daughter. He loved outdoor life and was especially fond of swimming in the sea or the Swiss lakes. Rambling through the woods and meadows of Kent was a joy for both himself and his daughters, because, in true Celtic style, his lively imagination transformed everything into fairylands inhabited by benign little people.[efn_note]See Reference 30).[/efn_note] The benign rounded contours of Kent, as well as the rough jagged landscape of Africa, are settings for Salvator whose composition dates back to this idyllic phase of Gibbon’s life. His love of rambling never left him. His other pastimes were connected with golf, boxing and rugger.[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note] His alleged interest in motoring, (Black’s Who’s who)[efn_note]Who was Who 1916-1928 (London: Black, 1929), p. 401.[/efn_note] Gibson, his Bookman reviewer, humorously discounts.[efn_note]Gibson, op.cit., p. 122.[/efn_note]

Gibbon had a great sense of humour, and loved telling his children stories, or reading to them from Kipling, Chesterton and Browning. He would often dramatize and sing, or explain the meaning and significance of things literary – he went to great lengths to interest his children in languages and books, even sending them to school in Switzerland because he thought English boarding schools made too much of sport and Maths, and not enough of Classics and languages.[efn_note]See Reference 30).[/efn_note]

Gibbon and Joseph Conrad were intimate friends. ‘Uncle Conrad’ and ‘Aunty Jessie’ with their sons Borys and John, were frequent visitors at the Gibbon home in Kent, while the Gibbons would often go to the Conrads at Ashford. Gibbon and Conrad would, to quote Gibbon’s daughter, ‘pace silently, side by side on the back lawn, for long periods, each working out in his own mind a story, or article, and without need of communication’.[efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note] Norman Sherry relates how Conrad would go up to London for a few days, then lunch with literary friends at the Mont Blanc restaurant in Gerrard street – one of those friends being Gibbon, the others Edward Garnett, W H Hudson, E V Lucas, Stephen Reynolds, Edward Thomas, and Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer),[efn_note]Norman Sherry, Conrad and his world (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), p. 85.[/efn_note] to whom Salvator is dedicated. Gibbon maintained a wide circle of literary friends throughout his life.[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note] He dedicated Margaret Harding, his third and last novel, to Jessie and Joseph Conrad. Conrad reciprocated by dedicating Victory (1915) to Maisie and Perceval Gibbon.[efn_note]Joseph Conrad, Victory (London: Dent, 1915).[/efn_note] Conrad and Gibbon both had the same literary agent, James B Pinker, Conrad from 1899 until Pinker’s death in 1922, Gibbon from 1905 onwards. ‘Bookishly’ was Pinker’s (and Gibbon’s) telegraphic address[efn_note]See References 62) and 73).[/efn_note] – another of the delicious ironies of Gibbon’s life!

The Gibbon-Conrad-Pinker correspondence makes interesting reading. On one occasion, for instance, Conrad confides to Gibbon that Pinker is being unreasonable in expecting him to produce copy to order when he (Conrad) needs time to explore the psychology of a particular character (Razumov in Under western eyes). Pinker has, after all, only been waiting two years for copy![efn_note]Letter: Joseph Conrad to Perceval Gibbon, 19 December 1909 (Berg Collection).[/efn_note]

Another special family friend of the Gibbons during this period, was Robert Dunbar Mackintosh, the family doctor, to whom Miss Gregory is dedicated.[efn_note]See Reference 28).[/efn_note]

Gibbon was all that a father could be to his daughters, it seems, but the relationship with his wife turned out to be less happy. Perhaps the demands made on or by a peripatetic journalist and war correspondent, a hermit author, do not conduce to stability in marriage. An essential ingredient was missing in the strange alchemy of personalities. Gibbon and Maisie were divorced, after they had been estranged for some time. Gibbon was constantly exploring the psyche of the artist, the place of the artist, the significance of the artist in society, as he does in Margaret Harding, and several short stories, e.g. ‘The master’ and ‘Lola’.[efn_note]Gibbon, The second-class passenger.[/efn_note] He shared one of the major problems of artists at that time: how to integrate an artistic persona with a social or familial one.[efn_note]See Pieter Williams, Introduction to Perceval Gibbon, Margaret Harding (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983).[/efn_note]

Gibbon continued to write articles and short stories, turning his technique in the latter to a fine art. They are collected in The adventures of Miss Gregory (1912), The second-class passenger (1913), Those who smiled (1920), and The dark places (1926). These short stories are often intensely dramatic, as witness Louis Goodrich’s successful dramatization of ‘Three rags’ at the Globe Theatre, London, under the title No other way (1927, published 1931). Gibbon himself never wrote for the stage, as far as I know, although he and Joseph Conrad seriously considered a joint theatrical venture in 1913.[efn_note]Letter: Joseph Conrad to James B Pinker, Monday 2 a.m., received 5 May 1913 – quoted by Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 470.[/efn_note]

My sources next locate Gibbon as Daily News correspondent in Turkey in 1912;[efn_note]Records: Mill Hill School, London NW 7.[/efn_note] then he continued his work with the British Intelligence Department[efn_note]E Pereira, Gibbon, Perceval, Dictionary of South African Biography III, p. 333[/efn_note], as a war correspondent for The London Daily Chronicle in Russia, Poland, Austria and Bulgaria (1914-1916); subsequently, for the same paper in the Somme (1916), temporarily replacing Philip Gibbs who was ill; a joint correspondent for The London Daily Chronicle and The New York Times, then latterly for The New York Times only, reporting on the fighting at the Italian Front (1917),[efn_note]The London Daily Chronicle: 2 November 1914 to 21 November 1916; The London Daily Chronicle and The New York Times: 26 March 1917· to 26 May 1917; The New York Times: 28 May 1917 to 28 February 1918.[/efn_note] and finally, an honorary major in the Royal Marines, writing dispatches at Zeebrugge (1917-1918),[efn_note]La Gazette de Guernsey, 5 June 1926.[/efn_note] and an official documentary in London, The triumph of the Royal Navy (1919).[efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, The triumph pf the Royal Navy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919).[/efn_note]

Gibbon’s life as a war correspondent was a hazardous one, but it provided him with material for some of his best journalistic writing, and the odd short story, e.g ‘Those who smiled’. On one occasion, for instance, his fellow reporter John F Bass shared with him the perils of a famous regiment in Poland, then they were a target for enemy guns as they tacked along a moonlit road:

At last a shell exploded overhead, smashing the branches and sending a load of metal flying. I felt blows of flying earth and twigs on my back. Bass asked: ‘Have they got you?’

‘Are you all right?’ I enquired.

‘Think they have got me in the face,’ was the reply.

I had an electric pocket lamp with which I made an examination. He was cut across the jaw with a fragment of shell and bleeding freely. I bandaged him with our handkerchiefs. Bass, as always, uncomplaining and treating the wound humorously. Several shells followed, each too near for comfort, but we were now reaching the limit of the guns’ range and we came without further incident clear of their fire.[efn_note]The New York Times, 8 January 1915.[/efn_note]

World War I probably robbed us of Gibbon’s Novel No.4 and the rest – the critic, Ward Muir, who knew Gibbon, states that ‘after the war he brooded on various schemes for novels’, and suggests that there were, at the time of Gibbon’s death. ‘sufficient stories left to constitute a sixth (collection)’.[efn_note]Ward Muir, ‘Perceval Gibbon., The Bookman, July 1926, p. 199.[/efn_note] But World War I was a major turning-point in Gibbon’s life, as the Anglo-Boer War had been 20 years before. His life now entered a new phase. But let Nan, his second wife who affectionately calls him P.G., take up the story:

I married Perceval Gibbon in 1920 and wehad two daughters … I did not meet P.G. until 1918/1919 … We came to the Channel Islands because P.G. thought they would be quiet and peaceful places for him to write …[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note]

They lived in a quaint grey-stone cottage Hauteville, Guernsey, called Ker Anna – it is still standing today.[efn_note]Letter: Marie-Louise Backhurst to P D Williams, 7 August 1978 (author’s collection).[/efn_note] Gibbon, like Stevenson or Gauguin before him, was searching for a lost paradise which he had failed to find in South Africa – or even in England, that ‘other Eden, demi-paradise’. Nan says of him during these years:

He was a kind and very generous man, very fond of children and animals – we spent a lot of time at the zoo when in London – but he did not suffer fools gladly and was very impatient.[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note]

Indeed, ‘a man of strongly marked personality, with a habit of giving very forcible expression to his views’.[efn_note]’Noted journalist dead’, Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg, 2 June 1926.[/efn_note] At 46, he was at the height of his powers as a writer, and, according to a contemporary report, ‘commanded a very high price in the magazines of the United States and Britain’.[efn_note]Ibid.[/efn_note]

Gibbon was a man of his time, writing about major concerns of his day.[efn_note]See Reference 84).[/efn_note] Besides political problems (war, foreign affairs, heroism), ethnographic issues (Africa and the African experience, ethnicity, identity, language), social questions (the outsider, feminism), aesthetic themes (art, the artist and society), he was also interested in metaphysical matters (science and religion, the workings of fate, the supernatural),[efn_note]See, for instance, ‘The day of omens’ in Those who smiled, and ‘The man of science’ in The dark places.[/efn_note] and many others. But Gibbon transcended his time, looked towards the future, as Margaret Harding and The dark places clearly show.

On Saturday night, 30 May 1926, Gibbon took ill, and died suddenly the next afternoon – intestate. The official certificate ascribes his death to liver disease and heart failure.[efn_note]Certified copy of an Entry of Death in the Island of Guernsey, 8 March 1978, issued by Deputy Registrar-General.[/efn_note]

Like the paradisal Pacific Ocean islands, the Channel Islands which Gibbon thought would be ‘quiet and peaceful’, were not exempted from the ravages of World War II. Ironically, when the Nazis overran the Islands, most of Gibbon’s press cuttings, letters, etc. were lost[efn_note]See Reference 16).[/efn_note] – and Nazi bombs caused the Gibbon papers lodged with at least two publishers to suffer the same fate.[efn_note]Letters: Norman Lambert, Company Archivist, Cassell Ltd, London, to P D Williams, 4 April 1978; F A Thomése, Koninklijke Drukkerij van de Garde b.v. Zalt-bommel, to P D Williams, 22 April 1978 (author’s collection).[/efn_note] Only three of the Guernsey cuttings remain: photocopies of these are among my mast treasured possessions.

There seem to me to be few more fitting epitaphs for Perceval Gibbon than words he himself wrote near the end of Margaret Harding. What he says of Margaret, and of the experience of being in Africa, might well apply to Gibbon himself, indeed, to every human being ‘at large on the earth without trimmings’:

Peace and melancholy were in the mood of the hour, a cue to lead (his) thoughts to sadness. It caused (him) to realise that (he) would not leave it all without a sense of loss. (He) would miss its immensity, its effect of setting one at large on an earth without trimmings under a heaven without clouds, to make the most of one’s own humanity. It would be a thing (he) had known in part, but which henceforth (he) would never know even as (he himself) was known. (He) could never now find the word that expressed its wonder and appeal … [efn_note]Perceval Gibbon, Margaret Harding, p. 264.[/efn_note]

And for those who know about his life, who have read his works (all too few in number!), the ‘sense of loss’ must be even more poignant.

POSTSCRIPT: The search continues. The author would welcome any additional information directly concerned with Perceval Gibbon and his work, or any which might lead to further fruitful research.