1851 –13/04/1936
A labourer and gardener
Relatives
Research:
Plot 756 Robert Henry Gibson (1851-1936)
Robert was born in 1851 in Long Crendon, Bucks, the son of unmarried mother Emma Gibson, a lace maker. In the 1851 census he is recorded as living with his grandparents, Joseph and Martha Gibson in Long Crendon and is shown as their son. His mother, who had a second child, Ellen, in 1855, married Thomas Hamp in 1857. When he died she married again to Cornelius Oliver, a widowed agricultural labourer.
The 1861 census shows young Robert in a very extended household with his mother, now Emma Oliver; his step-father Cornelius Oliver; Reuben Loader, the son of Cornelius’s first wife; Ellen Gibson, Robert’s six year-old sister ,and William Oliver, Ellen and Cornelius’s son.
In 1871 Robert and his step-brother Reuben Loader, both aged 20, were living with his mother and step-father in Pound Lane, Thame. Both were described as “boarders” and both, like their step-father, were agricultural labourers.
Robert married Ellen Dickens in Thame in 1873.
Annie Louise (1876), and Henry Robert (1878), were both born in Shotover, just to the east of Oxford, but the family was back in Thame, living in North Street, by the time William George was born in 1881. Robert was employed as a labourer.
Soon after that they moved to Berkhamsted where Frederick J (1884), Sydney Herbert (1887) and Ellen (Nellie) Lucy (1889) were born.
The 1891 census records them living at 2, Cross Oak Road and Robert was employed as a gardener. They were still at the same address in 1901 with five of the children still at home. Robert was a commercial gardener, presumably a nurseryman, and young Sydney was a hairdresser’s apprentice.
In March 1904 Frederick, who was 19 and had been employed as a labourer by East & Co and had been a Volunteer in the Bedfordshire Regiment, signed up for 6 years’ service, but appears to have been released after one month.
In 1911 Robert was a jobbing gardener. Two of their children were still at home at 2, Cross Oak Road: Sydney, despite his hairdressing apprenticeship, was a nurseryman and Nellie a stationer’s assistant.
Sydney did eventually became a hairdresser and in April 1915, now a married man living at 3, Cross Oak Road, joined the Labour Corps. In June 1916 he was in Poperinge, Belgium and, following exposure ended up in hospital. He was demobilised in March 1919 but was left with a weak chest, breathlessness and what the army medical records diagnosed as neurasthenia, nowadays described as “an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.” Even worse, William George, who was serving as a Private in the Royal Fusiliers, was killed in action in March 1919 leaving a widow and three children.
The 1921 census reveals that Robert, now retired, and Ellen were living at 3, Cross Oak Road with Sydney now a gravel digger – presumably, given his health, using machinery. Also there were daughter Ellen, her husband Ernest Brooks, a clerk at East & Co. and their son.
Ellen died in July 1928 and Robert remained at 3, Cross Oak Road until April 1936 when he passed away aged 86. They are buried here together. Their daughter-in-law, William’s widow Elizabeth, also lies in this cemetery.