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| ISBN-13: | 9781742242767 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bill Gibson
Pioneering Bionic Ear Surgeon
By Tina K Allen
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Tina K AllenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-276-7
CHAPTER 1
Memories of a father at war
I heard the stories so often I took them into me ... and now, mine or not, they are my shiniest self.
Anna Funder, All that I Am
We are all born in the middle of something. For William Gibson and his twin brother Robert it just happened to be World War II. The twins were born on 11 June 1944 into a household of women in the county of Devonshire while their father was away in Normandy serving as a commanding officer for the D-Day landings. Captain John Gibson faced all the dangers of being on the front line, but he was not involved in the armed combat on the beaches or the landing grounds or the fields. His role with the Royal Army Medical Corps was far more inspirational in the eyes of his children, particularly one of his two sons, who would later become a doctor.
The boys' mother, Jane Gibson, knew she was having twins and telephoned Nurse Webb to come as soon as the labour pains started. A birthing room was no place for little girls so Jane's mother took Eleanor, aged seven, and Kathy, aged four, to spend the day with their auntie Nell. Jane and the elderly nurse ensconced themselves in one of the large upstairs bedrooms of Lakemead, in the old walled town of Totnes on the river Dart. The babies were born without complication at about 4 o'clock.
Eleanor remembers arriving home from her auntie Nell's with her sister and climbing up the carpeted stairs. 'We found our mother resting on a large bed with a tightly wrapped bundle on each side of her,' says Eleanor, who was informed that William was born before Robert and that Nurse Webb would be staying for their mother's lying-in.
That evening Jane composed a telegram for John, who was by now stationed at one of the Allied headquarters in the south of France. He had been away from them for long periods over the last four and half years since World War II began.
SEPTEMBER 1939
John and Jane Gibson were living in Birmingham when they heard the BBC announcement by the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, on 3 September 1939 that Britain had declared war on Germany. After John enlisted with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Jane took two-year-old Eleanor down to Totnes in Devon. Jane would have the company of her widowed mother, known affectionately as 'Ammy' by all her family.
Totnes also felt like home for Jane, who was the youngest of four children to be born in the headmaster's residence of the King Edward VI Grammar School. Her father, Charles Rea, who was appointed the first lay headmaster in 1896, had enjoyed holidays touring the continent on a bicycle with a camera slung over his shoulder. The family thought these trips were opportunities to get away for a few months from Ammy, who was 'reputedly an awkward person' and also extremely religious. This tiny, bespectacled woman asked the staff from the school to drag a piano onto the High Street, where she became a regular fixture on Sundays, playing hymns to encourage the townsfolk to go to church.
When Jane's brother Louis died from appendicitis at age nine in 1914, grief was the mostly likely reason her father Charles replaced his academic gowns with mayoral robes to serve three one-year terms as his contribution to World War I. He also spent many years transcribing the town's historical records and writing articles for the Totnes Antiquarian Society. After the war, Jane's parents purchased a sandstone and slated house in Maudlin Road, Lakemead, on a hill overlooking Totnes. Only a decade after the Rea family moved into this home, Charles died of bowel cancer in March 1929.
Jane was only eighteen when she attended her father's grand funeral, which included a mayoral procession through the streets of Totnes, headed by the town crier and mace bearers. Her mother Ammy never really came out of mourning and continued to wear dark dresses for the remaining three decades of her life. And so it was to her pious and widowed mother and the two remaining staff at Lakemead that a pregnant Jane took Eleanor to live during World War II.
With his family settled, Captain John Gibson reported for duty at the Aldershot Barracks in Hampshire, 40 miles south-west of London. In his account of the warJohn wrote that he doubled as the sports officer while he 'saw in' the recruits through a three-month course in hygiene and first aid. When he was home on leave in Totnes John held the first of his war-time babies, Kathleen, who was named for her strong Irish heritage. Kathy, as she became known, was born in 1940, the same year that the Battle of Britain began. During air raids Jane grabbed Kathy from her cot and ran down two flights of stairs to the basement, where the Luftwaffe provided her lullaby and the family huddled under blankets with the cook and the gardener.
After two years of looking after the health and fitness of his men in first Hampshire and then the Alva Valley in Scotland, John told Jane he would soon be seeing some action. The 'phoney war', as he called the previous period of limbo, was finally over. Into the top pocket of his khaki-coloured woollen uniform John buttoned a small black-and-white photo of Jane which did not do justice to her natural beauty.
John's ship was the first in the fleet to land on the African coast on 8 November 1942 and he made note of the 'twinkling lights of Algiers' to their left. In the northern Tunisian town of Medjes-el- Bab, John and his six orderlies set up a field ambulance station in a farmhouse with a red 'X' painted on the roof. The only access road to this farmhouse was frequently shelled by Germans, who occupied the hills surrounding the town.
Jane would have been desperate for news from the front and John's whereabouts, but all she received back in Devon were pale- yellow, index-sized cards bearing the name 'John Gibson', with ticks in boxes corresponding to his physical condition. She never really knew where he was.
After serving three months in North Africa, John's division arrived at the Mersey Docks in Liverpool and he was sent back up to Scotland. When he was granted fourteen days' leave, he returned to his family in Totnes, and his twin sons were born nine months later.
During the early months of 1944, John was stationed 200 miles east of Totnes in Newhaven, where he was assigned a trusted position on the planning team for the invasion of France. In the evenings he collected all the 'bumph' from Planning and worked till early in the morning organising the supplies to be loaded onto various ships.
In April 1944, John returned to Totnes when Jane was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. He looks tall in a photo taken of him in uniform during this brief leave. The diminutive Jane was only a week away from her delivery date when John departed from Newhaven for Operation Overlord, which history would remember as the D-Day landings.
John Gibson and his men from the Third Infantry Division set off at midnight on 5 June 1944. He recalled that dawn was a 'wonderful', though noisy, sight with assault craft numbering at least 3000 stretching as far as he could see. HMS Warspite fired its 15-inch guns across them and Royal Air Force planes flew over them like great freight trains rattling the sky. As Sword Beach came into view, a mortar hit the front ramp of John's landing craft, leaving it gaping and vulnerable.
Among those John knew from the landing party who waded ashore at 0700 were Craven and Watty, along with the war artist John Ward. John remained on the craft to treat the wounded and by the time he had transferred the last of them to a support vessel it was 0830. The beaches were 'not healthy' so John found his orderly and batman as quickly as possible and together they advanced westward the 20 miles through the French countryside to their headquarters in a château at Colleville-sur-Mer. That evening John's thoughts turned to his great friends Watty and Craven, who never made it off Sword Beach.
Nineteen days after D-Day, near a crossroads about a mile from the HQ, the division padre walked towards John holding a dogeared telegram which announced the birth of his twin sons. John looked up and thanked the Padre, who replied, 'Pas du tout'. John heard this French phrase for 'Not at all' as 'Pa of two' and laughed out loud with joy and relief. The English padre also seemed to enjoy the double meaning of his little joke.
For the first month at least after D-Day John remained at Colleville-sur-Mer as commander of the field ambulance station. He used his limited knowledge of French to convince the countess who owned the château to allow his men to use her cellar so they had somewhere private to write their letters home. John Ward, whose art works were later acquired by the Imperial War Museum in London, used pen and paper to capture these poignant moments in the cellar. When Jane sent across a photo of herself with Bill and Bob, this same war artist remarked to John, 'Your wife looks well; the lights are back in her hair'.
The servicemen John treated had ailments ranging from gunshot wounds to battle exhaustion to ruptured eardrums, for which he was able to give penicillin for the first time in his career. It was not until World War II that large-scale production of penicillin commenced in America, allowing its more widespread use.
In August 1944 John and his men left Colleville-sur-Mer as part of a convoy of trucks, which zigzagged in a roughly eastward direction along rutted brown roads through French hedgerow country. When they reached the town of Flers, John found a little terrier which he named Joe Flers. This dog was run over by a tank but it must have made an impression on John because he later bought a similar breed for his children. The division stopped for a night near Rouen, where John bought a large bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume for Jane. In Brussels they were met by cheering crowds, but by December John was spending a 'most uncomfortable and dodgy Christmas' by the river Maas in Holland. Lying in a ditch half-filled with snow and slush, John tried to keep warm in his camouflaged 'airborne' sleeping bag but never really felt safe because German air patrols came over every night.
The enemy encounters John faced as a medical officer with the Royal Army Medical Corps would later become burnished memories for his children, made brighter and more lustrous with each retelling. Bill has always been very proud of his father's role as a 'medic' during World War II and can recount several of hiswar-time stories in such animated detail they could easily have been his own. Among his favourites was the time his father needed to deliver drugs and dressings to a small hospital staffed by Germans, who were pleased to see him. When he arrived back to his division John discovered that he had accidentally crossed over into enemy territory. He wrote of this incident, 'I was greeted as a hero when I called again and didn't admit it was just bad map reading.'
Early in 1945 John had the harrowing task of liberating prisoners from a concentration camp. Then, in the days before Germany's surrender on 7 May 1945, he spent a night arranging ambulances on either side of a river in the process of being bridged so they could cross. 'We knew VE [Victory in Europe] Day was in the offing and I was scared stiff that my luck wouldn't hold out.'
With their bands and banners, 'a great gathering of the Devon clans' led a flickering torchlight procession down the High Street of Totnes on 8 May 1945 to honour those who had died. John also celebrated VE Day with a parade of massed bands, but he was in Bremerhaven, a German seaport on the North Sea. Doctors were not demobbed until after the end of the war so they could repatriate the prisoners or wounded, if fit to travel, back to their own countries.
John was now a major and from Bremerhaven he moved to Luneburg Heath near Hamburg, where he worked shifts with another country doctor, Captain Jimmie Wells, from Oxfordshire. John had just gone off duty when the Allies apprehended one of the creators of the Holocaust, the Reichsführer (leader) of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. While being examined by Captain Wells, Himmler crunched down on a tiny glass vial of cyanide, which he had concealed in a fold of his cheek, and died within minutes. John wrote of this moment, which has been documented by war historians: 'The other [Medical Officer] was most unfairly criticized for missing this, for I'm sure I would have missed it too.'
* * *
Soon after the war officially ended in September 1945, John Gibson arrived at Lakemead in a grey pinstripe suit, having given his Army uniform away. Among the trophies of war he brought home were a pair of Zeiss binoculars and a silver cigarette case, which held the little vials of heroin and adrenalin he administered on the battlefield.
Bill and Bob had never met their father, so this new playfellow was a pleasant distraction, but it was a different matter for their sisters, for whom he was like a stranger. John had missed many of his children's formative years and found it difficult to show the affection he felt for them – 'perhaps too great an affection', as he noted in his account of the war.
John had not completed his clinical training before the war began so for six months he delivered babies at Oldway, a mock-Versailles mansion near Paignton owned by the Singer family of sewing machine fame. He then worked for a further six months in the exclusive coastal resort town of Torquay at the Torbay Hospital.
On his rare days off John took his family on expeditions around Totnes. Once they reached the High Street it was only a short stroll along the covered Butterwalk to the Guildhall. For the Gibson children this town hall was not only a history lesson but a lesson in family history. There are large oak tables on the first floor where Oliver Cromwell sat with Lord Fairfax in 1646 to plan the civil wars, and also a portrait gallery, which includes ancestors from both the maternal and paternal sides of Bill's family who had served terms as mayor of the Borough – including a grandfather and his two great-grandfathers.
Near the Guildhall are the remains of one of the earliest Norman strongholds, Totnes Castle. Looking north from the castle ramparts on a clear day it is possible to see all the way to the Dartmoor nature park, with its deserted miles of tor and bog which range in colour from moss green to rust brown. Jane and John took photos of each other on Dartmoor holding the handle of a large nanny-style pram. Sitting upright inside are a pair of rosy-cheeked, white-blonde toddlers, Bill and Bob, and holding onto each side of the pram are their sisters, Eleanor and Kathy.
On their return from these day trips, the family entertained themselves in the sitting room of Lakemead, reading stories and listening to Ammy playing pieces such as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on her grand piano. For Bill and his siblings, this sonata still evokes memories of their grandmother, as does the plodding dumdum-de-dum of Chopin's Funeral March, which Ammy played at all hours of the night and day on the second grand piano in her late husband's study.
To the Gibson children their grandmother's garden of an acre and a half seemed enormous. If they walked across the level lawn from the sitting room there was a swing hanging from the branches of an ancient cedar tree. The remainder of the garden fell steeply away from this cedar and at the bottom of the grass banks there was a fragrant rose garden where the children searched for Saxon silver pennies. Like the Old Town walls, which had once protected the early Saxon settlers and their mint, the stone walls of this garden made the Gibson children feel safe. With its brick stables, tennis lawn and heated glasshouse for the grapevines, the property was like a little village, but how long would they remain living here now that the war was over and their father had returned home?
It wasn't only their mother who loved the fruitful South Hams district; it also had a very special place in their father's heart. As a young lad John travelled down from the industrial city of Birmingham in the West Midlands to spend his school holidays, and also much of World War I, with his grandparents in Devon.
George and Laura Gibson lived at 13 Bridgetown Road, in an exclusive suburb on the eastern side of the river Dart in Totnes. They employed a staff of six to run their Victorian home, St Maur, including a boy to run the medicines for George's medical practice. They were used to having a large staff from the eighteen years George served as a Colonel-Surgeon with the British Army until his retirement in 1888. While living in Totnes he served terms as both mayor and medical officer of health.
John was an only child until his sister, Joan, came along when he was nine, so he enjoyed playing with his cousins during these holidays with his grandparents in Totnes. George owned some of the first cars in Devon, including a 1925 Bean, a Model T Ford and a Wolseley, which he permitted John to drive from the age of about eleven onwards.
When John was seventeen and on holidays in Totnes from boarding at Epsom College in Surrey, he noticed a girl in a black dress standing next to the bridge over the river Dart. She was selling cornflowers, which, like poppies, were sold as symbols of Remembrance Day because both continued to grow on the barren battlefields after World War I. The girl's name was Janet but she said to him, 'You can call me Jane'. She was in mourning for her beloved father, Charles Rea, the day that John bought a cornflower from her and it became their own remembrance flower thereafter.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bill Gibson by Tina K Allen. Copyright © 2017 Tina K Allen. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Preface,
Abbreviations,
Gibson Family Tree,
1 Memories of a father at war,
2 Bill's school days,
3 A medical qualification,
4 Fellow of the College of Surgeons,
5 Taking a new direction,
6 The London Triumvirate,
7 A major decision,
8 The new professor,
9 Children making headlines,
10 Storm clouds,
11 Casting the net long and wide,
12 A new centre and a new manager,
13 The best use of the money,
14 Dreams becoming a reality,
15 Winds of change,
16 Three score and ten,
Endnotes,
Select bibliography,
Glossary of terms,
Acknowledgments,
Index,