Tuesday 06th of January 2009
Rev. Robert Mortimer Gibbons
Rev. Robert Mortimer Gibbons, who was Curate of Street, 1914-17, was born in about 1890.
He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he gained his BA degree in 1911.
He was ordained Deacon in 1914. After a three year curacy in Street he joined the Royal Navy as a Chaplain in 1917, and served at the National Nautical School in Portishead until 1922, when he volunteered to go to Zanzibar as a missionary with the U.M.C.A. (Universities' Mission to Central Africa, a mission founded after the return to England of David Livingstone). At that time the famous and inspiring Frank Weston was Bishop of Zanzibar.
Robert was clearly a man of ability and dedication, because in 1924 he was appointed Principal of St Andrew's Training College, Zanzibar. He went on to the Training College for Teachers in Minaki, some seventeen miles inland from Dar-es-Salaam, in 1926.
I have no information about his subsequent career, but he was appointed an Honorary Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar, in 1951, and at some time before 1967 he was awarded a C.B.E. A tantalising extract from an article to which I do not have access speaks of "Canon Robert Gibbons and Dr. Mary Gibbons, who ran an outstanding mission..." If this is our Robert, then we may deduce that he married a doctor.
He married Caroline Mabel Marshall in Wells in that year.