The legacy left by a Welsh hero of 1917
A visceral portrayal of the horrors of World War I is being viewed by audiences around the world in the award-winning epic film 1917. The partly-factual story at the heart of the movie is one of countless accounts of bravery from the Great War and Amanda
‘FFROM where I sit writing I can see the cemetery where we laid him to rest yesterday afternoon and I can assure you that while the 9th Welch are within reach of the spot, his grave will never be left untended and that his memory will remain green in all our hearts.”
A condolence letter to a widow in 1917, the day after her husband’s burial during World War I, pays a hearfelt and poignant tribute to a much-loved fallen hero.
Yet the story of Major John Angel Gibbs is little-known beyond his home town of Penarth, a place where his legacy lives on at the school he founded and which supports and inspires young people in a way he would have wanted.
As the epic war film 1917 is in the headlines and cinemas after winning seven Baftas and two Oscars, Major Gibbs’ grandson Simon is writing a book about his ancestor with the aim of bringing his account, and the regiment’s history, to a wider audience.
Film director Sir Sam Mendes was inspired to write 1917 by his own grandfather. Its portrayal of the horrors of the Great War’s trenches and battlefields has particular resonance with Simon Gibbs, who’s been researching his own grandfather’s story for the past decade.
What emerges from his research into Major Gibbs is the tale of an Army officer so valued by his peers and the soldiers who served under him that they saw him as an uncle.
Born into a devout Methodist family, what was to become his parting gift to his home town of Penarth was a building.
He left instructions that if he was killed on returning to the Western Front, the building should become an orphanage and school for boys who’d lost their fathers in the war.
The school remains, but its purpose has changed in the 100 years since then. Owned by the charity Action For Children, it teaches young people with emotional, behavioural and social difficulties and autism.
Remarkable photographs from the Gibbs family’s collection show the Major as an upright and kindly-looking officer who, by coincidence, bears more than a passing resemblance to actor George Mackay, who plays the thoughtful Lance Corporal Schofield in the film 1917.
While the movie is the product of creative genius with a true story at its heart, the life and times of Major Gibbs and the battles of his regiment, the 9th Welch, are worthy of making it to the screen in their own right.
“Very little of John Angel Gibbs’ life in 1916 and 1917 in France and Belgium was known before I started my research,” says his grandson Simon.
“I want to produce the book to rectify the extent to which the history of the 9th Welch has been lost within the welter of words written about the war.”
Before we talk about the battalion, he tells me about his grandfather’s background, which is inextricably linked with the shipping heritage of south Wales.
Along the way, there’s a tale of a young woman whose father opposes her marriage and a cast of characters which include well-known writers and Roald Dahl’s father.
Simon explains how his grandfather moved to Penarth from Cardiff at a very early age when his father, also called John Angel Gibbs, died.
The elder John Angel Gibbs had been among a number of related shipping
families who’d moved from Portland Bill on the Dorset coast to Cardiff and Penarth in the second half of the 19th century.
Cardiff was boom town by that time. The growth of the iron industry had given the city its own port. The Glamorganshire Canal linked Cardiff with Merthyr and the city’s main landowner, the second Marquess of Bute, built West Bute Dock in 1839, with East Bute Dock opening in 1859. As the coal industry grew, more docks followed, including in Penarth and Barry.
In 1841, the Taff Vale Railway opened – and this becomes important later in the story of Major John Angel Gibbs.
“A significant number of the Cardiff shipping firms located themselves in Penarth and among those families were a number who were Methodist denomiation and among those there were two particular families, the Morel family and the Gibbs family,” Simon Gibbs explains. Born in 1880, John Angel Gibbs had two older sisters, one older brother and two younger brothers. He played hockey, cricket, football and, notably, rugby, including for Penarth RFC in a team which beat the Barbarians, says Simon.
Two of John Angel’s brothers, William and Reggie, captained Penarth RFC, with Reggie playing for Wales and scoring a then record four tries against France in 1908. Around that time, John Angel and Reggie set up their own shipping firm, commissioning vessels for the coal trade from shipbuilders in the north-east of England.
For some time, John Angel had wanted to marry his cousin Gladys, whose father Sir Thomas Morel was bitterly opposed to the match.
They married in 1909, after her father had died and by which time John Angel’s shipping business was flourishing.
John Angel and Gladys settled in an area near the cliffs of Penarth where houses are now valued at well over £1m. Gladys gave birth to their only son, John Morel Gibbs, in 1912.
We can imagine this small and prosperous family happily living among aunts, uncles and cousins within a strong Methodist church community on the south Wales coast.
But World War I broke out by the time their son was a toddler and, at the age of 34, John Angel Gibbs was one of the first to enlist, telling a friend at the time he’d rather die in France than be thought of as a “slacker”.
By the end of 1914, he’d become a captain in the 13th Battalion of the Welch Regiment.
His grandson Simon Gibbs, who’s a former planning inspector, sends me a copy of a presentation he’s delivered to various audiences called Uncovering My Grandfather.
It charts John Angel Gibbs’ war history through a series of photographs. Among the pictures is one from around 1916 with a montage of ship owners at the Coal Exchange in Cardiff.
John Angel Gibbs is in his Army uniform, standing among them.
“His first cousin Ralph Morel is just behind him in the row behind and immediately behind him is Roald Dahl’s father,” says Simon.
“It shows how few of the Cardiff shipowners joined up because in the whole photograph there are three in naval or military uniform and John Angel is one of those.
“He didn’t have to join up, he had a job that would have kept him away from the Army, but I think he thought it would be exciting and it was his duty as well.”
Simon’s talk opens with another montage, this time one he has put together himself. In the centre is John Angel Gibbs flanked by two writers.
One of them is the author and poet Ford Madox Ford, whose historical fictional masterpiece Parade’s End has a character called Captain Gibbs.
“Ford Madox Ford mentions my grandfather quite a lot,” says Simon, who has contributed to a conference in London on literature and war, presenting a paper on Ford.
“In July 1916 he [Ford] goes out to France as a second lieutenant,” Simon tells me. “My grandfather at that stage is a captain, so Ford Madox Ford is quite a
lot more senior. He [Ford] comes out to France and the colonel of the regiment takes one look at him and decides that he’s not the sort of man he wants in his battalion.
“He’s a bit old, he’s a bit fat and then he keeps on talking about everybody he knows, which includes the prime minister,” Simon laughs.
“But my grandfather, it seems, was kind to him and in his novels he has a character called Captain Gibbs who’s a Cardiff shipowner and very fond of his children and that sort of thing. That’s obviously directly based on him.”
The other writer in Simon Gibbs’ presentation is St Helier Evans, who wrote about the 9th Battalion of the Welch Regiment which John Angel Gibbs joined later in the war. We hear more about St Helier Evans later.
Among the photographs are poignant family images, including some from the a parade in Rhyl where John Angel Gibbs was a training captain for the 13th Battalion. One image is from a postcard which shows a woman with a dramatic Edwardian-style hat next to a young child in a pram.
The toddler is Simon Gibbs’ father, the woman thought to be his grandmother Gladys. “At that stage in the war, she was going up to north Wales quite a bit and seeing him and this is February 1915, he’d been training then for about three or four months.
“You can see the men are still wearing the Welsh cloth,” says Simon, referring to the distinctive uniform, made of “brethyn llwyd” or Welsh homespun, created partly because there were uniform shortages.
Once the 13th Battalion had been trained, they went into combat in France, but John Angel Gibbs stayed behind for a while.
“They’ve got too many officers,” says Simon Gibbs. “So he stays behind and he stays in a training role in this different battalion which was the training battalion, the 20th.”
The baby in the pram in the picture at Rhyl appears again in the family’s collection. This time the child, Simon’s father John Morel, is aged about three and is sitting in front of his uniformed father with Gladys holding their child’s hand.
Simon thinks the picture may have been taken during embarkation leave.
“I think there would have been a lot of pressure put on him not long after to go to France because they began to run out of officers, but he himself makes the decision in February 1916 that he wants to go to France, that he wants to be in the action.
“He probably by that time comes to the decision to give up what is really a comfortable and almost jolly life and actually go out to the front.”
However, although he’d become a major, John Angel Gibbs hadn’t actually been in battle and decided to step back a rank to captain.
“He’s totally inexperienced,” says his grandson. “So he goes across totally inexperienced as a captain rather than a major.”
In September 1915, the battalion he was going to join, the 9th Welch, had suffered heavily in the Battle of Loos.
That conflict had seen the worst British Army losses on a single day at that point in the war, with more than 50,000 casualties and at least 20,000 deaths from six military divisions.
“My grandfather gets out there in early 1916, when the battalion’s been rebuilt, its morale is being built up,” says Simon, explaining how John Angel Gibbs transferred from the 13th to the 9th Battalion to bring the number of officers in the latter up to strength.
“Between April and June they’re involved in defensive training and, by the end of June 1916, this battalion is getting a high reputation for being well-behaved, disciplined and enthusiastic.”
This was just before the start of the Battle of the Somme, which started in July 1916 and was one of the bloodiest episodes of World War I.
“It’s not easy to work out what my grandfather is doing during the Somme battle,” says Simon.
“I don’t think he’s in the frontline of fighting very much, I think he’s held back a little bit from that, but the men and the junior officers are heavily engaged in some very difficult fighting.”
Despite the gaps in what the family knows about John Angel Gibbs, he continued to impress his superiors. He was promoted to major again and decorated with the Distinguished Service Order.
There’s also evidence of the kindness he showed to the junior officers he supported and the ranks below.
“There are couple of stories from [the writer and officer] St Helier Evans about Christmas 1916,” says Simon.
“In Christmas 1916, my grandfather’s just been made a major and he decides the men need a certain amount of support for their morale, so he buys a goose for each platoon.
“I think a platoon is about 10 men and he gives them individually a fiveshilling hamper. I still don’t know what would be in a five-shilling hamper, but I imagine it’s quite a lot of things.”
Not long after that Major Gibbs fell ill, quite likely with appendicitis, and needed to return home for surgery.
The final family photograph of John Angel Gibbs shows him with his wife Gladys while he’s on sickness absence. Once again, he’s in uniform, his wife smartly dressed with a hat and umbrella as the couple walk along a street.
We don’t know whether it was during this outing, or at another time, that the couple had a conversation which would leave a lasting legacy for the town of Penarth and generations of young people to this day.
The couple decided to buy a property known as the Penarth Hotel from the Taff Vale Railway Company.
With views over to Cardiff and the Bristol Channel, and standing in five acres, it was worth around £15,000 at the time.
“Just before he goes back to France in May 1917, he and his his wife have an important conversation about the Taff Vale Railway Hotel,” explains his grandson.
“And they decide that, if he’s killed, it should be set up as an orphanage in his memory and, if he survives, it should be an orphanage in thanksgiving that he’s survived and in support of all the men.”
John Angel Gibbs returned overseas for what was to be the final time.
By September 1917, the 9th Welch were due to be taking part in another offensive and he was put in command of the battalion for the Battle of the Menin Road in Belgium, part of the Third Battle of Ypres, which later became known as Passchendaele.
Just as we see in stark detail in the film 1917, there’d been heavy weather before the Battle of the Menin Road offensive on September 20 and ground conditions were boggy. It was holding up progress by the 9th Welch.
“The story from a condolence letter [reproduced on this page] is that my grandfather goes forward to see about the failure of part of the line to advance,” says Simon, whose interpretation of what happened differs from the explanation offered to Major Gibbs’ widow.
Simon goes as far as to say that his grandfather had been rash and impetuous and this led to his death.
“My understanding is that the Germans would have known where the battalion command post was and, as soon as there’s movement, then snipers are getting active.
“My grandfather was hit in the head and, very early on in the battle, at about nine o’clock, he’s killed.
“The relationship between Colonel Godfrey and John Angel Gibbs was quite complex,” he adds, explaining that the writer Ford Madox Ford had described the colonel as “the laziest man in the Army”.
“As far as we know, he was a loyal second-in-command and worked hard, at least in part, to make up for Godfrey’s defects.
“These were such that only a matter of six days after my grandfather was killed, Brigadier General Glasgow, the next in line above Godfrey, wrote to his superior: ‘I think this officer [Godfrey] should be relieved of his present duties at once.’
“More significantly, in relation to the content of the condolence letter, it has to be recognised that this was written to give comfort to the receiver.
“The picture built up and the phrases used are hackneyed and would have been a staple part of many letters of condolence written by senior officers.
“In particular, I have difficulty with the vainglory in the sentence, ‘He was as pleased and as proud as could be to take them over the top.’
“Yes, I can see that John Angel Gibbs was ‘pleased and proud’ to have been given command of the battalion.
“However, as a commanding officer, it was John Angel Gibbs’ role to stay at the command post and watch his men go forward to attack an enemy that was in a well-defended position – not to ‘take them over the top.’
“What I believe the higher command wanted was reassurance that John Angel Gibbs was able to cope with the pressures of commanding a battalion in a battle and particularly keeping a cool head when things were not going as planned.
“That he left his command post early in the day’s battle and exposed himself to an enemy bullet was a rash act and a serious lapse of judgement, suggesting he was over-anxious to urge his men on and he was trying to do too much himself.
“This was, of course, not the picture to be presented to a grieving widow.”
Simon also thinks it’s more likely his grandfather was killed by a sniper rather than an enemy machine gun.
“I think it far more probable that, as he emerged from his bunker, he was picked off by a sniper who had his sights trained on the command post, to take advantage of an opportunity presented when a messenger or some other person emerged from the relative safety of that position,” he says.
“By referring to a machine gun, Godfrey was removing the personal from the action.
“The bullet was wellaimed and had fatal consequences, whereas a machine gun bullet would have been far more likely to wound.”
What we do know for certain are the words Major Gibbs himself wrote to his wife just an hour before his death.
“This will be the proudest moment of my life, as I know my battalion will live up to its reputation,” he told her.
He was buried two days later, leaving his widow to carry on the work he’d intended at the school in Penarth.
Gladys gave the hotel to the major Methodist body working with children, the National Children’s Home and Orphanage – now Action for Children. For many years it was called the JA Gibbs Home.
“It wasn’t just setting up an orphanage, the really powerful thing was that they were providing training for children and in south Wales that particularly meant working on ships and going to sea and that sort of thing, a full nautical education,” says Simon Gibbs.
Simon’s late father John Morel Gibbs – the toddler we see in the early photograph opposite – became a child psychologist and chaired the school’s management board for about 50 years.
“Interestingly, my father was a conscientious objector in World War II and so they were both expressing Christian approaches to life in very different ways,” says Simon, comparing his grandfather and father.
“He [John Morel Gibbs] was very much involved in it shifting from being an orphanage to being an approved school and then, I’m afraid, towards the end of the time it existed, you started to have some of these scandals that were particularly connected with the schools in north Wales.”
He’s referring to how the the school, by then renamed Headlands, saw child abuse allegations which led to a number of cases in the early 2000s.
Simon was living away by this time and didn’t know the details.
The school was part of a widespread police investigation called Operation Goldfinch into abuse in children’s homes and Action for Children is keen to emphasise how things have changed since that time.
The charity says it’s “deeply sorry for the abuse that any children endured while living in the care of any of its homes”, adding, “the experience of children being abused in care homes in the past had a profound effect on our services and across the sector.
“We therefore have robust child protection arrangements so that any concern at all about staff is now considered at senior levels and referred to the local authority and police to consider.
“All staff are appointed only after rigorous vetting and selection processes and our homes are inspected regularly
I think he would have been very concerned for the children of the men who he could see suffering and dying in World War I
by an independent inspectorate.
“Headlands School today is a dynamic and innovative school that is recognised for its excellence by Estyn and others in the sector and all our children’s homes provide high-quality and safe care that has transformed young lives.”
I’ve seen at first hand just how transformative the school is, visiting in a non-journalistic role last year and later interviewing one of its teachers for a feature about cycling.
The teacher, Joe Lucas, told me about how six pupils and four members of staff had travelled to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate last year as part of a trip which took in the start of the Tour de France.
They were commemorating John Angel Gibbs 100 years after the school was founded.
“We wanted to replicate what John
Angel Gibbs would have done, leaving Penarth with the whole town waving off the soldiers in World War I, so we did that ride over the Severn Bridge as our own Grand Départ and then we took all the bikes over to Belgium on the car,” the teacher told me in 2019.
“The boys did more than 100 miles of cycling over the three days.”
Cycling is a big thing at Headlands, where, as part of their education, pupils run a bike maintenance workshop as well as a cafe and radio station.
“They are young people who’ve been disengaged from mainstream education and we get them involved in bike mechanics and also riding bikes which builds on that self-esteem and gives them confidence and encourages them to be healthy individuals and then maybe do better at everything.
“It improves their social and emotional difficulties,” Joe Lucas explained.
It’s just the kind of thing John Angel Gibbs and his widow Gladys would have taken great pride in as they continued the family’s strong interest in youth work.
“I think he would have been very concerned for the children of the men who he could see suffering and dying in World War I,” says Simon Gibbs about his grandfather.
The hotel donated by the Gibbs family is now a listed building and unused, with new and renovated buildings as part of the school.
Action for Children acknowledges the disused hotel is a “striking and historic landmark in Penarth” and says it’s working to decide its best longterm use.
Returning to the couple who started it, and after all the research he’s done, I wonder how well Simon feels he now knows a grandfather who died long before he was born.
“That’s an interesting question,” he replies.
“While my life experiences have been totally different from my grandfather’s experiences in the Great War, I can see that in the situation he was in, he acted with the same spirit and conviction that he had shown in his prewar life.
“He was a Methodist, a sportsman and a businessman.
“He worked hard at being an Army officer, he put time and effort into his relationships with the people around him so that his nickname of ‘uncle’ was totally appropriate.”
Simon Gibbs then refers to the writers who captured his grandfather’s spirit.
“Ford Madox Ford served with the 9th Welch for three months in summer to autumn 1916,” explains Simon.
“This was a difficult time for Ford and apart from John Angel Gibbs he would appear to have had no respect for his fellow officers.
“Ford’s Captain Gibbs in Parade’s End is a ‘nice, silent, capable man’ and devoted to his family.
“St Helier Evans in Going Across, the only book written specifically about the 9th Welch and based on his letters home, wrote of my grandfather’s funeral: ‘We buried Major Gibbs in Kemmel Cemetery, all the battalion attended, every one very moved. What is there left to say. The battalion will never be the same.’
“These are voices of men that knew my grandfather well – they speak to me directly over the 100 years since he died and I can see how much my grandfather was my father’s father.”