On
the 7th
of December 1977, a 64-year old bus driver named Paul Gibb clocked on
for his shift at Guildford Bus Station – and promptly dropped dead
from a massive heart attack. It was a tragic, if mundane occurrence.
However, the ambulance crew who rushed to the scene, and the gawping
bystanders who witnessed the event would have found it curious that
the unfortunate victim lived alone in a caravan in a nearby village.
They would have been startled to discover that he had been educated
at a public school, and Cambridge University. And they would have
been downright astonished to learn that he had played cricket
for Yorkshire and Essex, and eight
Test matches for England. And
there
were other notable aspects of Paul Gibb’s life, including that he
had flown Short Sunderland flying boats during the war; that he was
the first Oxbridge Blue to become a professional cricketer, and he
was also
the first (and only) Blue
to
become a First-Class umpire. In this article I will review Paul
Gibb’s life, and speculate on the factors that led to
his
singular cricket career, to him
driving
a bus for
a living,
and to his
rather sad and lonely death.
 |
| Paul Gibb batting for England v India, 1946. Image: Alamy |
Paul
Gibb Before the War
Paul
Anthony Gibb was born on 11th
July 1913, in Acomb, a suburb of York. His family had roots in
Scotland, and Gibb’s first first-class match was for that country.
His grandfather, Sir George Gibb, was a notable railway
administrator, who became Managing Director of the London
Underground. His father Paul senior
was
also a railwayman, becoming Goods Manager of the North Eastern
Railway. His maternal grandfather was Judge J.D.C. Carver, KC.
Gibb
junior was educated at a preparatory boarding school in Dorset
(reportedly he ran away on one occasion), and King Edward’s school
in Oxford. His
talent for cricket was soon evident; he
played for the school’s first team from the age of fourteen and
Wisden
noted in 1931 that “he should be heard from again in Yorkshire
cricket”.
After
leaving school, Gibb did not go straight to
university.
In
1932 he played club cricket for York, then spent two years employed
by Sir Julien Cahn, owner of a large chain of furniture stores (and
one of the first entrepreneurs to introduce ‘hire purchase’).
Ostensibly, Gibb worked as a salesman, but in reality he was a
full-time
cricketer in Cahn’s private team (in
effect, a ‘shamateur’).
Cahn, who had made a fortune from his furniture business, was
a cricket obsessive. He built a private ground on his massive country
estate, and despite being a modest player, captained his own team,
which was of near county standard - umpires never gave him out LBW.
His team played a full programme of (non-first
class) matches
each summer, including a game against the year’s international
tourists. Gibb played for Cahn with success in 1933 and 1934, and in
August 1933 toured Canada, the USA and Bermuda with his
side.
As well
as playing for Cahn,
Gibb made his
first class debut in 1934 for Scotland against the touring
Australians.
Following
the 1934 season, Gibb finally went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
to read history. He spent four years at the University, earning
‘Blues’
in each year. Gibb was a wicketkeeper-batsman, a rare thing in those
days. Until recently, cricketing wisdom held that wicket-keeper was a
key specialist position, and that teams should include their best
keeper regardless of their batting ability – it was not uncommon
for county and even Test match keepers to bat at number eleven.
Cambridge stirred controversy by picking Gibb over S.C. (Billy)
Griffith, who was regarded as a better keeper, but was a weaker
batsman (Griffith
went on to play for Sussex, won three England caps in the 1940s, and
spent many years as Secretary of the MCC). Gibb’s dual role made
him an attractive prospect for
county and country, as well as for his university.
He
could open the batting,
and
sometimes
he played as a specialist batsman, with a reputation for caution and
slow scoring.
Following
the 1935 university season, Gibb played in six matches as
an amateur for
Yorkshire, scoring a century on
his county debut against a Nottinghamshire attack that included
Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, and
going
on to carry his bat for 157 runs.
Following
his spectacular
debut,
Gibb was profiled in the Leeds
Mercury.
His father was interviewed, and told the reporter:
“[Cricket’s]
a grand game, and Paul is good at it. But after all, it’s a game
and his study must come first. He wants to become a public school
master when he leaves Cambridge. He’s a way of getting on with
youngsters and his cricket might be useful. But he ought to keep it
in its proper place”.
It
is not clear whether the ambition to be a schoolmaster was Gibb’s
own, or his father’s. But Gibb did not put his studies first, and
despite spending four years at Cambridge, he only achieved a general
pass degree, and his subsequent teaching career was not a long one.
Despite
his father’s view that he was good with “youngsters”, Gibb’s
personality was an eccentric one, not
obviously suited to the rough and tumble of teaching.
He disliked social events and
found them difficult,
writing in his diary that they
bored him “unless I have a good deal to drink”. He was
chronically absent minded, often mislaying his kit or other
belongings, and while he appears to have been a popular team mate, he
was often the butt of practical jokes, that today might be regarded
as bullying. He had cravings for certain foods, in particular ice
cream, milkshakes and fruit salads, which he would eat in prodigious
quantities, without it seeming to affect his weight. He was also
prematurely bald, and wore spectacles, giving
him the appearance of an accountancy clerk rather than an
elite
cricketer.
During
the 1935-6
winter,
Yorkshire went on a three match tour of Jamaica, only the second time
that a county side had toured abroad. Due to the convention that the
team had to be captained by an amateur, and
because none of Yorkshire’s other amateur players could make the
trip, Gibb, aged 22 and after just a few games, was appointed tour
captain. The role exposed his lifelong shyness and awkwardness in
social situations, though his inexperience on the field was
compensated for by the tour manager, the legendary George Hirst, and
the senior professional, Herbert Sutcliffe. Gibb does
not appear to have captained a county side again.
Gibb
went on tour again in the winter of 1937-8, this time to India with a
strongish team put together by former England captain Lord (Lionel)
Tennyson. He played in all five unofficial ‘Tests’. Cambridge
University indulged his touring, which resulted in him having to
spend an extra year to
get his degree.
He rewarded the University in 1938 by scoring over 1,000 runs during
the season, including a century in his
fourth
Varsity match. With some good performances for Yorkshire as
well,
he caught the Test selectors’ eye, and when England’s
wicket-keeper Leslie Ames was injured, Gibb was chosen for the third
Test against Australia (Ames was also a wicket-keeper batsman, so
Gibb was regarded as a like-for-like replacement). In the event, Gibb
suffered ill luck. The third Test was rained off without a ball being
bowled, and he was then injured in a county match and had to withdraw
from the squad before the fourth Test.
So
Gibb had to wait till that winter’s tour of South Africa to make
his Test debut. He
did so in style. With
Len Hutton injured,
he opened
the batting with Bill Edrich (with Ames keeping wicket), and
scored 93 in the first innings and 106 in the second, thus
achieving the rare feat of scoring a century on both his county and
Test debuts.
Opening
for the remainder of the series, he scored another fifty and then 120
in the final Test - the infamous ‘timeless Test’ that was
abandoned as a draw after eleven days when the tourists had to catch
their boat home. Gibb’s
innings contained just two boundaries, and at the time was the
slowest in Test cricket. England
won the five-match series 1-0, with 4 draws.
Despite
his winter successes, Gibb played no first-class cricket in 1939.
Having finally finished at Cambridge, at the advanced age of 25, he
needed a career, and he fulfilled his destiny by becoming a
schoolmaster at Hurstpierpoint College in Sussex, presumably teaching
history, his degree subject. Following
the end of the school year, Gibb did not play for Yorkshire, but
returned to Sir Julien Cahn’s team, presumably on financial
grounds, as he was engaged to be married. His fiancee, Joyce Cooper,
was the daughter of a prominent Yorkshire businessman, who that year
was Lord Mayor of York. They married on 6th
October, in
a lavish ceremony at York’s Mansion House. Rather
than selecting a cricketing colleague as best man, Gibb chose a
school friend, a Mr E. Climer. Gibb
and his wife later had two sons.
The
War Years
Gibb
may well have been relieved that the outbreak of war curtailed his
teaching career. There
are no reports of his time at
Hurstpierpoint College,
but he appears to have only stayed for one academic year, and
did not return to teaching after the war.
Following
his call-up, Gibb joined the RAF. He
played some cricket in the early years, including scoring a century
against the Army in 1941, but then trained as a flying boat pilot. He
was posted to stations in Pembroke in Wales and Oban in the west of
Scotland, piloting Short Sunderlands on missions to hunt German
U-Boats and protect Atlantic convoys. He was given the rank of Pilot
Officer, the lowest commissioned rank – leadership roles were not
for him. Such
far away stations reduced his cricketing opportunities.
After
the War
Gibb
was demobbed in December 1945. In 1946, he returned to cricket as an
amateur with Yorkshire and England. He played in the first two Test
matches against India, but wicket-keeping errors in the second Test
led to him losing his place to a rising star, Godfrey Evans (England
won the series 1-0, with 2 draws). He was however selected, along
with Evans, for that winter’s tour of Australia and New Zealand.
It
was an unhappy and unsuccessful tour. English cricket was still
recovering from the war years, and the tour party was largely made up
of players from the 1930s, several of whom were past their best.
Australian cricket had been less disrupted, and a number of good
young players had emerged, while the juggernaut that was Don Bradman
was still rolling along. The
tour captain was Wally Hammond, who was 43, not the batsman that he
had been before the war, and distracted by marital and other personal
problems. He was a distant and ineffective captain, and it rankled
that he and the tour manager, Rupert Howard, travelled between
matches by car, while the rest of the team had to journey on hot and
uncomfortable trains. It was unsurprising that Australia won the Test
series 3-0.
It
was an unsuccessful tour for Gibb personally. He played in the first
Test at Brisbane, keeping wicket and batting at number seven, but he
scored just 11 and 13 as England lost by the huge margin of an
innings and 332 runs. His wicketkeeping did not scale the heights
either, and he lost his place to Evans. He then suffered from
injuries and loss of form and was a passenger for much of the rest of
the tour, returning home early with other unwanted players rather
than going on to New Zealand. Thus ended his Test playing career.
After
Gibb’s death, it emerged that he had kept a diary during this tour,
and extracts from it were published in Wisden
Cricket Monthly
in 1979 and 1980. While
a clear and lucid writer, Gibb was no Samuel Pepys, and his entries
contained far more mundane practical details than psychological
insights. Confined largely to minor matches as a player, he tells
of endless games of
golf, tennis and squash. He writes
of his boredom and
discomfort at
the many official functions, and his endless searches for ice cream
and milk shakes. He sometimes seems uninterested in the cricket, and
once he had been dropped from the Test side, he spends
more
time on the golf course than watching the games. He was clearly happy
to return home early.
There
were some more
waspish
comments. He criticised captain Wally Hammond, believing that Hammond
had done him (Gibb) no favours by his approach to captaincy. When Don
Bradman infamously did not ‘walk’ when apparently caught for 28
in the first Test (he went on to make 187), Gibb dryly observed that
“the
umpire was either unwilling or afraid to give a decision against a
man of so high an authority in the Australian cricket world”.
And at a function he found himself with the Duke of Gloucester
(younger brother of King George VI and uncle of Queen Elizabeth),
noting,
“The
Duke had put one or two whisky-and-sodas away so was quite easy to
get on with and frequently broke into his somewhat high-pitched
laugh… If we had been a bunch of racehorses he would have known
better what to say to us. He talked a lot of hot air in such a manner
as to make us doubt his sobriety and he opened by saying that he
supposed we had all won the toss as if each of us had spun our
separate coin with our opposite number in the Australian team.”
On
his return to England, Gibb was clearly disillusioned with
cricket,
and again had to address the issue of earning a living. He did not
want to return to teaching, and was found a job by his father-in-law
in a gentleman’s
outfitting
company that he owned. He worked for this firm for four years
(1947-1950), playing no cricket during that time. However,
he
again
found that he was not suited to this
career.
Matters came to a head in 1950 when, through his cricketing contacts,
he secured an order for evening dress for the 1950-51 England tour of
Australia, but agreed such a low price that his firm lost money on
the deal. Also in 1950, his marriage broke down and he and Joyce were
divorced on the grounds of her adultery, the co-respondent being a Mr
Reginald Fitch.
Unsurprisingly,
given these circumstances, Gibb left the firm in 1951, and now alone
and with his sons in boarding schools, needed new employment. He
found a lifeline in cricket.
Essex’s long-standing wicketkeeper, Tom Wade had retired, and
Gibb’s Yorkshire and England team mate Norman Yardley recommended
Gibb
to the county. He joined Essex for the 1951 season, aged
38, the
first Oxbridge Blue
to play as a professional.
His
move did not excite much comment, Wisden merely noting the fact,
though the MCC pompously suspended his playing membership, which was
not open to professionals. In truth, by the 1950s the line in
first-class cricket between amateur and professional was becoming
increasingly blurred. Several counties now had professional captains,
and in 1952, Len Hutton would become the first professional to lead
England. Amateur privileges such as separate dressing rooms and meals
were being phased out, and ‘shamateurism’ was increasingly rife,
with a number of prominent amateurs having sinecure positions with
their counties, such as ‘assistant secretary’. While
Gibb was the only player with an Oxbridge degree to turn professional
before the amateur/professional distinction was abolished in 1963, he
was not the only graduate: Frank Tyson, who had studied
at
Durham University, played as a professional for Northamptonshire from
1952.
Gibb
had five successful years with Essex, and was even selected for the
Test Trial match held in 1953 prior to that year’s Ashes series.
That
winter, he went on his final overseas tour, to
India with a Commonwealth team. As in Australia in 1946-7, Gibb kept a personal diary, and as he was a reserve player, it included a lot
more episodes
of golf and squash, ice creams and trips to swimming baths. However,
there was a brief but moving passage about his sons:
“As
is often the case, I spent much time vaguely missing the children.
There is an unsettling feeling inside of me when I wonder how the
boys will settle themselves into life and the situation of their
separated parents in later years. Will they suffer a sense of divided
loyalties?”
Gibb’s
thoughts are given extra poignancy by the knowledge that he later
became estranged from both his sons.
By
1956, now aged 43, Gibb
had given way to Brian Taylor behind the stumps at
Essex,
and after spending much of that
season
in the second eleven, he
retired
as a player. His overall first class record was as follows:
287
matches, 479 innings, 12520 runs, average 28.07, 19 centuries, 425
catches, 123 stumpings.
His
Test record was:
8
matches, 12 innings, 581 runs, average 48.41, 2 centuries, 3 catches,
1 stumping.
Given
the spectacular starts to his county and Test careers, it might be
thought that Gibb did not completely fulfil his potential. However,
like so many of his generation, he lost his best years to the War,
and like many other amateurs, struggled to combine cricket with
making a living. If the War hadn’t intervened - or if he had
turned professional sooner – his record would surely have been
better.
Earning
a Living after Retirement
Yet
again, Gibb needed employment, and this time he stayed with cricket.
He was appointed to the first-class umpires panel, the only Blue that
has ever taken this role. He remained an umpire for ten years. Now
long divorced, and losing contact with his sons, Gibb took to living
in a caravan, which he towed from match to match, parking it in the
car park of the ground where he was umpiring. During off-seasons he
spent time coaching in private schools in South Africa (where one of
his pupils was the great all-rounder Mike Proctor). Other than that,
he remained a caravan dweller for the rest of his life.
Gibb
gained a reputation as a ‘hard but fair’ umpire and a stickler
for the laws of cricket. He was willing to give batsmen out LBW when
playing forward, which at the time was not often done – today’s
‘Ball Tracking’ technology may well have proved him right to do
so. At the time, ‘throwing’ was a considerable problem in
first-class and Test cricket, and at different times Gibb no-balled
several bowlers for throwing, including Derbyshire’s Harold Rhodes,
Hampshire’s Butch White, and Surrey and England’s Tony Lock. Gibb
may have been regarded by his bosses as too strict at times, as he
never umpired in a Test match.
Following
the 1966 season, Gibb was dropped from the umpires list. For a while,
he lived in South Africa, continuing his school coaching, and during
the South African winter writing travel articles for magazines. But
this did not last long, and he returned to England, securing a
position at Harrods, no less. But once again, the job was not for him
(and he found it hard to park his caravan in central London). So he
made his final – and finally successful – career move, and became
a bus driver. His employer was the Alder Valley Bus Company, based in
Guildford, Surrey, and he mostly drove service number 273 between
Guildford and Ewhurst. He lived in a caravan park in a nearby
village, Shamley Green.
Gibb
apparently did not conceal his past from his workmates, but he did
not dwell on it either, and he took to wearing a toupe, possibly to
reduce the chances of being recognised. He appeared to be comfortable
with becoming the “forgotten man” of English cricket. And that
might have been that. However, the author David Frith, editor of
Wisden Cricket Monthly, heard about his new life, and in the
mid-1970s contacted him, through his work manager. He and Gibb had a
few meetings, and Frith proposed collaborating on a biography. Gibb,
initially reluctant, agreed to talk about his life, with the proviso
that Frith interviewed him while he was driving his bus.
In
March 1977, a one-off Test match was held in Melbourne between
Australia and England, to commemorate the centenary of the first ever
Test match, which had taken place in the city in 1877. All living
cricketers who had played in an Ashes Test were invited to attend the
match, all expenses paid, and although Gibb had played in just one,
unsuccessful, Ashes game in 1946-7, he duly received his invitation.
He was at first reluctant to go, fearing that he might find all the
socialising overwhelming, but Frith persuaded him, driving him to the
airport. Gibb wore his toupe, and at first, Frith reported, even
former Essex teammates Trevor Bailey and Doug Insole failed to
recognise him. But once he had introduced himself, he enjoyed the
occasion.
After
this excursion, Gibb returned to his caravan and Frith prepared to
carry out some interviews with him. But the project was brought to an
end by Gibb’s sudden death. After he died, his diaries were
discovered, and Frith tracked down one of his sons to get permission
to publish them. Extracts were published in Wisden Cricket Monthly
in 1979 and 1980 – ice cream and all.
So
What Was Wrong With Paul Gibb?
David
Frith mentions Paul Gibb talking to Trevor Bailey and Doug Insole at
the Ashes centenary Test at the MCG. The comparison between the three
former team-mates is instructive. All went to good schools and read
history at Cambridge. They played together at Essex for several years
in the early 1950s, and all played for England. But Bailey and Insole
were amateurs (or at least shamateurs), while Gibb played for Essex
as a professional. Bailey and Insole both captained Essex, while Gibb
never captained a first-class team after being nominally in charge of
Yorkshire in Jamaica in 1936. Once their cricketing careers were
over, their fortunes varied drastically. Trevor Bailey became a
journalist, a businessman and a commentator on Test Match Special.
Insole also went into business
and was a prominent cricket administrator, becoming Chairman of
Selectors and later Chair of the Test and County Cricket Board (the
forerunner of today’s ECB). Both Bailey and Insole were awarded
CBEs. Meanwhile, Gibb was an
umpire, and ended his days as a bus driver.
Why
such a divergence in fortunes? Gibb had a privileged family
background and his younger brothers had successful professional
lives. But Gibb himself seemingly failed at every attempt at a
profession other than cricket, and his family life also fell apart.
Such
a ‘rakes progress’ has been noted in other successful sportsmen,
and the culprit has often been alcohol.
Was this Gibb’s weakness? He wrote in his diary that he found
socialising difficult “unless I have a good deal to drink”.
However, there is no evidence that Gibb was in
general a big drinker, and he
mainly coped
with social situations by avoiding them. If
he abused any substance, it was most likely sugar, with reports of
his consumption of ice cream, milk shakes, fruit salads and the like
verging on the pathological (and possibly contributing to his
comparatively early death). Perhaps Gibb was self-medicating with
sweet things, as a way of coping with life.
Gibb’s
personality appears pathological in other ways. He was shy and
awkward from a young age, and always
found social interaction difficult. He was absent minded and gauche,
and an easy target for his teammates’ practical jokes. We can
speculate that he was not well organised, and perhaps poor at
managing money (as evidenced by his undercharging the MCC for evening
dress). Overall he was not well equipped mentally for professional
careers such as teaching or retailing.
It
is striking that Gibb’s attempts at professional careers were
almost all
during the period either side of the war when he was either engaged
or married to Joyce. Clearly,
he was trying to keep his wife and sons in a way that befitted their
upper middle class status - his sons were both educated at boarding
schools. Pressure from his
and Joyce’s high-achieving families likely played a part as well.
As a young man he had been content to take Sir Julien Cahn’s
shilling as a cricketer for hire, and after his marriage broke down
he gave up the unequal struggle with his class and reduced himself to
the ranks as a professional cricketer, umpire – and bus driver.
Did
Gibb achieve contentment in this way? David Frith isn’t so sure. In
his book Frith’s Encounters
he describes probing Gibb as he drove him to the airport to catch the
plane to Australia:
“I
began to see into his troubled mind. He simply did not know where he
belonged. He revealed that he had flown Sunderlands for Coastal
Command during the war, which left him standing on cricket fields
after the war wondering what the devil he was doing there. What was
the point of it all? His marriage failed and he lost track of his two
sons”.
In
Gibb’s day, he would have been labelled as ‘odd’ or
‘eccentric’, and that would have been that. Today, however, we
have experienced the ‘psychiatrization of life’, where all human
quirks and variations are deemed to require a psychiatric label. And
the labels we are most likely to apply at the moment are Autistic
Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
ADHD. Both
could be made to fit Paul Gibb. He had a life long wariness and
avoidance of social situations that may suggest ASD, and we could
stretch to noting his need for order, as evidenced by his apparently
inflexible application of
the laws of cricket when
an umpire. David Frith’s
report that “he didn’t know where he belonged” echoes what many
people diagnosed with ASD say about themselves. His
persistent absent-mindedness and possible difficulties with managing
money might put him in the ADHD bracket as well. However, it depends
how valid one believes such labels to be. Recently, both ASD and ADHD
as currently conceived have come under attack from experts such as
Uta Frith (no relation to David) and MaxPemberton, who suggest that they have stretched too far from their
roots in child development and special needs, and have become a
comfort blanket for ‘worried well’ adults. We cannot of course
know whether Gibb himself would have welcomed either, or both
diagnoses.
For
me, the most interesting aspect of Paul Gibb’s story is that he
would only agree to being interviewed by David Frith if he could do
so while driving his bus. This fits with the rest of his life, in
that he only appeared
to feel comfortable and in control when he had
something in his hands, whether it be a cricket bat; a pair of
wicket-keeping gloves; the
laws of cricket (metaphorically); the controls of a Sunderland flying
boat,
or indeed the steering wheel of a bus. We could add to this list,
golf clubs, squash rackets,
tennis rackets – and even
tubs of ice cream. The social world was a confusing and tricky place
for Gibb, but when using his hands he could manage it. It is a shame
that he lived at a time when men of his class and upbringing were
expected to cope with sophisticated social situations with urbane
ease, and play games with an
amateur ethos. In
reality, Paul Gibb was from
birth a natural professional cricketer.
Sources
Used
Bartlett
K (1995) Paul Gibb: Famous Cricketers Series, no. 28.
Nottingham: Association of
Cricket Statisticians and Historians.
Chandler
M (2020) Paul Gibb: From Yorkshire Amateur to Essex
Professional. Cricketweb.net.
Frith
D (2014) Frith’s Encounters. Hove:
Von Krumm Publishing.
Wisden
Cricketers Almanack.
Wisden
Cricket Monthly.
Newspaper
articles at the British Newspaper Archive.
