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.
