Robert Gibbings (1889–1958)

Ah well now, … this one, my third, was a wee bit disappointing. Robert had lulled me into believing I was about to settle down with one of his quiet and charming river books. Instead we get a wild, roaring romp around County Cork which it seems is crowded with rumbustious drunks, ghosts and the "fairies", the little people.

He certainly proves that he, along with everybody else he meets on his return home, was ”inoculated with gramophone needles” – sure, and a bit like m’self – or had snogged with the Blarney Stone. The reader is treated to histories and tales, supported with Gibbings’ usual glorious woodcuts as he wanders, tramps, and hurries around his home region. The Lee itself (in Cork) makes no appearance for thirty chapters and he barely gets his feet wet before he is again among the ghosts and changelings.

It is still a charmer of a book of course, certainly proving that whilst you cannot get the “Oirish” out of this author if you prefer his river books, you do need to get the author out of Ireland and back on the Thames or the Seine.… (més)

”If ever there was a saint on earth before me it was my father.” You do have to be careful reading this delightful yarner, although generally he holds to the truth with his history and research. Gibbings was, at the time of writing this book, already appearing on early television and with a war and several careers behind him, was now a senior lecturer at Reading University. He had travelled extensively …”over 50,000 miles on salt water” … when he decided to build a small punt and float down the upper Thames, from source to … well, back to his old home again as he fished out at Chelsea.

As he drifts, he muses and writes and produces those startlingly good woodcuts of his, and he looks and listens. From his gentle floating then we get this quiet charming book that wanders with his Celtic wit from bees to Greek fables. He actually packs a microscope aboard to inspect the smallest life he can find in the river’s mud.

Reading Gibbings on nature and the plants, insects and wildlife he discovers is like listening to one of the Bartrams, the great American father and son botanists, perhaps Puc-puggee himself but with his 18th century English updated into a more modern tongue. On hunting and big game fishing – both pursuits of which he was guilty of following when younger … ”By all means, Gibbings says, let us kill for food. I am even in favour of a mild form of cannibalism when necessary”!

There are several other touches of his “Oirish” wit among the clear facts of river wildlife, history of the villages and characters and several cheerfully suspicious yarns that must also be true, for, as he says “did I not just invent it myself?”… (més)