~ Chapter One ~
Birth of a Patriarch
When Charles George Gisby was coaxed, squalling, into this world in the third week of June 1859, Queen Victoria had already reigned for more than two decades. With both the elation of victory in the Crimea and the horrors of that “first modern war” still fresh in the minds of Victoria’s subjects, her Empire had attained the height of its imperial power. And an aged Lord Palmerston had barely begun his second term as her Government’s Prime Minister.
As was the case with many of his Gisby forebears in East Kent, stretching back two hundred years or more, Charles was born within a stone’s throw of the sight and sound and smell of the sea. And like those forebears, his beginnings were modest, his birthplace being a house up a narrow lane in Margate called Alkali Row, which was then (and still is today) no more than an insignificant gap between the grand facades of the buildings on King Street sweeping down to the harbour.
By 1859, Margate had burgeoned from a quiet fishing town into a leading seaside resort. Victorian holidaymakers from London were flocking by both steamboat and the recently introduced railway to enjoy the sandy beaches and balmy sea air. Construction of the latest attraction for those visitors, the engineering wonder of Birch’s Margate Pier, had been completed only three years earlier.
When T. S. Eliot was convalescing in a bustling and prosperous Margate in 1921, he described what he observed on Margate Sands in what was to become his most famous poem, The Wasteland. He wrote:
As was the case with many of his Gisby forebears in East Kent, stretching back two hundred years or more, Charles was born within a stone’s throw of the sight and sound and smell of the sea. And like those forebears, his beginnings were modest, his birthplace being a house up a narrow lane in Margate called Alkali Row, which was then (and still is today) no more than an insignificant gap between the grand facades of the buildings on King Street sweeping down to the harbour.
By 1859, Margate had burgeoned from a quiet fishing town into a leading seaside resort. Victorian holidaymakers from London were flocking by both steamboat and the recently introduced railway to enjoy the sandy beaches and balmy sea air. Construction of the latest attraction for those visitors, the engineering wonder of Birch’s Margate Pier, had been completed only three years earlier.
When T. S. Eliot was convalescing in a bustling and prosperous Margate in 1921, he described what he observed on Margate Sands in what was to become his most famous poem, The Wasteland. He wrote:
On Margate Sands
I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing. |
Had he visited the town some sixty years earlier, Eliot’s vision of the working-class inhabitants striving to make a living in the midst of Margate’s prosperity would have been no different. He would have witnessed the same “broken fingernails of dirty hands” and the same “humble people who expect nothing”.
Charles Gisby was not born into Margate’s prosperity; his birthright was that of Eliot’s “humble people”. But in a lifetime spanning nearly eighty years, he would rise above his lowly origins. He would become a fisherman, a shopkeeper and a businessman. He would serve in the defence of his country during the Great War. He would meet and marry two striking women, and suffer the dramatic loss of one of them. And he would father four fine sons, one not so fine and a daughter. His story and the stories of his five sons are narrated in this book.
Charles Gisby was not born into Margate’s prosperity; his birthright was that of Eliot’s “humble people”. But in a lifetime spanning nearly eighty years, he would rise above his lowly origins. He would become a fisherman, a shopkeeper and a businessman. He would serve in the defence of his country during the Great War. He would meet and marry two striking women, and suffer the dramatic loss of one of them. And he would father four fine sons, one not so fine and a daughter. His story and the stories of his five sons are narrated in this book.