~ Chapter Twelve ~
In His Brother's Footsteps

Stephen Charles Gisby, the second son of Charlie and Amy, was born in October 1894, two years after George and about the time when Charlie gave up his life as a fisherman to work full-time as a fruiterer and greengrocer in the shop at Market Street.

            In the year of Stephen’s birth, Queen Victoria opened the Manchester Ship Canal and Docks.  Her good friend, Lord Rosebery, embarked on his short-lived and ineffectual term as the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister.  And along the eastern borders of the distant Ottoman Empire, in an act that would be repeated at intervals for the next quarter of a century, the slaughter of their Armenian neighbours was begun by the Turks, the soon-to-be sworn enemies of Britain whom Stephen was destined to encounter in another conflict in another far-flung land.

            Stephen’s schooldays, like those of his big brother, would have been brightened by the exciting stories to emerge from South Africa, where the Boer War was being fought out on the vast, sun-scorched plains of the Transvaal.  The national outpouring of grief that followed the passing of Queen Victoria in January 1901 is also bound to have left an impression on Steve’s young mind.  The momentous impact of the latter event in Britain and elsewhere is perhaps best illustrated by this extract from On the Death of Queen Victoria, the famous speech by Sir Wilfred Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada, which he delivered to his Parliament shortly after Victoria’s funeral:
             There is wailing and lamentation among the savage and barbarian peoples of her vast empire, in the wigwams of our own Indian tribes, in the huts of the colored races of Africa and of India, to whom she was at all times the Great Mother, the living impersonation of majesty and benevolence. Aye, and there is mourning also, genuine and unaffected, in the farmhouses of South Africa, which have been lately and still are devastated by war, for it is a fact that above the clang of arms, above the many angers engendered by the war, the name of Queen Victoria was always held in high respect, even by those who are fighting her troops, as a symbol of justice, and perhaps her kind hand was much relied upon when the supreme hour of reconciliation should come.

             Undoubtedly we may find in history instances where death has caused perhaps more passionate outbursts of grief, but it is impossible to find instances where death has caused so universal, so sincere, so heartfelt an expression of sorrow. In the presence of these many evidences of grief which come not only from her own dominions, but from all parts of the globe; in the presence of so many tokens of admiration, where it is not possible to find a single discordant note; in the presence of the immeasurable void caused by the death of Queen Victoria, it is not too much to say that the grave has just closed upon one of the great characters of history.
            While it is unlikely that the six year-old Steve would have been overly touched by the “universal sorrow” described by Sir Wilfred, it is certain that he would have been deeply shocked by the awful death of his mother five years later.  Still suffering that loss, he was probably as resentful as George was to the association between his father and Elizabeth Holmes and to the family’s subsequent move from Market Street to Addington Street.

            In 1911, at the age of seventeen and still living at Addington Street, Steve was employed as a bread baker, an occupation, like that of pastry cook, which would have been common in the kitchens of Margate’s grand hotels.  We’d like to think that he worked alongside George in the same establishment, perhaps even assisting his brother and learning from him the skills required of a pâtissier.

            While that may be conjecture, we do know for sure that Steve followed in his big brother’s footsteps, enlisting in The Buffs as soon as the call for volunteers in “the war to end all wars” was raised in 1914.  But Steve’s War was to take a different course from George’s and was to have an entirely different outcome.