Philip Gibbs

Who was Philip Gibbs?

Sir Philip Armand Hamilton Gibbs was an English journalist and prolific author of books who served as one of five official British reporters during the First World War. Two of his siblings were also writers, A. Hamilton Gibbs and Cosmo Hamilton, as was his own son, Anthony. Gibbs was a Roman Catholic.

The son of a civil servant, Gibbs was born in Kensington, London, his name then being registered as Philip Amande Thomas. He received a home education and determined at an early age to develop a career as a writer. His debut article was published in 1894 in the Daily Chronicle; five years later he published the first of many books, Founders of the Empire. He was given the post of literary editor at Alfred Harmsworth's leading tabloid format newspaper the Daily Mail. He subsequently worked on other prominent newspapers including the Daily Express.

The Times, in 1940 referring to 1909, credited Gibbs for "bursting the bubble with one cable to the London newspaper he was representing". The bubble in question was the September 1939 claim by American explorer Frederick Cook to have reached the North Pole in April 1908. Gibbs didn't trust Cook's "romantic" impressions of his journey into the ice.