Philip Gibbs

Sir Philip Gibbs
Gibbs (date unknown)
Born	Philip Armand Hamilton Gibbs (1877-05-01)1 May 1877 London, England, UK
Died	10 March 1962(1962-03-10) (aged 84) Godalming, Surrey, UK
Occupation	Journalist, novelist, memoirist
Nationality	British
Period	1899–1957
Relatives	A. Hamilton Gibbs (brother) Cosmo Hamilton (brother)

Sir Philip Armand Hamilton Gibbs (1 May 1877 – 10 March 1962) 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 (and growing) 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.

His first attempt at semi-fiction was published in 1909 as The Street of Adventure, which recounted the story of the official Liberal Party newspaper Tribune, founded in 1906 and failing spectacularly in 1908. The paper was founded at vast expense by Franklin Thomasson, MP for Leicester from 1906-10. A man of decidedly liberal views, Gibbs took an interest in popular movements of the time, including the suffragettes, publishing a book on the British women's suffrage movement in 1910. With tensions growing in Europe in the years immediately preceding 1914, Gibbs repeatedly expressed a belief that war could be avoided between the Entente and Central Powers. In the event, war broke out in August 1914 and Gibbs secured an early journalistic posting to the Western Front.