Colonel John George Nathaniel Gibbes (30 March 17875 December 1873) was a British army officer who emigrated to Australia in 1834 on his appointment as Collector of Customs for the Colony of New South Wales, an appointment which gave him a seat on the New South Wales Legislative Council and which he held for 25 years.
In his capacity as head of the New South Wales Department of Customs, Colonel Gibbes was the colonial government's principal accumulator of domestic-sourced revenue − prior to the huge economic stimulus provided by the Australian gold rushes of the 1850s − through the collection of import duties and other taxes liable on ship-borne cargoes. Thus, he played a significant role in the transformation of the City of Sydney (now Australia's biggest State capital) from a convict-based settlement into a prosperous, free enterprise-based port replete with essential government infrastructure.
Gibbes was forced to retire from the Council in 1855 and from his post as Collector of Customs for New South Wales in 1859. In 1844 he persuaded the Governor of NSW, Sir George Gipps, to begin construction of the Customs House, Sydney on Circular Quay in response to the port's growing volume of maritime trade. This major building project also doubled as an unemployment relief measure for stonemasons and laborers during an economic depression which was afflicting the colony at the time. The new Customs House replaced inadequate departmental accommodation for Gibbes and his team of officers in The Rocks area of Sydney.
Gibbes resided in a series of historically and architecturally important houses during his time in New South Wales, including the since demolished Palladian-style Point Piper House, Wotonga House (now part of Admiralty House on Kirribilli Point), Greycliffe House (overlooking Shark Beach in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse), and after his disgrace Yarralumla Homestead (now the site of Australia's Government House, Canberra).
Parentage and Education Gibbes's parentage was long unknown. He was a bigamist about whom much was invented. The Australian Dictionary of Biography, I (1966) 439, said that he was 'born in London on 30 March 1787 the son of John Gibbes, planter, of Barbados and later of London. Rev. D. Geary contributed to his education in part in Dejether, North Wales', but the Dictionary provides no sources and these people (if they existed) cannot be identified.Anthony Camp, Royal Mistresses and Bastards: fact and fiction: 1714-1936 (London, 2007) 224-227. Gibbes is assumed to be the John Gibbs, born 30 March 1786 (sic), who appears without parentage in the published register of Merchant Taylors' School as having been educated in the school, 1795-99. A flattering piece published in Australia in 1847 said that he was born in London in 1787 'the son of the late John Gibbes (nephew of Sir Philip Gibbes, Bart, of Jackby, in Oxfordshire), formerly of Bardaboes, and afterwards of London'The Collector of Customs', in Heads of the People, vol. 1, no. 26, 2 October 1847. but the Baronet had no nephew of that name.
Although Gibbes claimed to have married Elizabeth Davies in London in 1808, prior to the births of their first two children, as 'John Gibbes of St Paul, Covent Garden', he did not marry her, at St Andrew, Holborn, until 23 May 1814, and her parentage has not been ascertained. They had six further children, but whilst at Quebec, Canada, in 1818, Gibbes married there bigamously on 22 May 1818, to Mary Ann Bell, daughter of Matthew Bell (1769-184) a wealthy businessman. Apparently, he left her the following year and, not being prosecuted, returned to Elizabeth Davies.'Augustus Gibbes: squire of Yarralumla' by Stephen Gibbes in The Ancestral Searcher, vol. 19, no. 2, page 72. In a 'Journal in Retrospect' written around 1899 and based on his diaries, Stewart Marjoribanks Mowle (1822-1908), who knew Gibbes in Sydney and at Yarralumla in 1838-51, wrote of him as 'the reputed son of the Duke of York'.NLA MS 1042. This belief took hold in Australia and in 1996 a descendant, Stephen Gibbes, wrote in the article just cited, that Gibbes's mother was Agnes Gibbes (1761-1843), the unmarried youngest daughter of Sir Philip Gibbes (1731-1815), and said that she met the Duke of York in Germany, he being in service on the Continent in 1786-7. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam took up and repeated the story in an address at the Old Parliament House in Canberra in 1994.'Our own illegitimate royalty, in The Canberra Times, 13 September 1994, page 12. However, the story lacked any contemporary sources.
In 2020 the theatre historian Terry Jenkins noted that Gibbes, his wife and son, were mentioned in the will of Mary or Maria Gibbs (born Mary Logan), the mistress of George Colman the Younger; however, when acting from the Spring of 1787 onwards, she called herself Mary or Maria Gibbs. She left her gold watch to her son Colonel Gibbes, her diamond snake ring to his wife Elizabeth, and her best gold chain to her grandson George Harvey Gibbes.Terry Jenkins, 'The true facts of Colonel John George Nathaniel Gibbes' in Traces: uncovering Australia's past, no. 13 (Melbourne, December 2020). She was the sister of the Duke of York's mistress Elizabeth or Eliza Cary or Carey.Anthony Camp, Royal Mistresses and Bastards (2007) 244-5.Terry Jenkins, 'Mrs Carey (c.17773-1848): the other mistress of the Duke of York', in Genealogists' Magazine, vol. 33, no. 19 (June 2021) 354-60. The identity of 'Mr Gibbs' remains unknown.
Military service
Gibbes filled a vacancy with the 40th Regiment of Foot upon joining the army as an ensign in 1804John Philippart, The Royal Military Calendar (London, 1821) volume V, page 380 and was promoted to lieutenant the following year. He was made captain in the 4th Garrison Battalion in 1806 before transferring to the 85th Regiment of Foot in 1808 and then the 69th Regiment of Foot in 1811. He was granted brevet rank as major in 1819, as lieutenant-colonel in 1837 and colonel in 1851, retiring from the Army on 11 November that year. Early on, he participated in some fierce fighting during the wars against Napoleon and the French Emperor's allies. He saw action firstly in South America, where he participated in the siege and capture of the fortified city of Montevideo and the follow-up assault on Buenos Aires, which degenerated into a savage sequence of street-fight battles between the British redcoats and the ultimately victorious Spanish defenders of the city.
In 1809, Captain Gibbes was called in from staff officer duties in Southern England to take part in the Walcheren campaign, but an alarming number of British soldiers collapsed and died in their camps from a virulent form of malarial fever that they had contracted after the bombardment and capture of the strategic town of Flushing. Gibbes was one of the disease's victims. He was evacuated back to England to recuperate on half-pay. Once Gibbes had recovered his health sufficiently, he was reinstated to the army's active-service list, and served as a staff officer at stations, chiefly in Berkshire and Yorkshire, obtaining the rank of brigade major. In 1815, following Waterloo, Gibbes went back on the half-pay list and it was during this period that he contracted a bigamous marriage in Quebec with the daughter of a Canadian industrialist named Matthew Bell.Stephen Gibbes, 'Augustus Gibbes: squire of Yarralumla' in The Ancestral Searcher, vol. 19, no. 2 (June 1996), page 72.
Customs service
In 1819, Gibbes was appointed Collector of Customs at the wealthy Caribbean sugar port of Falmouth, Jamaica, and served there until 1827, drawing a salary of about £1500. While in Jamaica, Gibbes and his growing family lived in a plantation house inland from the town of Falmouth, where census returns show him owning livestock and several slaves. Gibbes enjoyed life in the West Indies but ill-health, probably a recurrence of malaria brought on by Jamaica's tropical climate, forced him to leave the island in 1827.
Back in England the family lived for a short time at Fulham Lodge in West London which had formerly belonged to a mistress of the Duke of York and Albany. From here he applied successfully to the Board of Customs for a transfer to the collectorship at the North Sea trading and fishing port of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. He occupied this post until 1833, working to improve the physical conditions and work practices at what he discovered, on arrival, to be a somewhat rundown red-brick customs house on Great Yarmouth's main quay. He strengthened, too, the law-enforcement partnership which existed with the naval coast guard, to counteract smuggling along 'his' section of the Norfolk-Suffolk coast. In 1831, he and Mrs Gibbes saw their eldest child, George Harvey Gibbes, married to a local East Anglian girl.
Nonetheless, Gibbes decided to leave England permanently and in 1833 the Board of Customs accepted his application for the well-paid post of Collector of Customs at the Port of Sydney in the Colony of New South Wales agreeing to an exchange arrangement with his counterpart there. As Collector of Customs he had a seat on the Legislative Council and soon after his arrival in Sydney on the Resource on 19 April 1834, he was sworn in by Governor Richard Bourke. As a Legislative Councillor, he served on a number of maritime-related boards and parliamentary committees, his most important contribution being to recommend the introduction of gaslight into Sydney. The subsequent establishment of the Australian Gas Light Company at Darling Harbour during the 1840s transformed the lifestyle of Sydney's 19th-century residents in terms of street-lighting and domestic illumination, and, later, gas cooking.
When Gibbes arrived in Sydney in 1834, he held the rank of major. In 1837, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and then to full colonel shortly before his retirement from the army in 1851. Initially, he and his family leased Henrietta Villa, also known as the Naval Villa, on Sydney's scenic Point Piper. In 1843–44, they moved to "Wotonga", a stone house designed and erected by Gibbes on Kirribilli Point and now forming part of Admiralty House. (Point Piper House was torn down in the 1850s and the site redeveloped.)The Book of Sydney Suburbs, Compiled by Frances Pollen, Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1990, Published in Australia , page 206
Physically, Colonel Gibbes was a compact, spare person with grey eyes and receding light brown hair. He looked taller than he was because he walked with an erect military carriage. However, the burdens of public office increasingly irked the Colonel and he sometimes became prone to angry outbursts. The Australian Dictionary of Biography said of him:
"As collector of Customs at a salary of £1000 Gibbes found his department inadequate to cope with the growing demand of shipping and trade and he constantly appealed for more and better paid staff. He carried out his duties with more zeal than discretion and, when his suspicions were aroused [about possible smuggling activity], he seized whole cargoes which often led to tedious litigation. His accounts were always confused because of inefficient clerks and often showed him liable for surcharges which were removed only after long and acrimonious correspondence with the Board of Customs in London. All these irritations frayed his temper and he gained a reputation for irascibility."