Biography
Charles Sydney Gibbes was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire, England on 19 January 1876. He was the youngest surviving son of John Gibbs, a bank manager, and Mary Ann Elizabeth Fisher, the daughter of a watchmaker. The fate of a younger son often being to enter the church, at the behest of his father, he took the Moral Sciences Tripos at St John's College, Cambridge, gaining a BA in 1899. Whilst at The University of Cambridge, Charles Sydney added the `e' to the spelling of his own name. He entered upon theological studies in Cambridge and Salisbury in preparation for holy orders but realised that he had no religious vocation.
Having some talent at languages, he decided to teach English abroad. In 1901 he went to Saint Petersburg, Russia, as tutor to the Shidlovsky family and then the Soukanoff family. He was then appointed to the staff of the Imperial School of Law, and by 1907 he was qualified as vice-president and committee member of the Saint Petersburg Guild of English Teachers. He came to the attention of the Empress Alexandra and in 1908 was invited as a tutor to improve the accents of the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana; and subsequently Maria and Anastasia. In 1913 he became tutor to Tsarevich Alexei. The children referred to him as Sydney Ivanovich.
Gibbes' career as court tutor continued until the February Revolution of 1917, after which the Imperial family was imprisoned in Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. He was in Saint Petersburg at the time, and immediately after returning to Tsarskoe Selo was proscribed from seeing the family, only being allowed to recover his possessions after the family was transported to the house of the Governor-General of Tobolsk in Siberia. Gibbes voluntarily accompanied the family, arriving in the village in October 1917 shortly before the Provisional Government fell to the Bolsheviks. In May 1918 the Imperial family was moved to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, and neither Gibbes; French tutor Pierre Gilliard; nor most other servants were allowed to enter. The servants stayed in the railway carriage which had brought them to the city.
This carriage became part of a refugee train on 3 June and the tutors were in Tyumen but returned to Yekaterinburg after the murder of the Imperial family on the night of 16/17 July 1918 and the fall of the city to the White Army on 25 July. Gibbes and Gilliard were early visitors to the scene of the executions at the Ipatiev House and were both involved in the subsequent enquiries carried out by Ivan Alexandrovich Sergeiev and by Nicholas Alexievich Sokolov.
As the Bolsheviks took Perm and closed in on Yekaterinburg, enquiries were abandoned and Gibbes and Gilliard left for Omsk. Gibbes was appointed as a secretary to the British High Commission in Siberia in January 1919, retreating eastwards as Siberia was captured by the Red Army. He was briefly employed at the British Embassy in Beijing and then became an assistant in the Chinese Maritime Customs in Manchuria.
There was a large White Russian refugee community in Harbin and it was there in 1922 that he met an orphan, Georges Paveliev, whom he adopted. He established George in 1934 on a fruit farm at Stourmouth House in East Stourmouth in Kent.
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