Monk Gibbon - Career

Career

He was educated at St. Columba's College, Dublin and Keble College, Oxford, but after only one term he volunteered for the army, serving as an officer in France during the First World War until invalided out in 1915. He became an avid pacifist after his experiences of war, and left Ireland to teach English in Switzerland. He also taught in England before returning to Ireland, not retiring until he was in his 1980s.

As a British Officer on leave in Ireland, he was involved in the Easter Rising of 1916. His book Inglorious Soldier gives a first-hand, and one of the most detailed accounts of the shooting of the pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. His papers present lively and intimate accounts of the famous Irish writers whom he knew personally, such as William Butler Yeats, George Moore (novelist), Edith Anna Somerville and Katharine Tynan.

At his father's church, Lily Yeats, sister of W. B. Yeats, was a parishioner.. There was also a family relationship: Gibbon and the Yeats family were cousins. There was no love lost between the poets Gibbon and Yeats, however; and the biography Gibbon wrote was rather hostile. Yeats in return said of Gibbon: "Monk Gibbon is one of the three people in Dublin whom I dislike... Because he is argumentative!" In 1963, Gibbon collaborated in the editing and publication of Michael Farrell's posthumous novel Thy Tear's Might Cease.