Norman Gibbins enlisted in August 1914, the month Australia went to war. He’d fought before, in South Africa, and rose to the rank of captain in one of the colonial contingents. In 1914, he enlisted as a private – such was his haste to serve again. Gibbins was amongst the first ashore at Gallipoli, and there he was commissioned for bravery in the field. He then went on to fight at Fromelles, Australia’s first major engagement in France.

Fromelles was a pointless diversion during the battle of the Somme; a case study of the Great War’s callous incompetence. Over 5000 Australians (and a comparable number of British troops) were killed, wounded or taken prisoner in less than twenty-four hours. The Australian casualties in a single day exceeded the combined Australian tolls for the Boer War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War – and the attack failed in all its objectives.

The battle plan for Fromelles was bungled from the outset. A preliminary bombardment failed to destroy enemy machine guns or artillery, but gave every notice an attack was imminent. Men were told to advance across open ground under heavy fire and take the third line of the German defences. But there was no ‘third line’ at Fromelles, just a series of drainage ditches cut through the sodden fields of Flanders. The men under Norman Gibbins’ command were stranded in no-man’s-land, cut to pieces by ‘grazing fire’ sweeping over the wheat fields. To this day every spring rain brings their bones to the surface.

In the frenzied heat of battle, Australian engineers dug a new trench towards the German lines, hoping to support the attack or at least bring back the wounded. Soon the trench was battered by shells, awash with mud, and choked with the dead and wounded. Men called it ‘the butcher’s shop’.

Gibbins held this trench to the very end, waiting until the last hopeless minute before retiring. ‘There was no braver man in the action that day,’ one report reads, ‘Capt. Gibbins fought his way back with a pistol in one hand and a bomb in the other.’1 Norman Gibbins refused to leave his wounded men behind. He was shot through the forehead on reaching the Australian parapet.

Norman’s sister Violet learned of his death several days later. ‘He was inexpressibly dear to me,’ she wrote, ‘and made me his next-of-kin solely and absolutely.’ She pleaded for his letters, his medals, and ‘all the precious personal belongings which may have been removed from his dear body on the battlefield’. No one, and certainly not a mother, ‘estranged’ from him, had greater claim than her:

These and all the honour and glory of his supreme sacrifice are mine by my brother’s oft-expressed wishes and as a recognition of the part I have played in his life. We have been all-in-all to each other, since the earliest childhood. My brother was the noblest and most just of men.2

No one had greater claim than her: Violet insisted that her relationship with Norman was much closer than that of her mother. Usually the ‘privilege’ of choosing an epitaph would fall to the mother as next of kin. P03788.003 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Violet continued to honour her brother all her life. She chose the inscription for his grave: ‘With my soul’s homage and my heart’s utmost love to my beloved and deeply mourned brother’; she entrusted his letters to the Australian War Memorial so the nation would never forget his sacrifice; and she took it upon herself to decorate the graves of soldiers every Anzac Day.

So the nation would never forget: Violet Gibbins with C.E.W. Bean, the first Director of the Australian War Memorial. Both Gibbins and Bean were in the business of remembrance. The two worked together in the interwar period, Bean’s daughter, Joyce, was sent to Miss Gibbins’ school and Norman’s papers were bequeathed to the Memorial. P03788.002 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Like many women of her generation, Violet Gibbins took up teaching in the 1920s – the war had emptied the classrooms of many young men who might well have taught in them. At Epping, just outside Sydney, and then at Leura, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, Violet established private boarding schools, offering ‘moral, physical and intellectual training’3 to ladies of a certain class.

Every Anzac Day eve, Principal Gibbins and her charges would work into the night fashioning beautiful wreaths, a yard in diameter, to pile high on soldiers’ graves and memorials. ‘Well!’ she wrote to Dr Mary Booth, founder of the Anzac Fellowship of Women,

The girls overwhelmed me with their choice of flowers. The School was full of them. Mothers sent all the flowers they could pick and people visited the School to see them. [We] sat up until 2 and 3 o’clock in the mornings of April 24th and 25th. I was making large wreaths of flowers each night . . .  I hope you did not mind the laurel wreath being sent to the Soldiers’ Club. The girls begged me to make it and place it where my brother’s comrades might see it. Anzac Memorial was quite covered in flowers so there was no room for it there.4

Anzac Memorial was quite covered in flowers: Some of the tributes laid at Sydney’s Cenotaph would have been fashioned by Miss Gibbins’ ‘girls’. Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1928 courtesy National Library of Australia.

She did this for over a decade after her brother’s death. And then she established a scholarship, which she called ‘a living memorial’, bearing Norman’s name.

Miss Gibbins continued to teach young ladies until her death in 1958. Osborne College, a boarding school, was named after Osborne Naval College in England and run along naval lines, imbued with naval traditions and naval discipline. The girls dressed every day in bright blue uniforms; they marched, drilled and saluted. Teaching rooms were named after ships in the Royal Navy – Sirius, Sydney and Nelson. The school’s bathroom was dubbed Neptune and the sickbay Dreadnought. Miss Gibbins was addressed as the Admiral.

Violet Gibbins educated her young women to be ‘fine, strong, sensible types’.5 And one must pity any spirited young lady who defied her iron code of discipline. Miss Gibbins believed in King and Country, Australia and Empire, and raised three generations of a nation’s youth with those ideals in mind. They must be ‘willing’, she said, ‘to serve their country in any capacity’. As had that brother of hers, ‘the noblest and most just of men’, buried in the cold earth of Flanders.

An iron code of discipline: Violet Gibbins dressed in naval style uniform. She governed her schools according to a military code of conduct. P04253.001 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Norman Gibbins’ service dossier NAA: B2455, GIBBINS N; his Red Cross Wounded and Missing file AWM 1DRL/0428; and the Gibbins Papers AWM PR02053. For further reading on Violet Gibbins (or Gibbons, as she often went by), see Robyn Hanstock ‘“In the Spirit of the Navy”: Violet Gibbons and Osborne Ladies’ College, Blackheath’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 91, no. 1, June 2005, pp. 29–47. We also gratefully acknowledge the research of John Low on the life of Violet Gibbins. For a perceptive study of women’s experience of bereavement see Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

1 Red Cross Wounded and Missing file AWM 1DRL/0428 Captain Norman Gibbins.

2 Violet Gibbins to Base Records Melbourne, 11 August 1916, NAA: B2455, GIBBINS N.

3 This was the philosophy she pursued before embarking on business ventures in New South Wales, advertisement for Cambridge Ladies’ College, Brisbane Courier, 13 January 1904.

4 Violet Gibbins to Dr Mary Booth, undated letter (April 1921), Anzac Fellowship of Women Papers, NLA MS2864.

5 Cairns Post, 28 August 1935.