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HISTORY |
Percival William Gibson
1893-1970
By Dr Robert Moore and Gerald T Rayner
Nature has been decidedly frugal with the Commonwealth Caribbean in terms of
physical size. With eleven sovereign states and four colonial dependencies the
region constitutes a very small fraction of the earth�s landmass. And its
population, some 5,000,000 in all, underlines this physical modesty. But by way
of compensation, nature and history have lavished nonmaterial gifts on the
area�s people and their cup of talent runneth over. In many fields � politics,
law, medicine, scholarship, administration, international affairs, creative
writing, cricket, music �West Indians have proved that they are no strangers to
the top. Indeed, three Nobel prizes have gone to them in the last 38 years. And
their diaspora, mostly in North America and Britain but also spread across six
continents have made outstanding contributions in crucial areas to their host
societies.
Like his island home, Jamaica, and its region, Percival William Gibson was small
of physical stature but gigantic of personality and purpose. He was born in 1893
to a lower middle class, Africandescended family of Anglican persuasion, where
talent was more abundant than money. A scholarship took him to a Jesuit
high-school � his family could not afford his secondary education � and there he
performed with enviable distinction. Paradoxically, this Anglican youth
consistently topped the school in Roman Catholic catechism while developing a
tenacious enthusiasm for his own church. His mentor, in his late teens, was Enos
Nuttall, Archbishop of the West Indies, who had all the administrative gifts of
a superb governor-general with a tremendous spiritual charisma to boot. His
passion for education was to become Percival Gibson�s own.
Entering St.Peter�s College, the Jamaican Anglican seminary, in 1912, he set
himself to acquire credentials commensurate with his appetite for theology. His
three degrees, BD, BA honours and BD honours, were gained externally from London
University largely by self-study, an achievement sufficiently impressive for
others to emulate. Over time, Percival Gibson made himself Jamaica�s most
learned Anglican cleric without a day�s oncampus university experience.
With an omnivorous mind and strong Evangelical convictions he was priested in
1918 and the next year became curate of St.George�s Church in Kingston,
Jamaica�s capital. With fire on his tongue and public and private morality on
his mind, his Sunday night sermons attracted large crowds ready to be inspired
or chastened by this prophetic young priest whose head could barely be seen
above the pulpit.
But a future larger than a parish ministry awaited him. The then Bishop of
Jamaica, in 1925, founded a downtown school for city boys and appointed
Percival, aged 32, to run it. A wise move, as the young headmaster had already
got groups of city youth hooked on drama, music-making and debating. The
school�s beginnings were distinctly modest (49 students and 3 teachers) and some
feared that modesty would remain its distinguishing feature. They need not have
worried. With Percival�s spacious vision and his knack of persuading others to
share it, his electrifying dynamism and a resource-filled mind, an
inconsequential academy was not in the cards. His appointment, too, was a bold
stroke. Principals of Jamaican secondary schools were white almost by definition
but Percival Gibson was there to demonstrate that the definition had had its
day.
The school, Kingston College, was created primarily to provide poor black boys
with a secondary education. The end of slavery in the 1830s did not mean the
beginning of a time of opportunity for the vast majority of black Jamaicans.
They were still shackled by a social system that, with some notable exceptions,
treated them more as pairs of hands than possessors of minds � even up to the
1920s. Let them have primary education but let them leave the secondary schools
to their betters� that was the attitude fairly common among the white and
light-skinned elites.
Percival Gibson saw his school as a remedy for this social deformity. He was convinced that
there was a treasury of untapped talent among the black working and lower middle
classes. Kingston College would nurture that talent and so take to another level
the uncompleted process of full Emancipation begun in 1838. �K.C� as the school
became known, admitted any boy, black or not, born in wedlock or not, who could
satisfy the entrance requirements and pay the affordable fees.
He was, of course, swimming against the stream, something that Percival Gibson
seemed created to do. Indeed, he was Victorian in his belief that the more
daunting the challenge, the more compelling a Christian should find it.
Victorian too, was his relish in tackling nettlesome tasks, and his dedication
to afternoon tea. But he was Edwardian as well, especially in his preference for
urbane etiquette and decorous formality. Jamaican he certainly was in his
feistiness, his intolerance of cant, his flair for the dramatic and his cheeky
humour always an arresting contrast to his magisterial personality. A superb and
spell-binding orator in the best West Indian tradition, he could give lucidity
to complex ideas and maturity to fledging ones. Caricaturing society�s
absurdities with creative impertinence came readily to him. And his greatness as
an educator lay in his unswerving belief that, given the right opportunity, poor
black Jamaicans would prove themselves equal to the best of the British.
In the headmaster�s reckoning, KC would be more than just an equalizer of
opportunity. It was dedicated to the making of well-balanced Christian
gentlemen, at home in the arts, the sciences and the humanities, au fait with
the world as it is but committed to the world as it ought to be. His boys
(�periwinkles� he liked to call them) were expected to be mentally agile, in
levity as well as gravity, and physically nimble, their field-sports being as
important as their studies and almost as important as their prayers. A sound
mind in a sound body was their aim. And they should show their love of God not
just by their worship but by their compassion for the under-privileged, their
active concern for justice in society, their critical love of Jamaica. Above all
by their incorruptibility in public life.
The decade of the school�s foundation was the �Roaring Twenties� when public
morality in many countries was fragile and scandals in high places were common,
even in colonial Jamaica. Percival Gibson saw his school as a nursery for
guardians of public probity. He expected KC�s boys to become leaders of society
at critical levels, reaching positions where their Christian integrity could set
the tone for the institutions they served.
The era in which the school found its feet was an agitated one. The raucous
1920s were followed by the wrenching 1930s, what with the Great Depression, the
Nazi and Fascist insanities and Stalin�s glowering Soviet regime. Empires and
their ideologies were beginning to be questioned before 1939 and the Second
World War set their dissolution in train. Many in Jamaica found this development
exciting, some found it unsettling and others found it unpredictable.
All this deepened Percival Gibson�s appreciation of St. Augustine, the 4th
century African Bishop of Hippo. His experience of uncertainty after the
collapse of the Roman Empire in the West prompted him to pen his classic work
�The City Of God�. Here he told Roman citizens, devastated by the ruin of their
apparently inviolable world, that no empire, not even a Christian one, was
eternal. Christian security could only be found in the City Of God, that
heavenly reality of which the church was an imperfect earthly foretaste.
Citizens of that eternal City should be prepared to abide the passing of old
political orders and the whirlpool uncertainty that often accompanies the
creation of new ones.
With the great Church Father as his mentor, KC�s headmaster considered the
school�s Anglican culture as just the thing to prepare young men for an era of
escalating change, whether leading to a brave new world or not. That is why so
much of the school�s activity was devoted to the development of Christian
character �an inner stability and strength equipping young adults to live and
work, productively and virtuously, amid flux and fluidity. Not surprisingly,
when in 1947 the school chapel was completed it was dedicated to St. Augustine
of Hippo. His name had become a household word to the students by that time.
With its defiant Latin motto �Fortis cadere cedere non potest���The brave may
fall but never yield� the school set out in 1925 to make a name for itself in
the competitive world of Jamaican education. The 49 students who opened its
doors had become 200 in1936, 300 in1943. By 1948, 500 were on the roll, a far
cry from its first days. One of its students had won, in 1936, that most
glamorous of imperial scholarships, the Rhodes, and the headmaster had been
awarded the King�s Silver Jubilee Medal the same year. To top it all, the school
was ranked in the highest grade by the Jamaican Schools Commission. Not
surprisingly. The teaching staff were decidedly first rate pedagogues, people of
multiple talents, some with eccentricities to remember, all with hobbies to
share. Ethnically mixed, the majority were non-white, zestful about imparting
their cultural and sporting enthusiasms to the students.
The �golden age�, from about 1947 to the mid-1960s, saw the school garnering a
harvest of scholarships, some to the new University College of the West Indies
in Jamaica, others to universities abroad. It also distinguished itself by
cornering the Jamaica Scholarship, the Everest of awards, six times in eight
years. Its prowess on the field was similarly stellar with a number of top
trophies coming its way. First class cricketers and Olympic medallists also
emerged from KC adding an international aura to the school�s name. By 1970, the
number of students was 1,500 and still growing.
The event that was dearest to the hearts of the boys, old and current, was the
consecration of their beloved headmaster as Suffragan Bishop of Kingston in
1947. Here was another milestone in the Emancipation process. For the first time
in British West Indian history, a descendant of black slaves had become an
Anglican bishop. Not that Percival Gibson was ready to give up his headmaster�s
role. The school was too precious to him. In his perfectionist mind, there was
still too much to do,
So he remained both suffragan bishop and headmaster, much to the delight of the
alumni and the students who could hardly imagine the school without him. His
eccentricities were too legendary, his compassion too heart-warming, his
charisma too soul-stirring to lose. No one could forget the story of �Priest�,
as they called him, rebuking a boy who had shouted unprintable expletives to
another beginning with the words � You is � �. The headmaster reminded the young
man that it was a grave offence against English grammar to say �you is�; �you
are� was the proper usage. The expletives did not rate a mention !
Percival Gibson was quite capable of stopping a congregation in mid-hymn by
saying �You are not singing like Jamaicans. Lift the roof with your voices� and
then asking the organist to begin the hymn again. A deft hand at tennis,
�Priest�, with Edwardian propriety, played the game complete with clerical
collar. At another level, several alumni remember that when their financial
circumstances could no longer keep them at the school, the bishop paid their
fees out of his own pocket or got a sympathetic business-man to do so .Also, he
would not let regulations triumph over fairplay. For instance, when he had five
boys, all brilliant performers, competing for one scholarship with scores only a
hair�s breadth from one another, he awarded scholarships to them all. The school
also became a rainbow community as Chinese, Indians, Lebanese and white students
found themselves at home with their predominantly Afro-Jamaican brothers.
As headmaster of KC he was a strong disciplinarian and expected very high
standards of behaviour. But his charisma persuaded the boys that nothing less
would do them justice. They knew that he was the soul of compassion and that he
cared deeply about them. In particular he was very concerned about the limiting
domestic environment of the poorer boys, often seeing to it that his
sympathisers in business fitted them out with the requirements for school. He
usually found a way of providing a midday meal for those who could not afford
one. In the classroom � he insisted on teaching � his touch was light, his
manner mellow, He fired the students� imagination and whetted their appetite for
more of the subject. And he could convulse a class or a congregation, a synod,
even assemblies of determinedly earnest folk, with laughter. He was a magic
storyteller.
The Bishop never married but he adored small children and they gravitated to him
with glee. They told him exactly what was on their minds, as children are wont
to do, and his response was explosive laughter. He had a Pied Piper�s touch seen
especially at Kingston College Fairs when he would be found marching a large
clutch of small children off to the ice-cream stall.
Having previously declined an effort to elect him to the office, Percival Gibson
became Bishop of Jamaica in 1955, amid much rejoicing. Here was a great educator
turned diocesan bishop and a diocesan bishop who was a prophet. The educator in
him prompted a vigorous programme to renovate and expand existing Anglican
primary schools and to create two high schools in the interior of the island as
well as an Anglican Teachers� Training College. He was determined to win the
nation back to Christ and, like the Jesuits, he believed that education was one
sure way.
With the prophets Amos, Hosea and Micah in his heart and F.D.Maurice, Charles Gore and William
Temple in his head, Percival Gibson put justice at the centre of his social
thinking. And he made no bones about openly speaking against injustice wherever
he saw it. Fittingly, he came to be known as the �conscience of the nation�. He
greatly admired Norman Manley, the visionary and incorruptible socialist
statesman who led Jamaica to the threshold of independence but did not become
Prime Minister when it was achieved in 1962. It was at Manley�s suggestion that
the bishop was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1954 and there he was
prophetic, practical and perspicacious; at his most lucid when he was most
angry. During his five year stint on the Council his chief concern was getting
the government to improve the appalling housing and sanitary conditions of the
poor in the slums of West Kingston. The Order of Deaconesses, which he refounded
in 1956, brought compassion, caring and hope to the people whom the comfortable
classes had forgotten.
By the time Percival Gibson became diocesan, Jamaica was humming with the
expectation of an independent destiny, either as part of an envisaged West
Indian Federation or on its own. The Bishop was acutely aware that the rhetoric
of independence and the reality did not necessarily square. So Jamaica needed
Christian values as never before to sustain its equilibrium when difficulties,
expected or not, arose. Accordingly, he set the Church on a path of vigorous
evangelisation to win the country for Christ. All the more urgent, he felt,
because the powerful winds from the north were secular and consumerist and
headless of social justice. By the time he retired in 1967 all the mainline
churches, not just the Anglicans, were sensitising Jamaicans to the need for a
more equitable society, and with considerable impact. And yet Percival Gibson
thought he had failed and said so publicly when the truth was that his standards
of success were unrealistically high.
He died in 1970 and Jamaicans keenly felt his loss, even his long-standing
critics admitting that the country would always need a figure like him to call
it to its better self. No doubt about it: he was a complex person. Yet, serving
30 years as KC headmaster and 20 years in the episcopacy, Percival Gibson
nurtured a strong resolve in an important part of Jamaican society to bring
Christian principles to bear on the development dilemmas facing a small sociey
in the late 20th century, His dream was to build a new Jamaica by developing
Christain character in many of its future leaders. This laudable objective
required audacity and courage, two ingredients that permeated his very being.
He knew the loneliness that is often the fate of prophets who dare to say the
uncomfortable things that people would rather not hear. But he believed that he
would be untrue to Christ, whose close presence he so often felt, if he kept
silent or buttered his words. Many Jamaicans appreciated his fearlessness when
he was alive and many more do so now. And the alumni of Kingston College, in
Jamaica and in many other parts of the world, serving causes and societies with
the dedication, intelligence, humour and humility they saw in him, have every
good reason to revere this Audacious Anglican.
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