Charles Sydney Gibbes
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Charles Sydney Gibbes (19 January 1876 - 24 March 1963) was the English tutor of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia. Later in his life he became an Orthodox monk, adopting the name of Nicholas after Saint Nicholas The Passion Bearer. After his return to Britain he became a prominent figure in Orthodoxy in Britain. His body lies in Headington cemetery.
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[edit] Mr Gibbes
Charles Sydney Gibbes was born in Rotherham 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. (Whilst at Cambridge, Charles Sydney added the `e' to the spelling of his own name.) 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. 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 Tsarina 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 Syndey Ivanovich.
Sydney Gibbes's career as tutor to the Imperial Family continued until the revolution. During these ten years he developed a deep love and respect for family. When the Romanov family were arrested during the February Revolution, Gibbes was in Saint Petersburg and after his return to Tsarskoe Selo he was denied entry and access to the family throughout their detention there.
Gibbes was only allowed to recover his possessions after 14th August (31st July (O.S.)) 1917 when the family was moved from Tsarskoe Selo to the house of the Governor-General in Tobolsk in Siberia. Gibbes opted to go after the family, arriving in Tobolsk in October 1917 shortly before the Provisional Government fell to the Bolsheviks. In May 1918 the Imperial family were moved on to the house of Nicholas Ipatiev in Yekaterinburg. Neither Gibbes nor the French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, nor any of the other servants were allowed to join the family. They were released, but stayed in Yekaterinburg in the railway carriage which had brought them.
This carriage became part of a refugee train on 3rd June and the tutors were in Tyumen but returned to Yekaterinburg after the murder of the Imperial family on 16th/17th July and the fall of Yekaterinburg to the White Army on 25th 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.
[edit] Archimandrite Nicholas
Sydney Gibbes returned to Britain in 1928 and enrolled as an ordinand at St Stephen's House, Oxford, but again decided that ordination in the Church of England was not to be his vocation. In Harbin at the age of 58, on 25th April 1934, he was received into the Orthodox church by Archbishop Nestor of Kamchatka and Petropavlovsk who was there in exile. Gibbes took the baptismal name of Alexei in honour of the former Tsarevich. He was tonsured monk on 15th December, ordained deacon on 19th December and priest on 23rd December, taking the name Nicholas in honour of the former Tsar. In March 1935 he became an Abbot, probably the first English Orthodox Abbot in history. He returned to Britain in 1937 and was established in a parish in London.
At the time of the Blitz he moved to Oxford where in 1941 he established an Orthodox chapel in Bartlemas. In 1949 he bought a house at 4, Marston Street, subsequently known as Saint Nicholas House, where he kept a chapel dedicated to St Nicholas the Wonderworker. This chapel was home to several icons and mementos of the Imperial family which he brought with him from Yekaterinburg, including a chandelier from the Ipatiev House. (The house was divided into flats in the 1960s, and the chapel was converted into a flat in the late 1980s. It is a co-incidence that St Stephen's House moved to Marston Street: this happened in 1980.)
When he died, his collection of Russian possessions were left with his adopted son, George, in Oxford; and George subsequently donated them to the museum at Luton Hoo. A small chapel was built there to house these memorabilia, consecrated by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. The museum has been moved from Luton Hoo and is now a part of the Wernher Collection in Greenwich.
