Photo: Jim Busby

Jean Longstaff has submitted the following:-

Harry was the youngest son of Northumberland born merchant Richard Gibson and his wife Elizabeth Rowell who were married in Gateshead in 1863; when he was born on 29th October 1885 his oldest brother John had already left home, so in the house in Bensham were Richard and his four sisters, Elizabeth, Ethel, Lillian and Elsie By 1901 Harry was a solicitor’s clerk and still living at home with his parents and sisters at 2 Windsor Avenue, Gateshead. Ten years later father Richard was retired, Ethel and Lillian were both school teachers and along with Harry, now a confectionery traveller, were the last three of the family to be still at home, which was now a detached house called Rose Hill in Kell’s Field Road, Low Fell; also in the house was widow Jane Metcalf, a boarder and Robert Richardson, a marine engineer visiting from Australia.

On 18th August 1912 Harry arrived in Montreal having travelled from Liverpool on board the SS Tunisian going to Calgary to visit his eldest brother John, who had emigrated with his family two years previously. The following year he was farming in Winnipeg, Manitoba and had joined the local militia, the 100th Grenadiers. On 6th December 1915 , listing his mother at Rose Hill, Low Fell as his next of kin, he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and became Private 700134 in the 101st (Overseas) Battalion. Still based in Winnipeg, on 4th April 1916 Harry married Scottish girl Margaret Mackenzie and on 20th July she gave birth to their son, Harry Finney Jr., just two weeks after Harry had arrived in England.

Posted to East Sandling with the 17th Battalion, after just a week Harry was appointed Acting Corporal and then admitted to hospital with an inguinal hernia, where he was fitted with a truss. The following April he was appointed acting Sergeant, with pay, and transferred to the camp at Bramshott as a PT instructor, but when he heard that his battalion was to be posted to France he asked to revert to being a Private so that he could go with them.

In France from mid November 1917 the men were posted as reinforcements to the 85th Battalion and joined them at Reimbert to help make up their losses suffered at Passchendaele. Harry joined them at a quiet time when the days were spent in training and sport, and the evenings at concerts or moving picture shows. But on 23rd December they were back in the front line at Avion, where after one particularly bad night of shelling the trenches collapsed and had to be redug before the Battalion could move on. Relieving the 78th Battalion on the front line near Lens in February, there were times when the Canadians occupied houses on one side of the street and the Germans on the other. By the end of March they were billeted at Cellar Camp, Neuville St.Vaast and it was here that "at about 6 o’clock on the evening of 30th March 1918, whilst proceeding to a British ammunition dump in the vicinity of Gavrelle, and when passing near to artillery position, an enemy shell burst quite near to him. He was slightly wounded in the shoulder by a piece of shrapnel, but suffered so from concussion that he succumbed shortly after the explosion".

Harry never got to see his son, Harry Finney Jr, who became an American citizen and died in Dallas in 1998. His wife Margaret Mackenzie Gibson received the $180 war service gratuity for dependents of deceased soldiers and his war medals and memorial cross whilst living in California, where she died in 1923.

Harry Finney Gibson is remembered in Gateshead on G39.004 page 95.

He is remembered in Canada on their Virtual War Memorial and in Book of Remembrance, and also on the Manitoba Historical Society’s War Memorial.

Canadian Book of Remembrance
Canadian Virtual War Memorial
The CWGC entry for Private Gibson