The Romanovs and Mr Gibbes

The Story of the Englishman who taught the children of the last Tsar

by Frances Welch

gibbs

Sydney Gibbes was appointed tutor to the children of Tsar Nicholas II in 1908. Over the next ten years he became deeply attached to the Imperial family – and they to him.
Frances Welch draws on a wealth of unpublished material to throw new light on the Romanov story, telling it from the English teacher’s point of view. The tragic events of the Russian Revolution devastated Gibbes, turning him into an obsessive Russophile, who was to go to extraordinary lengths to remain faithful to the old order…

About Frances Welch

Frances WelchFrances Welch has written for the Sunday Telegraph, Granta, The Spectator and the Financial Times. She is co-author of Memories of Revolution: Russian Women Remember (Routledge, 1993), The Romanov & Mr Gibbes (Short Books, 2003) and A Romanov Fantasy: Life at the Court of Anna Anderson (Short Books, 2007) She is married to the writer Craig Brown, and has two children. She lives in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Other books by this author

<a href="http://shortbooks.co.uk/book/the-russian-court-at-sea"><strong>The Russian Court At Sea</strong><br />The Last Days of a Great Dynasty: The Romanov's Voyage into Exile</a><br /><a href="http://shortbooks.co.uk/book/the-russian-court-at-sea" class="plain-link">On 11th April 1919, less than a year after the assassination of the Romanovs, the British battleship HMS Marlborough left Yalta carrying 17 members of the Russian Imperial Family into perpetual exile. </a><a href="http://shortbooks.co.uk/book/the-russian-court-at-sea"><img  src="http://shortbooks.co.uk/wp-content/themes/outreach/images/transparentgif.gif" border="0" width="160px" height="244px" alt="" /></a><a href="http://shortbooks.co.uk/book/the-romanov-fantasy"><strong>The Romanov Fantasy</strong><br />Life at the Court of Anna Anderson</a><br /><a href="http://shortbooks.co.uk/book/the-romanov-fantasy" class="plain-link">Did the 17-year-old Anastasia survive the massacre of the Russian Royal family in 1917? The possibility that she, the youngest of the Tsar’s daughters, might have escaped, and the universal longing to salvage some thread of hope from the tragedy, has provided a rich spawning ground for claimants.</a><a href="http://shortbooks.co.uk/book/the-romanov-fantasy"><img  src="http://shortbooks.co.uk/wp-content/themes/outreach/images/transparentgif.gif" border="0" width="160px" height="244px" alt="" /></a>