| AdminHistory | Walter George Gibbs (1872-1929) was born in St Albans where he started his career as a journalist. He joined the staff of the Leicester Daily Post as a reporter in 1894 and became editor in 1914. He also worked for a time as chief sub editor on the Leicesester Daily Mercury. Gibbs inaugurated the Leicester War Hospitals Committee in 1914 when a Base Hospital was opened in Leicester. By 1918 the LWHC was catering for 12 hospitals in both the city and the shire. It provided cigarettes, tobacco, newspapers, stationery, books, magazines, games and gramophones for wounded servicemen and had its own duty-free customs depot where supplies of tobacco were cleared for 52 other hospitals and the Leicestershire Prisoner of War Fund. Gibbs himself was responsible for successfully negotiating the concession with the government that no duty should be charged on cigarettes and tobacco given by voluntary organisations to soldiers in hospital. Gibbs was a member of the Leicester Great Meeting and Secretary of the Leicester Domestic Mission and after the war, when the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland College (later University College, Leicester) was set up, he became the College's first Secretary. He committed suicide by taking cyanide on 23 November 1929, blaming pressure of work at the College. |