by Hector Cook
The island takes its name from the Celtic god Mannanan mac Lir, a pre-Christian deity known and revered in both Ireland and Britain. According to legend, Mannanan throws a magical mist over the island in winter to protect it from invaders. In the summer months the lush green island becomes a bustling tourist resort and the sounds of the TT (Tourist Trophy) motor bike races fill the air in the hills above Douglas and Ramsey.
Ellan Vannin, as the island is known in Manx Gaelic, is where the saga of The Bee Gees really begins.
2
CHILDHOOD DAYS
“OH, WE MOVED about a lot!” Barbara Gibb would tell Manx disc jockey Bernie Quayle. The family’s first home in the Isle of Man capital of Douglas was a little house “over the hill behind Duke’s Garage … Then we moved down to Strand Street over Maley’s Chemist. From there it was [St] Catherine’s Drive, then it was Spring Valley, and from Spring Valley we went to Chapel House on the Strang Road and then from there … we got the house in Willaston and we were there for quite a while.”
It was in the little flat over Maley’s Chemist at 17 Strand Street, in Douglas’ main shopping street, that Hugh and Barbara were living with baby Lesley when their first son was born at 8.45 a.m. on September 1, 1946 at the Jane Crookall Maternity Home in Douglas. He was given the name Barry Alan Crompton Gibb. The “Alan” was in honour of Hugh’s second youngest brother, who died in infancy. According to Hugh, in a mingling of fact and fiction, the third name was given to the eldest son of the family in honour of the Gibbs’ illustrious ancestor, Sir Isaac Crompton, the inventor of the mule spinner, whom he claimed had been immortalised in a statue in Manchester though no such monument to a Crompton actually exists.
In fact, there is no Sir Isaac. It was Samuel Crompton (who would be Barbara’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, give or take a generation) who invented the spinning mule in 1779 in Bolton, Lancashire.
Hugh was kept busy with his music at the various hotels in Douglas when Barry was a baby. “I stayed there for [about] 10 years, and Joe Loss’ band used to be there … That was the big band era,” he said.
Rosalia Black, the daughter of hotel owner Carlo Raineri, recalls that “the band must have been popular because the ballroom was always packed, even though the Joe Loss Orchestra was at the Villa Marina and Ronnie Aldrich with The Squadronaires was at the Palace Ballroom.”
Hugh Gibb was always on the lookout for work as even an extremely popular musician did not earn very much, and he often put together bands for one-off gigs. One such dance might have been the Invitation Dinner Dance held at the Metropole Hotel on Thursday, February 24, 1949. The tickets, priced 8s/6d each advertised that the reception was at 7.00 p.m. with dinner commencing at 7.30 p.m. prompt. “Hughie Gibb And His Music” would keep the revellers entertained until 1.00 a.m.
Barbara stayed home looking after the children. “I had little ones then – Lesley was 17 months and Barry was a new baby,” Barbara said. “Most of the time Hughie was working, I didn’t see much of him. You know, he was up there [at the Raineri hotel complex] all the time. I couldn’t go out as much as my husband could because I had the children.”
The first year of Barry’s life passed without incident, but at 18 months he was injured in a near fatal accident which would seriously affect his development. “He was only a baby then – he was only a little baby,” Barbara Gibb told Bernie Quayle. “We lived at Strand Street at that time … I’d just made the tea, I put it on the table and he pulled the chair up and climbed on it, pulled the tea cosy off and pulled the whole thing all over him. He was in a terrible state.”
Barry was rushed to Noble’s Hospital with serious scalding and fell into a coma for a short while. It was a terrifying time for the family. “Then gangrene set in,” says Barry, “because in those days, the advancement of medicine simply didn’t apply to people with bad scalds, so you didn’t have skin grafts, you didn’t have things like that. But this was a particularly bad scald, and I think I had 20 minutes to live at some point. The incredible thing for me is that whole two years is wiped from my memory, the whole period of being in hospital … The idea of being burnt is in there somewhere, but I have no knowledge of it. I’ve got the scars but I have no knowledge.”
“He was seriously ill for about three months, and he didn’t talk until he was nearly three because of this,” recalled Barbara. “It upset him rather badly. I think this is one of the reasons he used to be quiet because he didn’t learn to speak until quite late.”
She remembers him as a quiet little boy who followed her around. If she turned suddenly, she would nearly fall over him and tears would stream down his face, though he never made a sound when he cried.
The family moved to Chapel House on the Strang Road. Hugh Gibb brought over a number of his musician friends from Manchester to play in his band, often inviting them to stay with the family. One of them was Arthur “Archie” Taylor who came out of the army in 1948, and whose first work was playing in a big band at the public swimming baths in Manchester. In those days it was common practice to put ballroom floors over empty swimming pools in the winter months. “You could go down during the day,” he recalled, “and look at the tiled bottom of the baths with all the struts of the sprung ballrooms which might dance several hundred people. Then, when the swimming pools re-opened, many Manchester musicians would go on summer season to the Isle of Man.
“So I went too and spent the summer of 1949 at the Glen Helen Hotel, playing in a trio band comprising myself on sax, Arthur Thompson on drums and a pianist, Don Franklin.
“Part of the time, I stayed in a rented house called Chapel House, and it was there that I met Hughie who was staying there too.”
An occasional visitor to the house was his then fiancée, Alma Varnom, who used to go across from her native Rochdale to visit him. Alma observed, “They certainly weren’t poor when we knew them although they weren’t rich either. The money was good for those people who worked at Glen Helen in the summer, but in the winter it would be very different. Life would have been tough on the island so I’m not at all surprised to learn that Hugh would take on lots of different jobs. I only met him a couple of times but the impression I got is that he would be a bit of an entrepreneur if he got the chance. My memory of Hughie was that he was fairly tall and that he looked like a man who was going places. That’s probably why he was so ambitious for the boys.”
Hugh Gibb also had the concession to provide music on board a small ferry, The Thistle, which ran the full length of the harbour to a jetty at Douglas Head. There, the tourists disembarked and took the inclined railway to the top of the headland where they could visit the open-air amphitheatre. Hugh had musicians on board who entertained the passengers, and Archie still has a photo which shows himself on saxophone and Don Franklin on accordion. Hugh himself didn’t actually play on board the ferry, and the band were not paid by Douglas Corporation, who ran the ferry, so it was up to Hugh to collect “tips” from the passengers. In the trade, this job was referred to as the “bottler” or “bag man” and close inspection of Archie’s photo does indeed show Hugh in the process of collecting the half crowns, or 2s/6d, which were deemed the norm at that time. Another of Archie’s photos shows a young Barry playing in the garden at Chapel House with Arthur Thompson’s son, Chris. A third child in the photo is most likely Rex Chambers, Barbara’s nephew, as her sister Peggy was a frequent visitor.
Not only did Archie share the same temporary residence as Hugh, and play at the same venues, albeit on different days, they also had something, or someone, else in common too. Archie explains; “I also used to play jazz at the Alexandra Hotel with a local barber called Charlie Whewell who played a very good jazz trumpet. We used to go back to Douglas with the last coach party returning from the Glen Helen, then go up to the Alexandra and play till all hours of the morning.”
Archie Taylor saw out the season on the Isle of Man before returning to Manchester to marry Alma and begin a six year run in a big band at the Levenshul
me Palais in Manchester where it was not uncommon to have up to 1,300 people paying to get in. Like the Gibbs were to do a few years later, the Taylors settled in Chorlton, where their daughter Julia was born.
Apart from trumpeter Charlie Whewell, others who played in Hugh’s band around this time included Arthur Crawford (accordion), Jim Caine (piano), Tommy Cowley (bass), Albert Metcalfe (tenor saxophone) and John Knight (trombone), but not all at the same time as the line-up would vary from a three-piece up to a five-piece. They would play at a number of other venues, including the aforementioned Glen Helen Hotel, a very popular tourist spot on the TT course that was especially famous for its afternoon tea dances. The Hughie Gibb Trio played there quite frequently. The Glen Helen Hotel, which is roughly in the middle of the island, still has a concert room in use today.
Jim Caine joined The Hughie Gibb Band as the pianist in 1949 and played with him in Hugh’s various groups until 1954. By coincidence, Don Franklin would be his normal “stand-in” on piano, on the odd occasion that Jim was unavailable for a particular gig. Jim still cherishes a recording made at the Villa Marina in 1949 when he was the pianist and Hugh was the drummer for a band put together just for the occasion. During the winter months, he recalls, all the musicians had to scrounge around looking for other work just to stay alive, so when gigs came up such as a dinner dance, bands were put together from whoever was available on the night. It could be just a quartet or a full dance orchestra, made up of members of Hugh Gibb’s band or Jim Caine’s or Harold Moorhouse’s. Jim’s acetate contains four tunes, three of which – ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, ‘Moonglow’ and ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’ – were considered as standards by Hugh and would be played regularly by his bands.
Jim’s wife Edna has very fond memories of the Gibb family. She married Jim a year after he had joined The Hughie Gibb Orchestra, which was a very busy summer season for the band. As a result she spent a lot of time with Barbara while their respective husbands were off playing at the various hotels in Douglas and often baby-sat for the young Gibb children.
It was a friendship which would last through the years. In the late Sixties Jim Caine was playing in the bar of the Castle Mona Hotel, when he felt a tap on his shoulder and a friendly voice saying, “You play just as well as ever.” It was Hugh Gibb. Jim was staggered and said, “I thought you were in Australia!” Hugh said the whole family were on the island for a few days holiday.
Hugh and Barbara asked Jim and Edna to join them for dinner the next evening which they did. When Edna saw Hugh she couldn’t believe her eyes – he looked 20 years younger. It took a while to realise that he had acquired a toupee that looked so natural she thought it was real!
Another friend with good recollections of those times is Dougie Davidson, whose parents originated from Glasgow, but who settled on the island before his birth in 1934. He first joined his father’s band, The Jock Davidson Trio, as a saxophonist at the age of 13 along with his sister Anne. “My father actually played sax as well but he wasn’t very good, to be honest, so we sort of got him on to string bass eventually.”
Although Jock never played in Hugh’s band himself, on a couple of Saturday nights in 1953, Dougie got to play at dances in The Majestic Hotel in Onchan Head, overlooking Douglas Bay. The Majestic was a very popular venue during the Fifties and Sixties for dancing and cabaret shows. The ballroom even featured a telephone on every table with the phone number on the lampshade. This way a young man could phone a girl and say, “Hey number 17, this is number 29, fancy a dance?”
Dougie remains impressed by Hugh’s ability. “I remember he was a good drummer, and he could have been a pro or a good semi-pro. He was a little bit outspoken … he used to gig around quite a bit with the local bands. I think he was one of the better drummers on the scene at the time.”
In the Seventies, when Hugh and Barbara ran the Union Mills Post Office, Dougie would sometimes pop in to buy a newspaper, but Hugh failed to acknowledge the identity of his customer. “He didn’t recognise me actually … I didn’t think I’d made a lasting impression!”
In the early Fifties Dougie witnessed a very rare occurrence. “I remember [Barbara] singing on the stage once. I wasn’t playing on that occasion – I went there to listen, and I didn’t even know she was his wife till afterwards. I don’t even remember her singing more than one [song]. Folk groups were very, very few and far between. I can’t even remember any local band having a vocalist.”
The advent of synthesizers would eventually bring about the decline of the hotel bands that offered employment to musicians like Hugh Gibb and his colleagues. By the Seventies an electronic keyboard player who knew which knobs to press could reproduce the sound of all manner of instruments, and by the Eighties dance band music, the elegant waltzes, foxtrots and quicksteps, had entered into terminal decline on the Isle of Man, as it had elsewhere. “Summer seasons” of the type that offered a living to Hugh Gibb and so many professional musicians like him were no more.
* * *
Back in 1949, the Gibb family had relocated to 50 St Catherine’s Drive. Barbara was expecting again and, about four weeks before the birth, the doctor confirmed her suspicion that she was expecting twins when he detected two heartbeats.
On December 22, 1949 Robin Hugh Gibb came into the world at 3.15 a.m. at the Jane Crookall Maternity Home. At 3.50 a.m. his fraternal twin Maurice Ernest Gibb arrived. The first of what would eventually amount to millions of press cuttings was a simple birth notice in the local paper: “GIBB – December 22nd, to Barbara and Hugh Gibb, 50 St Catherine’s Drive, Douglas – twin sons. (Thanks to Dr McPherson and Sister Carine.)”
As Barbara put it, “We had this little girl, Lesley, who could talk to [the family] like a little lady, the baby twins, and poor old Barry was in the middle of this. I think he got a little introverted at the beginning … That was only for a period, and then he came out of that. He was the boss of the twins, and Lesley was the boss of the lot.” Parents and grandparents were delighted with what seemed like the perfect family: a girl, a boy and then a set of twins.
But elder sister Lesley remembered that three-year-old Barry was singularly unimpressed with the new arrivals, especially as the family cat Tatty had produced six kittens rather than what he saw as a rather paltry two! She added that differences in the twins’ dispositions were immediately obvious: as she recalls it, Maurice was a quiet, contented baby and Robin began exercising those famous vocal chords right from the start.
Lesley recalled an occasion when Barry, annoyed by Robin’s crying, tried giving him a shake in an effort to quiet him, a lesson in child-care which he learned from watching his beloved Tatty with her kittens. When this proved to be ineffective on his brother – baby Robin screamed all the louder – Barry begged his mother to give the twins back. It would take a few years for Robin and Maurice to get past the crying stage, and only then did Barry look upon his young brothers as friends.
When the twins were still quite young the Gibb family moved to Smedley Cottage in Spring Valley, on the outskirts of Douglas. The Bell family lived next door to them, and their daughter Barbara, who was just a few years older than Barry, remembered playing with all the Gibb children.
All three of the boys have very clear first memories dating back to their birthplace on the Isle of Man. “My memories start in a pram obviously, but I have very early memories,” said Barry. “My childhood is fairly vivid to me. I remember standing in Spring Valley … Being about four or five, I remember standing on the loading dock at the back of the ice cream factory pretending to perform.” Barry’s recollection is slightly inaccurate – he recalled the ice cream factory as Wall’s (an easy mistake to make as, at the time, Wall’s Ice Cream was the leading manufacturer of ice cream in the U.K.), when in fact it was actually Ward’s, a local company.
Their neighbour Barbara Bell (now Barbara Wood) distinctly remembers seeing him up there on the loading dock of the Ward’s Ice Cream factory singing. On one particular occasion Barry had
gone missing as evening fell, and his mother asked the Bells if they had seen him. When Barbara Wood told her that she had seen Barry at the Ward’s factory singing ‘Home On The Range’, she recalled that Mrs. Gibb retorted, “I’ll give him ‘Home On The Range’,” and she smacked him all the way home that night.
The non-identical twins have identical earliest memories, even though they occurred on two separate occasions. Robin said, “I remember being stung by a bee – it’s my first … sort of memory because the pain and memories sort of go together, you know – you always remember horrible incidents in your life and that was being stung by a bee in Spring Valley. I must have been … younger than two or three, which is before we moved to Snaefell Road. I can remember that very vividly – perhaps if I hadn’t been stung by the bee, I wouldn’t remember it, but it sort of brings a picture …” “The only major one was getting stung by the bee for the first time – I think every kid remembers that when they get stung, especially when you’re three or four years old,” Maurice said. “And falling in the water – I remember walking home backwards because I didn’t want anyone to see my bum because it was wet, going all the way home to Snaefell Road.”
On that occasion, Maurice’s fall into the water had a comical twist to it, but on another occasion, it could have had tragic consequences.
When not under the watchful eye of adults, the Dhoo river was a favourite place for the neighbourhood children to play. “We lived in wellies all the time,” Barbara Wood recalled. A path of stepping stones was built across the river and the children tried to make their way across the precarious crossing. “The dog fell in first. It was a Pomeranian, a little posh dog. Then Maurice fell in next. [The twins] were only very little. They used to go round with these siren suits on … like little Eskimos. He toppled off the stone – it was a slimy stone and he went in the river. There was a bit of a swell on that day and he just got tangled up and carried down. Face down he was – when you think back it was very frightening.”