I was born in Glamorganshire, South Wales, in August 1941. My parents had both been pupils at the secondary school in Caerphilly, but had not married until their late twenties. Both spoke Welsh as a second language, and I am told that I also spoke some Welsh until we moved to Bideford, in 1944, when my father was appointed the senior curate at St. Mary’s church. I have a photo of him taking part in the procession with the mayor and corporation, to celebrate VE Day in 1945, as well as a letter to his mother, describing the event and the huge cheering crowds.
In 1946 we moved to Langtree, a village nearer Torrington than Bideford. My father was the rector there for the next 13 years, and I went to the village school, before passing the 11+ exam and going, by school bus, to Bideford Grammar School. One of my earliest memories of BGS is the school trip, by train from Torrington, to see the Coronation decorations in London, in 1953.
I enjoyed my time at BGS, and often compare those years favourably with the accounts we hear of teenage years today, where mental health is a recurring topic. I was fairly good at most of the subjects taught there, and obtained 9 O level GCE passes in 1957; two years later I passed A level Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry, together with S level Physics, sufficiently well to gain a place at Bristol University to study Physics.
Asthma prevented me from being as successful at sporting activities, but I did join the Army Cadet Force, which was led by Major Denis Harle and Captain “Basher” Bartlett – two real gentlemen. I was eventually promoted to the rank of Cadet Sergeant (as were Andrew Beer and Roger Newton), but I also qualified, after attending a summer camp at the home of the Royal Signals at Catterick, Yorkshire, as a Signals Instructor, so proudly wore the Royal Signals badge in addition to my Sergeants’ stripes!
In the summer of 1959, after leaving school but before going to Bristol University, I worked as a waiter at the Falcon Hotel in Bude – a job I enjoyed and returned to in the summer of 1960.
University was different from school, and, as one of the youngest in my year, I struggled a bit. I should probably have taken a gap year, but such things were not heard of then. I ended up with only a Pass degree, but made some very good friends, with whom I am still in regular contact, and met my future wife Jeanette, who was a history student in the year below mine. We have now been married for 57 years, and have two children, seven grandchildren, and two great-grand-daughters.
In the summer of 1961, as a member of the University “Vagabonds Club”, I and eight other students took a train and ferry to Ostend, where we had arranged to hire a VW campervan. I was one of three drivers for the next 6 or so weeks, driving through Belgium, Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia (as it then was) to Greece, sightseeing all the way. We then took a ferry across to Brindisi and drove up through Italy back to Ostend and home. We had had some wonderful experiences, and the entire trip had cost us just under £40 each!
After graduating in 1962, but before starting my first ‘real’ job, I went by train to Koblenz, in West Germany, where I spent two months as a “werkstudent” at KEVAG, the company which generated the electricity for the city and the region. I spent the first few weeks in an office environment, and then transferred to the department where they calibrated electricity meters. This was an easy job, and allowed plenty of opportunity for “conversational German”. Electricity was still being installed in some of the outlying villages, and I was taken along to some of the “planning” meetings, at which I was introduced to stronger drink than beer! I had my 21st birthday while there, and was delighted, that day, to see a VW campervan with a Union Jack on the front, parked outside the factory gates. Jeanette had gone to Turkey with another “Vagabonds” group, and had persuaded the others to return via Koblenz to be with me on my birthday.
After graduating in 1962 and returning from Koblenz, I joined Decca Radar, working on marine radar systems, which were being fitted to ships for the first time – a major advance. Little did I imagine that 35 years later, I would own a radar set of my own – in a sailing boat.
Jeanette and I married in 1965, and the following year I changed jobs – working for EASAMS Ltd, a very innovative new company in the Elliot Automation Group, and it was there that my career really began, after I was encouraged to use a computer – a new experience for me. However, I felt that ‘learning on the job’ was not enough, so I managed to persuade Birkbeck College, London University, to allow me to start their part-time M.Sc. course in Computer Science. Although I enjoyed the course, travelling up to London from Farnborough several evenings a week, and back home late, was tough. After a year of the course I changed jobs, to broaden my experience by working for Kleinwort Benson, the merchant bank, in their Data Processing department. This meant that I travelled up to London in the mornings, instead of after a day’s work at EASAMS. It was eventually realised that the main project I had been recruited for was going to cost far more than had been anticipated (the decision as to whether the memory for the IBM mainframe should be increased by 128 K was a matter for the main board of directors!) so the project was cancelled and I was redeployed building some financial models, which were greatly appreciated.
The less demanding workload meant that I was able to devote more time to my M.Sc. course-work, and to considering “what next?”. I obtained my M.Sc in Computer Science in 1971, and in the December I left the bank and returned to the defence sector by joining the Systems Research Division of NATO’s SHAPE Technical Centre, in The Hague, Holland.
We spent nearly 8 years there, but after two years I transferred to the Mathematics & Computer Division, where I became the head of the Computer Applications Branch, and was promoted to NATO Grade A-4 (the equivalent of Lt. Colonel). Those years, working in a multi-national environment, were very happy, especially since our daughter and son were born while we lived in Holland.
Eventually, partly for career reasons and partly for the children’s education, we decided to return to the UK. My American boss had tried hard to persuade me to go to the Harvard Business School, but instead I decided to do an MBA or equivalent in the UK. So I enrolled at Imperial College, London and did their intensive full-time course and obtained their M.Sc in Management Sciences in 1980.
Upon graduating with my second M.Sc. degree, I received a few job offers, and decided to join Scicon, the computer services company owned by BP, the oil company. I worked there on various IT consultancy projects for nearly three years until one day I was asked if I would go to act as interim DP Manager for BP Holland, based in Amsterdam. The previous manager had suffered a nervous breakdown! My knowledge of Dutch, as well as my availability at short notice, meant that I was “encouraged” to take the post – initially for 3 months, but I stayed for two years, and then handed over to a permanent replacement. These two years provided me with much valuable experience. I was managing over 70 people (they spoke Dutch to me, and I spoke to them in English – an arrangement which suited us all!) and was responsible for the computer centre and the financial and administrative systems in Amsterdam as well as the engineering support applications for the refinery in Rotterdam. I was provided with a flat on the Prinsengracht, and given tickets to fly home each weekend, apart from during the school holidays, when Jeanette and the children would come over to stay with me, and renew friendships with people we had known during our 8 years living in Holland.
I returned to work in Scicon’s London offices in December 1984, but found the work less challenging, and less satisfying than the BP Holland job had been. However, I was able to join the BP Yacht Club, and enjoy new experiences. I had begun sailing on dinghies and day boats when we lived in Holland, but BP’s were “big” boats, on which I was one of up to 6 crew, racing in The Solent or across to France, or cruising, in Scotland or Brittany. In 1985 I was selected to be one of the crew for the club’s first ever entry into the Fastnet Race – an experience I will never forget, partly because I was temporarily washed overboard when the Sigma 33 yacht was knocked flat by one of several 30’ high waves off the coast of South Devon! (1985 was a bad year, but not as bad as in 1979, when several people lost their lives.)
1985 was also the year in which I was “head hunted” to join SRI International, the consulting and research institution founded by Stanford University, in California. I worked for SRI for over 12 years, heading their IT consultancy group in London, but also travelling all over the world. I worked on several projects in Europe (Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, France, Spain and Italy), as well as in Australia, Japan and the USA. Obviously, I flew a lot (before the damage to the climate was as well publicised as it is now); I even accumulated enough BA Air Miles for my wife and I to be able to fly to Japan and back for a two-week holiday – the flights being free of charge!
In 1990 we bought our first sailing yacht – a 30’ Kingfisher, which was destroyed four years later when its petrol engine caught fire. Although we had to ‘abandon ship’, we were unhurt. Our next boat was a 34’ Westerly SeaHawk, which had a radar set – little did I think, in the 1960s while helping to install radars on big ships, that I would one day have one of my own! It also had a diesel engine – much safer than petrol! Although I had taken car petrol engines apart and rebuilt them in the 1960s, I had no experience of diesel engines, so did a short course with a former BA pilot, who, like many pilots, had taken up sailing in retirement. He lived in Hythe Marina Village, where we kept our yacht, so when we considered moving from Fleet, where we lived for nearly 20 years, to Hythe Marina, he and his wife were the obvious people to consult. We have never regretted taking their advice, and we moved to Hythe in July 1998; we have no plans to move anywhere else.
After an enjoyable decade at SRI, I began to wonder ‘what next’? again. Then my wife saw an advertisement for Sir Robin Knox-Johnson’s first Round the World Yacht Race, and asked me if I’d like to do it. If I had seen the advert and asked her permission, she would probably have said “yes”, but I would never have known whether she really meant it. However, she had suggested it to me, so I applied, and after interviews and several training sessions, I was selected. However, I decided that I could not afford to take a whole year off to do the whole race, and any longer than a few months would be unfair on her, so I opted to do just one of the six legs – Hong Kong to The Seychelles. I left SRI in April 1997, and flew to Hong Kong to join my boat – a 60-footer, on which I was one of 12 crew. The voyage to Singapore and the across the Indian Ocean would have been memorable under any circumstances, but we encountered Typhoon Rhonda soon after leaving Indonesia! After arriving in The Seychelles, Jeanette and I were reunited, and had a week’s holiday before flying back to the UK and I started to work as an independent IT Management Consultant.
I worked as a freelance consultant for about 5 years, but during this time we spent more time sailing, along the South Coast as far as The Scilly Isles or across to France, and began to wonder about sailing further afield. In 2000 we sold our 34ft Westerly SeaHawk bilge-keeler and bought a Callisto yacht – a 39ft steel hulled, long keel, cutter rigged boat, some other examples of which had been sailed around the world.
In 2005 I wound up my consultancy work and we set off for the Mediterranean on our yacht. We “coast hopped” down the Atlantic coast of France and along the north coast of Spain (instead of crossing the Bay of Biscay), and sailed down to the Algarve, in Portugal. We left our yacht in Portimão for the winter, and returned home. The following year we sailed down to Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean, leaving it in Cartagena for the months of July and August, when it was too hot for comfort, and then on to Barcelona where we left it for the winter. We kept up this pattern of sailing before and after the hottest summer months for the next decade, sailing as far as Antalya in Turkey, having visited France, Corsica, Italy, Sicily, Malta and Greece. On our return journey we sailed up the Adriatic and visited Albania (where we spent 10 days), Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy – a highlight being sailing into Venice. In 2016 we had the boat transported overland from Slovenia to Belgium, and we sailed it home from there.
I never imagined, all those years ago, while singing “the little Revenge dropped down the tide”, that I would sail so many miles, so far away from home, on our own boat!
Our son Alex and his partner moved to live in a little village in Catalonia, Spain, several years ago, and their two daughters are fluent in Catalan and Spanish, as well as English. In 2020 we took the ferry to Bilbao, intending to drive to visit them for a week and then tour northern Spain for a further week or so, but a few days after arriving, Covid struck and we were ‘locked down’. Our ferry back home was cancelled five times, and we stayed in the little village for nearly 4 months before we were able to return home!
Our daughter Rhiannon has four daughters and a son, who is now aged 14 and, with a handicap of just 7, seems destined to become a professional golfer. Her 3rd daughter made us great grand-parents three years ago, and now she has two daughters, aged 3 and nearly 2.
We are both in reasonably good health, apart from a few creaking joints, but have had to say “good bye” to a number of friends and colleagues we have known in the past. I try to keep fit, and usually do two 4 mile walks each week with a local Nordic Walking Group, and, weather permitting, I cycle 15-20 miles twice a week with a group of friends. I cycled a circular route of 28 miles in and around the New Forest on my 80th birthday last year. These activities are partly possible because asthma inhalers are now so much more effective than when I was at school. Maybe, if the inhalers I have now were available in the 1950s, I would have been playing rugby with the first XV – but I doubt it!
David Gibby
February 2022
