Product Description

Sydney Gibbes was appointed tutor to the children of Tsar Nicholas II in 1908 and over the next six years lived as one of the family in the royal palace. A demanding, fastidious man, he found the Romanovs bizarrely devout and insular. Yet he came to hold them all in deep affection. In this biography, Frances Welch draws on unpublished material, including Gibbes' letters and diaries, to throw light on the tragic Romanov story, telling it from the English teacher's point of view. The catastrophe, when it came, permanently affected Gibbes. He was a vital eye-witness to events - one of the first to gain entry into "The House of Special Purpose" after the assassination - and spent the rest of his life trying to vindicate the Tsar's memory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #359152 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday
"A jewel of a book...[which]...tells us more about the Romanovs...than a dozen more conventional biographies..."

Iain Finlayson, The Times
"A Masterpiece of comic understatement."

George Walden, Sunday Telegraph
"Welch writes with a limpid style and a cool intelligence."

Customer Reviews

an odd tutor - on the fringes of Imperial Family life - not a confident of the last Imperial Family.
Charles Sydney Gibbes (1876 - 1963) was the English tutor of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich and his sisters. He followed them into exile. Later in his life he became an Orthodox monk, adopting the name of Nicholas after Saint Nicholas The Passion Bearer in honour of the last Czar.

This small book is not uninteresting to read as it shows this quite odd personality of this Imperial tutor. I find it indeed strange that it is not clearly said that he was gay. The author is hinting at it, but that is all. Why? Gibbes was the tutor of the children of the imperial children and offers a certain insight in the life of the family, but this he is not really close to the family, not a confident. He did learn about the Heir's illness only very late. So it is a bit far fetched to claim that this offers deep insights.

So all in all, it is an easy read. One finishes it in an hour. Not bad, but it does not offer deep new knowledge about the Imperial family. So in my view it is not "a gem of a book". I simply can not get excited about it.

A really good book, but -- WHERE are the footnotes??
The mailman brought this book this morning, and I have already gone through it from beginning to end -- not that this is hard to do, as the text is only 125 pages long! -- and I found it to be enthralling. It's short, but concise, and jammed with new information; naturally most of it about Mr Gibbes, but also with little glimpses of the Romanovs, this time appearing as the supporting cast rather than as the stars of the story.

It has been hard to determine the character of CS Gibbes from other Romanov-related books, because he has existed in the shadows as a peripheral and colorless character, emerging only occasionally to tutor the Imperial children or to act as faithful-retainer-in-exile. This book answers questions about what sort of man leaves a comfortable English middle-class life to go it alone in a completely new country, where he didn't even speak the language when he arrived.

Gibbes lived a life steeped in irony. He seems to have created himself as a typically staid and hide-bound Englishman, but he actually was far more than that: This facade was largely a carefully selected cover that Gibbes wore to conceal his own imperfectly understood self. His cover, of course, suffocated him, and he seems to have run away to Russia, to escape the stultifying life his father would have liked to impose on him -- that of a Vicar in the Church of England. How great then, was the irony when he was hired by two Russian families and then the Romanovs just because his English facade was so perfect? And then in the latter part of his life, irony returned when he chose to follow a version of his father's wishes and became a man of the cloth, only this time in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Gibbes most decidedly had hidden depths, and perhaps a yearning for a life much freer than the respectable one he selected for himself. Frances Welch explores a number of these suppressed desires and characteristics, but I could wish that the book were much longer, to do justice to this man's complex personality.

The half-a-dozen photographs in this book are few, and nothing new. They are also small and have not been reproduced very distinctly.

The real problem that I have with this book is the lack of footnotes. Chunks of letters and diaries are quoted without attribution, which makes the new information in this book frustratingly unverifiable without either plowing through the sources listed in the acknowledgements or contacting the author. I don't understand why the current fashion in historical biography is to dispense with the footnotes and bibliography; obscurity ought not to be the end result of such good research as Ms Welch has done.

Fascinating!!!
This book really is a gem - a true insight into the lives of the Romanovs which more conventional books fail to provide. The fascinating depths of Mr Gibbes' complex personality make the story as enthralling as a novel, and I really must congratulate Frances Welch on her empathy in understanding both Russian and English psychology. A must for all russophiles.